SCHOOLS FOR LEARNING CITIZENSHIP -- Can All Charter Schools Support the Foundation of American Democracy?

How can the school fuse all these diverse elements so as to produce the unity essential to a democracy? . . That end can only be attained by spreading intelligence and a sense of responsibility for the social whole.
Ella Flagg Young, 1916

“Charter” schools were established in the US a decade or two ago to try out an idea – could schools free of the regulations imposed on public schools by states and localities and teachers’ associations develop better ways to use tax dollars? The idea was that parents, teachers, and other educators could be free to innovate and experiment, and perhaps discover some novel, successful approaches, unhampered by restrictions traditional public schools must deal with. Some, such as the nationwide KIPP (for Knowledge Is Power) schools started by Teach for America veterans, appear to be doing what they were intended to do. But whether they, or other charter schools, are any more successful academically than public schools appears to depend upon who is sponsoring the study. Whether all charter schools are more successful educating citizens we probably will not know for some time, but that’s my chief concern here.
A few years ago, before coming to Romania to teach, I attended a charter school fair in Chicago and met representatives of several organizations – mainly arts and ethnic culture groups – who had started charter schools. I even visited a few, including one that was highly regarded. Though I was not impressed by what I saw – unruly students, lackadaisical organization -- I tended to give them credit for taking on a challenging task, and trying to do something new.
While at the fair, I also spoke with a representative of a chain of charter schools operating in several Midwestern cities. A brief conversation with him revealed that his organization was founded and largely staffed by a group of Russian immigrants. Okay, I thought, or maybe not so okay. Here’s why.
After two years of teaching in a Romanian high school, I’ve developed a renewed sense of respect for the lessons, both academic and civic, inculcated in us by the American public school system. As the renowned Chicago educator Ella Flagg Young (1845-1918) noted, reflecting on 50 years of leading schools to accommodate themselves to the rush of immigrants, one of the school’s functions is to create unity from this diversity. And to do it not only by stressing academic performance, but by spreading “a sense of responsibility for the social whole.”
The school I teach in has competent teachers and talented students; many are dedicated to academic accomplishment and are delightful to work with. But the students’ sense of civic responsibility is negligible – they engage in few community service projects, copy each others’ work with impunity, destroy school property, and have little faith in the future of their country. They lack what Young regarded as essential – a sense of responsibility toward the society that has made their education possible.
Recently, I came upon a comment by Alexis de Tocqueville, the young French aristocrat who visited the United States in the 1830s, seeking to understand what enabled our young republic to maintain a democratic form of government. One of the essentials, he claimed, was our investment in public education. Further, it was a sort of education that aimed at a different purpose than the schools of Europe – in the U.S., schools rear the “political” man; in Europe, the “private” man.
In Romania, as I have argued in a previous blog, the schools do a good job preparing dedicated students for higher education, but they do not necessarily prepare them for their lives as responsible citizens in a democracy. In Tocqueville’s terms, they are educated for their private lives, not their political lives. Test scores are stressed – and subject to manipulation -- not extracurricular activities or service projects. Learning is theoretical, not practical; students think about the jobs they can get, not the companies they might establish or the new products or inventions they might develop.
Hence, when I read the headline of a recent article in The New York Times -- “Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas” -- it caught my attention. I found this disquieting, and not only for the concerns detailed in the article – school construction and school lunch contracts tend to go to firms owned by Turkish immigrants. Further, the leadership in this charter school organization – funded by U.S. tax dollars – has distressingly close ties to a religious movement in Turkey. Their students’ math and science scores may be admirable, they appear to import teachers from Turkey, claiming that they cannot find competent ones among U.S.-trained teachers.
All these concerns, well-documented in the Times’ article, are worrisome enough. But what distresses me more is whether organizations owned by Turkish (or Russian, etc.) immigrants have sufficient respect for, or understanding of, the essential function schools serve in inculcating a democratic mindset. Their countries of origin are still struggling to establish the democratic institutions that Americans have developed over the past 250 years.
American public schools are, to borrow from a well-known history of their early development, “pillars of our republic.” Might inadequate oversight of charter schools – which even their proponents admit to being a problem – be knocking some of those pillars from their foundation? Charter schools run by local parents wanting to do something different are one thing; those run by large, foreign-affiliated organizations -- whatever their intentions -- are something else. I worry that by overheated concern over test scores, and ignoring the public schools’ many other functions, we are threatening the very foundation, not only of American democracy, but of our multicultural society and its extraordinary productivity.