David Brooks Makes the Case for Charter Schools

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David Brooks recently published a work of fiction that may be called a novel. It is about a young girl who wants badly to get into a charter school so that she can get the education that she needs to become successful. She does not succeed in getting into the charter school of her choice until a member of the schools board, who happens to run a hedge fund, successfully pleads her case with the board and she is admitted. Of course she goes on to be successful, because of the charter school, and the intervention of the hedge fund manager. He wraps the American dream of hard work and success around the availability of for profit schools and another of his ideals. He really likes hedge fund entrepreneurs much better than Wall Street bankers.

In this op-ed he takes on one of the leading critics of charter schools who was once an important advocate. Her experiences with charter schools, and the research that has been done on their effectiveness, has turned her into a critic. She wrote a book on the subject which is the topic of Brook's op-ed. He trivializes her book by focusing on one of her criticisms, the misuse of testing, and he gives examples of charter schools that have been perceived as successful. He also alludes to some of the common criticisms of the public schools made by conservatives. The teacher unions protect incompetent teachers and impede necessary reform.

I don't intend to get into the details of the debate but I would like to make a couple of points. In the first place, it is not clear that our public education system is failing. There are countless examples of excellent public schools that send their graduates off to the best colleges in America. It would not be surprising if there were not also some examples of good charter schools. Children learn in many ways and teachers teach in many ways. The involvement of parents in the education of their children is perhaps one of the most important indicators of success. It would be a disaster for public education if charter schools siphoned off the children of the most involved parents in school districts where this is a rare resource.

My second point is that Diane Ravitch, who wrote the book that David Brooks criticized, has something which David Brooks lacks. She has worked in the public schools for many years and she has worked as reformer as well. David Brooks is an ideologue who substitutes ideology for experience on almost any topic that he writes about. He is smart, and he writes well, but his ideology is really the topic for most of his op-eds. Private enterprise and the profit motivation are the essential ingredients for organizational success. The world would be a better place if all public institutions were privately operated. Moreover, in the case of education, the problems in education do not lie in society. Poverty is not the problem. It must be teacher unions and the absence of the profit motivation and the entrepreneurial spirit. If schools teach to the required tests it is because the teachers choose to do so. Its not because the schools are held accountable for test scores that have been imposed on them by a federal law which penalizes schools with poor test results.
In fact, some have argued that one of the purposes of the federal law is to show that the public schools cannot successfully produce the achievement required by the tests for all of their students. Of course, no system of education can entirely reverse the products of nature and nurture that are the children that we send to them. Frankly, it is amazing to see how successful many public schools have been given the resources made available to them, and by the increasingly parochial behavior of school boards and politicians, who like David Brooks, believe that they know best.