Chickens Coming Home to Roost, With a Vengeance

Charter School Battle Shifts to Affluent Suburbs. Yet another neo-con policy disaster. Neo-conservativism is all about pursuing liberal goals with "conservative" policies. Starting out with the unshakable premise that performance in urban/minority schools has to be equal to those in white suburbs because - well, it just has to be, the neocons correctly observed that liberal polices - free breakfast, free lunch, culturally-sensitive curricula, gobs of money redistributed from those suburban districts - have failed to make a dent. But re-thinking they're basic assumptions is not an option - so clearly, liberals have simply mis-diagnosed the problem. The problem clearly is that these schools and the teachers in them simply suck. And how could it be that every single urban school sucks? Well they just do.

Well, look how well private enterprise and the free-market have succeeded in creating our amazing modern economy? So there you go - the solution to "failing" schools is more competition! That'll make those lousy teachers in those sucky schools sit up and take notice.

Part of their proposed solution worked - yet again it was proven that if someone's handing out money, someone will step in to grab it, and so the charter school industry was born - and boy did they figure out how to work the angles. Suppose you have a Jewish population living in an urban area where the parents are not too keen on sending their kids to the local - uh, failing - schools. Well, they're pretty much limited to private schools, right? Not anymore - you now can send them to the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School - on the taxpayers dime!

Despite all the redistribution of school money, there's still money to be made in the suburbs - and like any business, the charter school business is sure not going to leave money on the table. People in wealthy school districts still spend very serious bucks on private schools, despite all the nice, "good" schools in their own neighborhoods. So of course charter schools are looking to set up shop there. In the Times article linked above, the charter school is a "Mandarin-infusion" school. That's playing off another neocon trope - the "our schools must be globally competitive" mantra that explains why our enlightened free-trade policy has produced nothing but massive current-account deficits and a shrinking work force. It's important that our pre-school children learn Chinese now so that in 20 years the little dears can so much more effectively negotiate the transfer of American jobs overseas. Of course by then it will be Vietnamese that will be needed after the Chinese will have priced themselves out of the market - but the neocons will be on top of it, I'm sure.