Charter Schools Damned Before They Exist

Radical Utopians

Well, that's it then.  The educational establishment in New Zealand has resolved that charter schools don't work.  They fail.  We don't have any yet, but according to the Education Commentariat they will be useless from the get-go.  Worse, they will do real harm. 

Whenever this sort of thing goes down it is helpful to ask what world-view or framework the critics are arguing.  Here is one premise: if an educational policy does not produce uniform results across the entire nation, it is implicitly unjust.  Harmful.  Charter schools (being an alternative to government schools) only help some pupils, not all.  Therefore they have to be judged a failure before they begin.

Run the logic on display here: by this definition of success, no non-government schools can succeed, ever.
  Why?  Because they are not universal across the entire nation.  They deal only with some households.  The suppressed premise is, equality or egalitarianism is a necessary standard by which all educational activities should be judged.  If an educational policy does not produce an equal outcome across the entire society, for all children, it is harmful, destructive, and unjust. 

Egalitarian education reasons that if "over-achieving" children must be shut down in order to bring the "under-achieving" children up to the mean, it is a better (more just) outcome.  This is what C S Lewis called the triumph and celebration of mediocrity--a necessary outcome of all egalitarian educational theories.  The egalitarian sees some children achieving, whilst others do not, as an affront to justice.  In reality, some children achieving, whilst others do not, is the fabric of life itself--it has nothing to do with justice. 

Now the government is concerned about the underclass.  It is trying to find a way to transform the underclass so that children can escape their social environment and not walk in the same dissolute broken paths of their forebears.  The government knows that more money is not the answer.  It produces little results except more drug addiction and alcoholism.  The government believes that education is a key part of the solution--although increasingly it is dawning on the policy buffs that education which does not address the wider social context of children in the underclass is also doomed to fail. 

So charter schools, targeted at the underclass represent an escape hatch for some children--not all.  They operate at the margin. 

Charter schools, because they are voluntary, self-select.  The school selects the right kind of pupils; parents allegedly "game" the system to ensure that their kids get access.  The Educational Commentariat hates this idea, for it is not egalitarian.  The establishment would rather have all underclass children fail, perpetuating the degeneracy of the generations that have gone before them, than  have some underclass children escape. Thus, charter schools, because they help only some are judged from the outset as doing more harm than good.  The greater god of Egalitarianism is not being reverenced and served. 

These critics, these Educational Commentariat members, are radical utopians.