If there was a big, messy, noisy, bloodthirsty, weird marketplace for education in metro Hartford and New Haven and Waterbury, what do you think the enrollment would be in traditional urban schools?
Remember, this would be a real marketplace where the only thing that mattered was that willing partners agreed on a mutual transaction that presumably benefited both sides. It wouldn’t matter what the teacher unions wanted or whose egos might get bruised.
No, this educational marketplace would serve up whatever kind of education the urban families wanted; whatever kind of education delivered the goods.
If you think urban “consumers” don’t have the itch to seek out quality education, consider that some of Hartford’s ring suburbs have gone as far as hiring private detectives to ferret out kids who have sneaked over the border to get a better education. Consider that in one recent three-year period, Hamden expelled 200 students who were not legal residents; most of who presumably sneaked across the town line from New Haven.
The State of Texas reports that it had 16,000 students on waiting lists last year for admission to “charter schools,” which are still public, but in theory at least, free of some of the union and bureaucratic nonsense of the traditional public schools.
If there was good news out of the New Orleans hurricane disaster, it was that the monopoly of the hideous public schools was broken, with more than half of the public school students now in charter schools.
Connecticut is typical of the charter school environment: a cobbled together compromise, grudgingly implemented and grudgingly funded and acknowledged as a necessary evil to avoid pressure for true “school choice” — vouchers and an open market for education.
Most of the charters accept their role as sort-of-public, but not really, which gives them the freedom to exist, as long as they don’t market in a way that hints they are better than the dumb ol’ traditional public schools. An exception in Connecticut is the Amistad Academy in New Haven with enough wealthy donors and a superior track record that allows them to boast on a national scale.
A public opinion poll this year sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found that about 60 percent of adults know almost nothing about charter schools.
Even with that, the charter schools tend to suck up students — until the cranky powers-that-be “cap” the number of charters, or limit the enrollments. The quality of the charters ranges from superior to comically awful, but the lousy charters can be exterminated with much more ease than the monopoly public schools.
In Connecticut, the marketplace is mucked up by the addition of “magnet” schools, with titles like the Sports Medicine and French Language Magnet School and Preparatory Institute — all designed to entice white kids to attend school with their minority brothers and sisters so that Connecticut can pretend that its urban education is integrated.
Enthusiasm for competition and quality? Ask the befuddled Hartford parents about their new and improved “choice” experiment, in which you can’t go where you want, you can’t get any information, and maybe we’ll assign you to a school even worse than the one you’re attending now. Thank you for reading this column. You didn’t have to read it. That’s called “choice.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
