Arthur Camins: Collective Action, Not Competition, Is Necessary for Strong Public Schools
Arthur Camins, a strong advocate for equitable public education, has published a new commentary, this time mourning the erosion of America’s long valued ideal of educating all children, not merely the children who seem the most promising or whose parents know how to play the choice game. He notes that none of the candidates for President has distinguished himself or herself, “by challenging the winners and losers ethos that has come to pervade even the education of our children.” Camins traces a, “three-decades-long hardening of America’s heart,” “a turn away from caring about the poor, about integration, and indeed about the very idea of social responsibility. Now, callousness passes for entertainment. Before NBC fired him, Donald Trump enhanced his fame by proclaiming “You’re fired!”
Camins rejects school choice, a social policy encouraging self interest and abandoning commitment to the public good: “Policy makers plug charter schools and vouchers as a means to make the contest to climb the economic ladder fairer. Parents, frustrated by the quality of their local public schools, anxiously apply to charter schools, hoping their child will be selected over the competition—other people’s childhood losers. Is this the ethos that we want for education in the United States?”
And the ethos of competition is not limited to parents vying to promote the prospects of own children. “To advocates for market competition as the improvement mechanism for education, the opening and closing of schools and the resultant dislocation of students are necessary sacrifices on the alter of disruptive innovation. Similarly, education policy makers promote competition among teachers to get the biggest improvement in student test scores in order to win bonuses or ensure they aren’t the ones fired… The formerly discredited notion of social Darwinism has reemerged as a triumphant management ideology.” “(O)ver the last Arthur Camins: Collective Action, Not Competition, Is Necessary for Strong Public Schools | janresseger:
