Committee for the Preservation of Public Education

....Preserve Public Education....

Report to the May 1999 House of Delegates
by Gary Senyo, chair

The committee works in each region to help members recognize and fight attacks on public education. With an informed, motivated membership knowledgeable of threats against public education, we can, together with our communities, preserve and strengthen public education.

Everything we know about the attacks on public educaton leads to the conclusion that we must prevent the attacks through positive action. Yet throughout history we have waited in a defensive mode: lobbying, compromising and litigating after the fact. Our Committee strives to learn from history and experience.

We have been watching and studying the charter school movement. We find good reason to mobilize around this issue in defense of public education.

Research and develpment, the mantra of charter proponents, is a solid part of the legacy of public education. We've always been able to try new teaching techniques, curriculum or structures within our public schools. We keep what works and leave behind what doesn't. Not so long ago public schools were under attack for adopting the academic fad du jour, the new math, whole language instruction, open classrooms.

No matter how well written or well meaning, most charter laws are accomplishing the agenda of the anti-public education ideologies. Financial support is flowing away from the main student body. Decisions are not being made by locally elected board members. Firms interested in taking money from the community are taking advantage of loopholes by selecting founders and boards of trustees who then contract with the for-profit company to run "their" charter school. Evidence from Michigan, on of the nation's leaders in for-profit run charters, is that these for-profit schools are cookie-cutter operations, anything but innovative. But they can market. The public is being sold incessantly the myth that public schools are bad.

For-profits will eventually dominate the educaitonal field which will increasingly resemble managed care and the HMO industry, but until then competing theologies and ideologies are vying for public money thus fracturing communities.

Equity is lost. There is already evidence that charter schools are increasing ethnic segregation in Arizona. For-profit charter operators are trying to avoid their responsibility to teach students with expensive disabilities. And our own Department of Education has already signaled its desire to minimize charter responsibilities in the realm of special education.

Unity of community is threatened. Ethnic and other forms of social balkanization are ominous enough. However, while the charter movement may have promised greater parental involvement in education, the for-profit wave is more likely to turn citizens into mere consumers. Educational choice will increasingly come to resemble the choices we have when consuming the products or services of other franchised chains. The public school system is one of the handful of stabile, unifying community-based institutions left in America. Can it be possible to carve it up without inflicting great costs on our communities?

Our communities need to know that their public schools are meeting their needs. And if they aren't, we need to be a part of making the necessary changes within the system. As an association of public educators, we have the duty to reach out to our communities and demonstrate through our actions that our common interests in promoting public education far exceeds anything that may divide us. We must always strive to improve the public schools and let everyone know how indispensable to American democracy they are.