Yesterday’s email brought a message that featured the smiling face of Bill Cosby asking me to join Michelle Rhee’s Students First organization. I deleted the email without responding, but today I’m having second thoughts.

As the Chicago teacher strike continued and the scapegoating of teachers was ramped up in the mainstream media, I decided I should say a bit more about why I do not support Rhee’s effort and others like it. Now that the strike has been suspended, I think it is even more important that those of us who still believe in American public education speak out.

First of all, Rhee, herself. Her tenure as chancellor of the DC schools was a colossal failure. Now she has reinvented herself as a consultant and media darling who earns big bucks for speaking to various echo chambers around the country. Michelle Rhee is to the politics of education what Sarah Palin is to politics generally. She has repeatedly falsified her record in promoting herself, recently in Great Britain.

Rhee’s organization is one of a network of well-funded efforts to undermine public schools. Some of these organizations make no secret of their ties to moneyed interests intent on replacing public schools with for-profit charters. With PR that is long on slogans, these interests have nothing of value to offer in the way of real help to struggling schools, historically abandoned by successive waves of flight from the nation’s cities.

What they do have to offer is a program of privatization. A test of their ideas is now underway in Michigan. Behind it is the educational equivalent of corporate predation with its ethic of “creative destruction.” The Obama administration has based its “Race to the Top” program on this dubious program, and this in spite of a strong protest from the National Academy of Sciences. Race to the Top appears to be failing in Tennessee, the program’s signature client.

I take Students First as the most recently organized and perhaps most visible effort to privatize public schools. It identifies teachers’ unions as the cause of blight in urban school systems because teachers’ unions are its most serious opponents in the public sphere. Moreover, it should not escape notice that the school privatization cabal shares a strategic methodology with the American Legislative Exchange Council. Just as ALEC has “written” the legislation for many states who have enacted voter suppression laws, so the Teacher Advancement Project and the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (and now Students First) have “written” programs to suppress and marginalize teachers.

None of this is to say that there are not good charter schools, though for-profit charter schools have a sorry history. Nor is this to say that there are not fine private schools among us. One of the strengths of American education has always been its mix of public and private efforts. What is new in our time is flight from public education that began with attempts to escape integration, continued with the establishment of Christian and country day schools and has now eventuated in the home schooling and charter school movements. And what is most distressing about this recent experience is the normalization of antipathy to public education.

Higher education is implicated in this trend. Correct me if I’m wrong. It has been fashionable, and continues to be so, among college and university educators, to denigrate public education at least since the 1950s. It is an article of faith amongst university educators outside colleges of education that professional programs in education are substandard and inferior. It is this complex of prejudices that has created the hegemony of English departments in colleges and universities, and it is a canard. I told a story about an education prof in my last post that was prejudicial. That prof, who believed that administrators made teachers good, did not represent the norm. More representative was another prof, with whom I was privileged to work for many years, whose curiosity, intellect, and spiritual insight endeared him to a generation of graduate students at the University of North Texas, and to me.

I also mentioned Roosevelt High School in St. Louis in my last post. Any liberal who supports Michelle Rhee’s program should spend some time at Roosevelt or at Vashon High School in North St. Louis. The idea that the problems these schools face can be solved by firing a few high-priced veteran teachers and replacing them with cheap substitutes is hogwash. Liberals might wish, as well, to examine the history of Imagine for profit charters in St. Louis, currently being closed amid reports of poor performance and financial impropriety. And nobody, liberal or otherwise, should be surprised by the corruption of Imagine schools or of schools like them in other cities. The for profit charter system is yet another corporate scheme to transfer public monies into private-sector coffers. It’s a scam like the publishing scams that have bloated the cost of textbooks and scholarly journals and are now coopting online education.

Meanwhile, there are partnership programs cooperating quietly with public schools that actually do put students first. One of them is the network of urban debate leagues. I have a good deal of experience with the St. Louis Urban Debate league and have seen its results. I recently wrote about a St. Louis high school student who is a debater. Debate enhances the likelihood that students who participate will graduate from high school. Among key findings of a new study that will soon be reported in the Journal of Adolescence are these:

• Among the highest risk students, 72% of debaters graduated as compared with 43% of non-debaters.
• The level of participation in debate (number of rounds debated) is a strong predictor of high school completion. Students who debate more, are more likely to graduate.
• All students who debated, including those at-risk, scored higher on the ACT and were more likely to achieve college readiness benchmarks in English, Reading and Science.

Public education needs more programs like the UDL to restore valuable and life-enhancing activities such as music, dance, and art, that have been axed from many school programs in favor of teaching the test. Public education doesn’t need lessons in neoliberal economics or more demagoguery from political hacks like Rahm Emanuel, who is only the most recent politician to promote himself by attacking schools. And public education especially doesn’t need Michelle Rhee and her organization.

Shame on Bill Cosby.