People keep talking about how great Arne Duncan is: he's tall, he's good at basketball, he went to Harvard, he stands up to unions, and he has a lot of money he needs to give to needy school districts, via the $5 billion Race to the Top fund. This may mean subjecting students and teachers to lots of standardized testing of unproven value, but never mind that. Duncan, Obama's secretary of education, is also excited about charter schools and is the good-looking face of the school reform movement. Other well-publicized proponents of bringing business-like rationality and competitiveness (via charters) to steering the minds of millions of schoolchildren include DC's school chancellor Michelle Rhee, New York's mayor Mike Bloomberg, Newark's mayor Cory Booker, and the outgoing New Jersey governor, Jon Corzine.
I wrote about the sometimes unpredictable effects of the new rationality in school funding on New Jersey's urban kids for Next American City. A new school funding formula, passed in 2008, allots money in a seemingly fair and rational manner, weighting areas of concentrated poverty so that they receive more state money per student. But New Jersey already had fought a decades-long court battle to ensure that poor urban kids received what was deemed a thorough and adequate education--i.e. safe, decent schools--and the new formula actually gives less money to several urban school districts, in part because those local urban tax coffers are so depleted to start with. (The recession is also a confounding factor, but detractors of the new funding formula argue that it underfunds even before Trenton cuts out more.)
The shortfall may just point to just how much needs be done to help kids who start off in poverty attain the advantages accrued to kids from middle-class families before they even set foot in school. These are so basic they can be hard to discern: familiarity with books, with letters, with numbers, with lots of words.
Many studies show that a good preschool can help overcome some of the disadvantages of poverty, but after that it's still unclear what helps a middling or troubled student stick school out long enough to discover something she loves/can stand. So it's an open question how much the current push for reform is going to help the most needy students older than five, on a national scale. Is the idea to open charters with such speed that they replace all 100,000+ public schools in the United States? Or to throw enough ideas out there, via charters, that eventually some good ones stick? (It's not like education experts haven't been trying for years.) And charters themselves have received mixed grades.
Reformers can talk themselves in circles if they start looking at fundamental questions. Because at bottom, tackling our country's education problems means tackling economic inequity and poverty, which is often concentrated in neighborhoods and therefore schools (previous efforts at getting around this have included busing, magnet schools, and the Hope VI mixed-income housing push). And talk about that too much and someone's bound to call you a socialist.