School choice is good for all, including public school system, says Tacoma educator
“Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” Thus Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen said in 1964, arguing that it was time for Congress to pass a Civil Rights Bill, which would improve educational opportunities for minority students.
It is now clear to many that voucher programs, open to all, particularly less advantaged students, needs to be part of any plan to improve student academic achievement.
This conclusion has not come to me lightly. While I have taught in private schools, the vast majority of my career has been in public schools. As I argued in an a previous TNT guest opinion, public schools have an important role in helping to create a common American identity.
Other important recent developments have convinced me school choice must be an important part of the solution to low academic achievement, particularly among minority students.
The Black Alliance for Educational Options found in 2015 that 65% of Black parents favored some kind of “voucher/scholarship” program that would enable them to enroll their children in private schools.
The U.S. Supreme Court has now made it possible for publicly financed vouchers to be used in religious schools.
While the decision recently made in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue applies only to states having voucher programs, it sets the table for the expansion to other states.
No doubt an increase of parental support for voucher programs may also be prompted by a concern their children’s public school is increasingly more about political indoctrination than education.
American history has been turned on its head by publication of the “1619 Project.” Appearing in the August 18, 2019 New York Times, the project makes many bizarre claims, but perhaps the most outrageous is the idea that the American founders’ independence movement was primarily motivated by a desire to protect against the abolition of slavery by the British.
In fairness, promoters of the 1619 Project recently amended their claim to recognize the revolutionary generation was motivated by other interests as well. But the mea culpa doesn’t save the project.
Even worse, already more than 3,500 schools around the country are preparing to incorporate lessons based on the 1619 Project into their history curricula.
It might be useful to study elements of the 1619 Project in lessons on the uses and abuses of historical narratives, but it is clearly educational abuse to teach it as an authoritative account of American history.
The imposition of a suspect history curriculum is not the only problem justifying the greater availability of “school choice” options.
Increasingly teachers are expected to assent to a radicalized agenda. Consider a recent training program being offered in a Washington State School District — “Implicit Bias-And Gender and Intersectionality” Or; “Implicit Bias-Introduction and Race & Ethnicity.”
I can imagine each participant being required to confess to their implicit discriminatory attitudes. And woe to anyone who refuses their assent. Will they be assigned to the professional gulag?
Parents are the first educators of their children. Professional educators, particularly teachers, are partners in that noble enterprise.
The expansion of school choice programs, including religious schools, should be seen as an opportunity to strengthen education, private and public.
Mike Jankanish is a retired teacher, former chair of the history department at Tacoma’s Wilson High School and an occasional op-ed contributor on education issues for The News Tribune.