Minutes after he helped provide a bare majority to install an opponent of traditional public education as federal education secretary, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton issued a statement that the appointee, billionaire Betsy DeVos, would "return power to Arkansas parents."
He said it like it was always a good thing.
It is indeed a wonderful thing in many fortunate cases. Good parents, like mine, and I hope yours, working hard, staying together, sacrificing for their kids, disciplining them and demanding responsible conduct of them--what a glorious American picture that is.
But it would not be a good thing in the sadly abundant number of contemporary cases in which the parents are gone to prison or points unknown, or shot, or high on heroin or meth and out all night, or in a gang, or abusive, or so embedded in cycles of disadvantage and deprivation that they simply lack the wherewithal to connect their children to all the opportunities we endeavor as a society to make available to them.
When I went on social media Tuesday to ask that previously posed question--whether returning power to parents as our junior senator celebrated was always a good thing--I wound up in a predictable Twitter debate with a misrepresenting and over-generalizing right-winger (but I repeat myself) who said I had declared that parents should not have responsibility, or enjoy options or choices for their children.
But I hadn't. I had said that some parents fail their children and that traditional public schools once existed to try to save those kids, not haul them back home to the unchecked charge of no-account parents.
So here is a social media exchange that I submit synopsizes the debate:
I said, "[I] believe in giving parents options. I believe some parents are gone, high, abusive, incapable. Those kids must not be abandoned."
A local conservative consultant named Laurie Lee, who has worked on many of the DeVos objectives such as vouchers and charters and school choice generally, interjected to tweet: "Then their parents probably won't move them from traditional public schools."
Got that? Kids lucky enough to have good parents will enjoy options and choices. Kids stuck in dysfunctional and deprived environments ... well, the traditional public schools, the ones DeVos and Lee and others will disparage as inadequate to meet all needs, will serve as the default location for them.
And there you have it: The extollers of charter schools and private-school vouchers say they are merely introducing competition for the betterment of all. But it is a competition in which the fix is in. Their options require engaged, competent and responsible parents. They leave the most disadvantaged kids to parental control that either doesn't exist or is irresponsible or incompetent, and to the traditional public schools with whom they're only pretending to compete on a level field.
Choice for the lucky, inertia for the rest.
We're in a destructive cycle and the throes of a conundrum: We weaken traditional public education by saying it's failed and by taking the higher-opportunity kids from it under the guise of competition; yet the charter schools and the voucher program continue to meet with resistance from traditional public school champions, and thus are less than universally available, and less effective that they might--might--be.
It's a lose-lose for the kids.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the Little Rock School District, an internationally famous laboratory for contemporary education problems. The state has taken over the district presumably to make better a few poorly performing schools. But, at the same time, it keeps approving expansions of charter schools within the district to drain students and resources from the traditional public schools they profess to be committed to improving, several of which they are closing.
It may be time--and this may indeed be the very point of DeVos as federal education secretary--to do one or the other: Either we recommit all-in to traditional public schools to make them better, or we privatize and charter-ize education entirely, spending public money not for public schools, but for vouchers to empower parents to consider the private education market that the Waltons and others will build for them.
Pitting one style of education against the other--limiting one's full application while relegating to a default option the other--impairs both as a solution.
Teeter-totters are for the playgrounds, not for the schools themselves.
Counting ultimately on parents--all parents, merely by being parents ... well, that sounds simply virtuous until you realize Ozzie and Harriett died and that the Cleavers did, too, and that father not only doesn't know best, but is nowhere to be found.
This issue is not easy. We have no choice but to wait and see if a billionaire Republican donor who knows little to nothing of traditional public education is up to it.
All we know for sure is which way on the teeter-totter she wants us to favor.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/09/2017