California’s Public School Chief Says Education No Place for Competition
Tony Thurmond seems to be exactly the man that his most loyal backers hoped (and his opponents feared) he would be.
by Ben Christopher
CALmatters
CALmatters
“If it were not for the education, my cousin who took me in, countless mentors, that I would easily have ended up in California state prison instead of serving as California’s superintendent of public instruction. We owe this to all the students in our state.” — Tony Thurmond
In a discussion with CALmatters’ education reporter Ricardo Cano at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in March, he talked about how his mother, an immigrant from Panama, died when he was 6, leaving him to be raised by a cousin he never met. He says his family benefited from many government programs to get by, but that “a great public education” was the most vital.
“If it were not for the education, my cousin who took me in, countless mentors, that I would easily have ended up in California state prison instead of serving as California’s superintendent of public instruction,” he said. “We owe this to all the students in our state.”
That philosophy, he said, informs his fairly dim view of charter schools, which he characterized as benefiting certain students as the possible expense of others.
“I think there’s a role for all schools,” Thurmond said, including charters—publicly funded but privately managed schools that supporters say offer valuable educational alternatives to children, but which critics say undermine traditional public schools. “But I do not believe that the state should ever open new schools without providing resources for those schools. I do not believe that education is an environment for competition.
Newsom Asked Thurmond to Put Together a Task Force
“Here’s my concern: you cannot open charter schools and new schools to serve every single student in our state,” he continued. “If you take the competition approach, that means some students, a lot of students, will be left behind. And again, I don’t believe that that’s what our mission is. I believe that the promise that we make to each other in society is to provide opportunity to get an education, to live a better life, to be able to acquire what you want through your hard work for yourself and your family. So for me that means that competition is OK in some environments, but when it comes to education we’ve got a responsibility to make sure that every single student gets an education.”
In the 2018 campaign, Thurmond and challenger Marshall Tuck tried to convince voters that they were not as extreme as their opponents sometimes portrayed them to be.
Tuck, with a background in charter schools and over $30 million of charter-backing dollars behind him, stressed his progressive credentials, while Thurmond, supported by teachers’ unions, insisted that he would not be beholden to organized labor.
Thurmond won by 2 percentage points.
Following the teachers’ strike in Los Angeles, where charter school growth has exacerbated tensions in the district, new Gov. Gavin Newsom asked Thurmond to put together a task force to study the fiscal impact that charters have on school districts. Because schools receive state funding on a per-pupil basis, charter skeptics argue that when students transfer to a CONTINUE READING: California’s Public School Chief Says Education No Place for Competition - GV Wire
