Neither evil nor stupid

An explosive headline today: Providence Goes to War over Charter Schools. Another bitter fight over charter schools just ended in Cranston. People get passionate about educational reform. Yet there are more and less productive ways of debating.

In every class I have taught for the last ten years or so, student are advised: "Do not assume your opponent to be evil or stupid." Indeed, if you question your opponent's intentions and integrity, why engage in a debate? Evil has to be fought, not debated. If you think your opponent is just an idiot, a dialogue is just as pointless.

A good starting point is this: my opponent has the best intentions and really believes in what she is advocating; she is as intelligent as I am. But my opponent has a different set of experiences, and access to different information, so his opinion is different because of that. My job is to educate the opponent on how the world looks like from my point of view, but also learn why and how he came to his conclusions. The point of the debate is not only to change her mind, but also to admit the possibility of changing mine.

The charter school debate is the classic example of mismatched assumptions. The whole idea of charter schools has been presented to the educational community in the early 90-s as way to establish some space for experiment and innovation. On these terms, many believed it was a good idea. However, some people started to suspect that charter schools intend to gradually replace traditional district-run public education altogether. For example, in New Orleans, 71% of students attend a charter school. Under this assumption, most educators including me would object. The question remains - what is the intent? The proponents say the intent is still the same, the opponents say the intent has shifted. The intent is very difficult to know, and consequences of public policy do not always coincide with its intent. Like any organization on the face of the Earth, charter schools want to grow, regardless of their leader's actual intent.

My objections are theoretical: Education is not a typical market of consumer goods, and consumer choice just does not work as intended there. Unrestricted choice leads to development of concentrated educational ghettos. And as the most active and engaged parents move their children and resources to charters, traditional schools will look worse and worse. They will keep larger and larger proportion of special needs, homeless, and just very poor students with weaker family and community supports. However, FSEHD partners with several excellent charter schools, and I admire their accomplishments. A good school is a good school, and all educators have much to learn from the best of charter schools. As long as they remain a relatively small player, the negative systemic side effects will not be significant and the benefits outweigh the cost. I do not know what is the proper size of charters should be within the public school systems, but definitely not 70%.

A productive debate about charter schools should assume the integrity of intentions on both sides. It also has to focus on the real issue at hand: is this a small scale experiment or an opening act of the total charterization? I think if serious legal guarantees were developed to ensure the limits of charter schools' growth, there would be less opposition. With such guarantees, a large district like Providence can afford another charter school without crossing the threshold.

Another critical point: teachers and parents from traditional schools should see a tangible benefit of the innovation and experimentation promise. The good charters create many of excellent solutions, but there is no mechanism for spreading and adopting them in traditional schools. Charters and district schools are fairly isolated from each other, which breeds mutual suspicion, and defies the whole purpose of charter experiments. This has to be a dialogue of equals, where the best practices of traditional schools are treated with the same respect as those of charters.