The newspapers say President Bush is determined to avoid the mistake his father made in 1992. Now that Bush Junior’s Persian Gulf war is winding down, George W. is said to be prepared to pay attention to his domestic agenda in ways his father did not.
The domestic agenda could stand a bit of attention. The American economy has shed over two million jobs since Mr. Bush took the oath of office; you would have to look back to the administration of Herbert Hoover to find a president who presided over a greater downturn in the national economy.
So maybe Mr. Bush should focus on some other aspect of his domestic agenda. Education might be a good place to start. In 2000, Mr. Bush promised he would be the savior of American education, raising our children’s test scores and making our schools competitive with any in the world.
One of Mr. Bush’s strategies for academic excellence is promotion of charter schools. Charter schools are independent, established by parents or educators – or for-profit corporations – as an alternative to failing public schools. By qualifying in many cases for public money, charter schools are supposed to improve American education by introducing competition. Just as competition and free markets are supposed to make businesses healthier, improving products and services for consumers, so charter schools would supposedly bring the same benefits to academia.
The charter school theory holds that if your local public school cannot provide adequate teachers and test scores, that creates a need that a charter school can fill. By the genius of the marketplace, the public school will either wither and die or improve itself to compete with the independent charter school.
Charter schools have the advantage of being outside the traditional public school hierarchy. Without the cumbersome school boards, layers of administration and teachers’ unions, charter schools would answer only to students and parents – education’s true constituency.
Halfway through his first term, President Bush is still supporting charter schools, asking Congress this year for three quarters of a billion dollars in new funding for charter schools and school voucher programs.
Problem is, the business competition model cannot be grafted onto every vexing situation in American life. (To tell the truth, I don’t think the business competition model even works in business. Look at Enron. Look at Microsoft. That’s a rant for another day.)
Charter schools try to compete with public schools by offering more, or better, service for the same price. Any b-school grad will tell you the way to get more for less is to control costs and the biggest cost in any business is labor. A recent study by the University of California and Stanford University found that almost half the teachers in charter schools lack a teaching certificate, as opposed to public schools, where over 90 percent of the teachers are certified. Uncertified teachers are cheaper, but they’re not better.
Arizona has more charter schools than any other state and those charter schools receive failing grades twice as often as public schools. This is the business competition model turned on its head. The public schools are not particularly good, so charter schools open to offer an alternative. Unfortunately, the charter schools have no standards and are so poorly run they don’t survive, but they have managed to bleed money away from the public school system. Now the public schools are worse than they were before the charter schools arrived. Because all this takes four or five years to play out, there’s an entire cohort of students who have received a shoddy education for several years running and are now unlikely to ever catch up.
I cannot imagine this is the educational record President Bush expects to carry him into a second term. Between these schools and the failing economy, he may have no choice but to declare another war.
Hard Lessons
The newspapers say President Bush is determined to avoid the mistake his father made in 1992. Now that Bush Junior’s Persian Gulf war is winding down, George W. is said to be prepared to pay attention to his domestic agenda in ways his father did not.
The domestic agenda could stand a bit of attention. The American economy has shed over two million jobs since Mr. Bush took the oath of office; you would have to look back to the administration of Herbert Hoover to find a president who presided over a greater downturn in the national economy.
So maybe Mr. Bush should focus on some other aspect of his domestic agenda. Education might be a good place to start. In 2000, Mr. Bush promised he would be the savior of American education, raising our children’s test scores and making our schools competitive with any in the world.
One of Mr. Bush’s strategies for academic excellence is promotion of charter schools. Charter schools are independent, established by parents or educators – or for-profit corporations – as an alternative to failing public schools. By qualifying in many cases for public money, charter schools are supposed to improve American education by introducing competition. Just as competition and free markets are supposed to make businesses healthier, improving products and services for consumers, so charter schools would supposedly bring the same benefits to academia.
The charter school theory holds that if your local public school cannot provide adequate teachers and test scores, that creates a need that a charter school can fill. By the genius of the marketplace, the public school will either wither and die or improve itself to compete with the independent charter school.
Charter schools have the advantage of being outside the traditional public school hierarchy. Without the cumbersome school boards, layers of administration and teachers’ unions, charter schools would answer only to students and parents – education’s true constituency.
Halfway through his first term, President Bush is still supporting charter schools, asking Congress this year for three quarters of a billion dollars in new funding for charter schools and school voucher programs.
Problem is, the business competition model cannot be grafted onto every vexing situation in American life. (To tell the truth, I don’t think the business competition model even works in business. Look at Enron. Look at Microsoft. That’s a rant for another day.)
Charter schools try to compete with public schools by offering more, or better, service for the same price. Any b-school grad will tell you the way to get more for less is to control costs and the biggest cost in any business is labor. A recent study by the University of California and Stanford University found that almost half the teachers in charter schools lack a teaching certificate, as opposed to public schools, where over 90 percent of the teachers are certified. Uncertified teachers are cheaper, but they’re not better.
Arizona has more charter schools than any other state and those charter schools receive failing grades twice as often as public schools. This is the business competition model turned on its head. The public schools are not particularly good, so charter schools open to offer an alternative. Unfortunately, the charter schools have no standards and are so poorly run they don’t survive, but they have managed to bleed money away from the public school system. Now the public schools are worse than they were before the charter schools arrived. Because all this takes four or five years to play out, there’s an entire cohort of students who have received a shoddy education for several years running and are now unlikely to ever catch up.
I cannot imagine this is the educational record President Bush expects to carry him into a second term. Between these schools and the failing economy, he may have no choice but to declare another war.