{"id":6691,"date":"2023-10-26T19:56:32","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T19:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=6691"},"modified":"2023-10-27T21:00:48","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T21:00:48","slug":"good-riddance-to-the-one-way-of-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=6691","title":{"rendered":"Good riddance to the \u2018one way of teaching\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/good-riddance-to-the-one-way-of-teaching\/<\/a><\/p>\n

America has changed its mind on what public education looks like, thanks to parents who demanded school choice<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

\u201cThe Death of Public School,\u201d proclaimed the title of a widely<\/a> touted<\/a> new book, and a Milwaukee crowd came last week to hear<\/a> the gruesome details.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

You should note first that the corpse is missing. Of the 866,000 Wisconsin kids<\/a> getting a state-funded K-12 education as of this fall, 92.3% get one in a plain old public school, down only a tick from 92.7% last fall. \u201cDeath\u201d seems a hysterical overreach.<\/p>\n

The author, Cara Fitzpatrick, interviewed on stage, quickly conceded that public schools aren\u2019t dead. Instead, \u201cit\u2019s sort of this war over ideas and definitions,\u201d she told her interlocutor. When her subtitle says, \u201cHow conservatives won the war over education in America,\u201d she said, she means that boundaries have been blurred and the definition of \u201cpublic education\u201d expanded in Americans\u2019 minds. It no longer is only, as she writes, schools that are government-run, tax-paid, answerable to voters and \u201cfree of religious instruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFree of\u201d? One is free of chains or illness. I\u2019d say more accurate words are \u201cdeficient in,\u201d \u201cstripped of\u201d or \u201cbereft,\u201d but a neutral \u201cwithout\u201d would do.<\/p>\n

Still, if Americans\u2019 view of schooling really has expanded, I have one thing to say:<\/p>\n

Good.<\/p>\n

Long time coming<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Fitzpatrick\u2019s book is a 70-year history of the effort to give parents without the means to pay both taxes and tuition some say in the form of their children\u2019s schooling. While she spends many pages on the fortunately short-lived attempts in the 1960s South to use vouchers to avoid integration, Milwaukeeans with honest motives figure large in her book.<\/p>\n

A Marquette University political scientist and Jesuit, Fr. Virgil Blum, worked from the 1950s onward in urging that state aid follow children to religious schools as a way of preserving First Amendment liberty in a pluralist America. Fitzpatrick extensively chronicles the effort by Milwaukee legislator Polly Williams, who settled on school choice as a way of empowering poor African-American families poorly served by the Milwaukee Public Schools.<\/p>\n

It was part of a larger movement since the 1970s, one that linked liberal academics, urban minority parents and libertarian economist Milton Friedman, among others, in demanding that parents be given the power to take their children out of schools that weren\u2019t teaching and to use schools that would try something better. It was legendary teachers\u2019 union leader Albert Shanker, Fitzpatrick reminds readers, who helped invent the idea of charter schools, saying in 1988 that America needed more than \u201cone remedy, one pill, one way of teaching kids.\u201d Two years later, when Milwaukee\u2019s pioneering choice program launched, it was Williams \u2014 a liberal Democrat and black nationalist \u2014 who replied to critics fretful about public school payrolls, \u201cIf you all are worried about your jobs, try doing them better.\u201d<\/p>\n

These were the natural reactions of people who saw that schools may well have been government-run, tax-funded, secular, and answerable to voters \u2014 but were producing wretched results.<\/p>\n

Then what was a<\/em> long-simmering issue became the<\/em> issue during pandemic shutdowns, when online classes let parents see the rot. Fitzpatrick wrote her history because she wanted to know what prepared the ground for the current explosion in school choice around the country, where 10 states now offer all<\/em> families the option of using their school aid at private schools.<\/p>\n

Motivations abound, from sliding performance \u2014 two-thirds of Wisconsin public school 8th<\/sup>-graders cannot read proficiently<\/a>, and this is about average among states \u2014 to the realization that kids really are being taught quasi-religious beliefs in school anyhow, only they\u2019re about gender changes to be kept secret<\/a> from parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Good for families<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Fitzpatrick noted that whether choice improves the public education system is a separate question from whether it has been good for families. The answer, she concedes, is that it has for many, helping children escape bad schools. \u201cThey\u2019re not getting punched in the middle of math,\u201d she said. Scoff at safety as a motive, but \u201cyou\u2019re not going to learn to read if someone\u2019s hitting you and you\u2019re scared to be in school.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fitzpatrick\u2019s book quotes several figures who say a version of a new definition \u2014 that public education is anything that educates the public. I think the redefinition is bigger, as parents realize that all education is in a sense private: Whether a mother\u2019s child learns or not is a question independent of statewide scores, separate from the good of some \u201csystem,\u201d a question particular to that child and of absolutely central importance to her future.<\/p>\n

As one Milwaukee parent, dropping off his child at high-performing<\/a> St. Marcus Lutheran School amid anti-choice protests later told Fitzpatrick, \u201cYou\u2019re debating someone else\u2019s child.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the definition of an acceptable place for taxpayer-funded schooling has changed in the minds of Americans, that hasn\u2019t been the work of conservatives. We\u2019re cheering as it happens, but if decades of history make anything clear, it has been parents who have changed America\u2019s mind, parents who correctly see their children\u2019s futures as more important than some abstract idea about there being one proper shape for schooling.<\/p>\n

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

The post Good riddance to the \u2018one way of teaching\u2019<\/a> appeared first on Badger Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/good-riddance-to-the-one-way-of-teaching\/ America has changed its mind on what public education…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-badger-institute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6691"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6694,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6691\/revisions\/6694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}