Schools aren't startups and kids aren't consumers
Protesters rally against Eli Broad's charter expansion plan outside the L.A. school board meeting on Oct. 13, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Los Angeles Times)
The Los Angeles Unified School District will wrestle with enormous challenges in the year ahead. It's on the brink of financial insolvency, enrollment is dropping, and its board is about to hire a new superintendent to fix these fiscal problems.
The new superintendent will face more than money issues, though. A philosophical controversy is also churning inside LAUSD: Should LAUSD become a competitive marketplace of schools, or grow as a democratic civic institution?
Looking back at the events of last fall, it's clear how high the stakes are in this debate.
In September, a proposal from Great Public Schools Now, an initiative led by billionaire Eli Broad, unleashed ferocious debate. Rife with business-speak, it suggested LAUSD could be fixed by attracting edupreneurs to launch 260 new charter schools that would capture 50% of the district's “market share” by 2023. Within weeks, battle lines were drawn. Rallying anti-charter-school activists, former school board president Jackie Goldberg declared “This is war!” On its website, the teacher's union posted “Hit the Road, Broad.”
Another coalition of local foundation leaders then weighed in with its own open letter in November and offered to mediate. Without taking sides, they cautioned that “intended reforms often fall short if they are done to communities rather than with communities.”
Then, in an abrupt turn, Great Public Schools Now announced in December that it would channel its resources not just into adding more charter schools, but into replicating models of success at traditional schools as well. It released a list of 49 schools that were models of success, 42 of them magnets and charter schools. Both types of schools rely on competitive admissions policies that are based on lotteries or criteria such as giftedness.
The list's near-exclusive focus on charters and magnets rather than neighborhood schools sends a powerful message about how these private reformers want Angelenos to think about education — as savvy consumers competing for scarce resources needed to help their children get ahead.
What does this process of edupreneurship and innovation look like on the ground? Magnets and charters use aggressive recruitment campaigns to draw families with more social capital away from their neighborhood public schools. The most vulnerable children, then, are left behind in quickly emptying buildings, which sit waiting for a Proposition 39 takeover bid, which allows new charter schools to open in the unused Schools aren't startups and kids aren't consumers - LA Times:
