Socialism Its Own Worst Enemy

New York Household Idols To Fall Out of Favour

One of the best cures for a people wedded to the naive ideals and faux justice of socialism is to experience more of it.  New York has long been a "progressive" city: that is, it has a strong proclivity towards big interventionist governments.  The departing Mayor Bloomberg fitted the stereotype really well.  He was nanny state personified, passing rules, regulations, and wowser laws to try and regulate every part of the human anatomy and human behaviour.  New Yorkers grumbled a bit, but basically they loved it.  They loved being bossed and nannied by Sharkey.  It made them feel that all is right with the world. 

Now the electorate has doubled down, electing as mayor a chap who is not just a nannying Big Brother but a dyed in the wool, old-school, long term socialist radical.  De Blasio ticks all their boxes.  So the voters ticked his ballot paper.  New Yorkers are about to get a dose of good old fashioned ideological socialism.  It may help cure them of their folly--at least for a while. 

One thing de Blasio opposes (and campaigned against) is charter schools.
  He is ideologically opposed.  The state always does it better, don't you know.  Except there is a growing body of hard evidence that charter schools have done extremely well and that all the socialist saws and slurs about them being just another form of class oppression of the poor are ideological claptrap. 

Nina Rees, a charter school advocate,  writing in USA Today summarises the state of play.

New York¹s public charter schools are upending old assumptions about urban education. And they can help even more students if New York¹s incoming mayor lets them.

Earlier this year, Stanford¹s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) revealed that in just one school year, the typical New York City charter school student gained about five additional months of learning in math and one additional month of learning in reading compared with students in traditional public schools.

These gains, repeated year after year, are helping to erase achievement gaps between urban and suburban students. A rigorous 2009 study from Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby found that students who attend New York City¹s charter schools from Kindergarten through 8th grade will make up 86% of the suburban-urban achievement gap in math and 66% of the gap in English.

These are serious advances.  But it is amongst the poor areas (aka ghettoes) that charter schools are achieving their most impressive results.

What makes these results so impressive is that charter schools are not elite private schools. They are tuition-free public schools, funded by taxpayers and open to any student.  New York has roughly 70,000 students enrolled in public charter schools, and the numbers are on the rise. This school year alone, 14,000 new students in the city enrolled in charter schools ­ with the vast majority in low-income neighborhoods.

Remarkably, several charter schools in low-income neighborhoods are showing some of the most impressive achievement gains. For instance, while just 30% of students citywide passed New York¹s new Common Core math exam, 97% of students passed the exam at Bronx Success Academy 2. The passage rate was 80% at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill in Brownsville, a community that has suffered academic failure for generations.

Charter schooling is not magical pixie dust.  Some charter schools are better than others.  Let's face it: some charter schools fail miserably.  But here is the rub.  In the government run, union controlled schools, miserable failure becomes institutionalised to perpetuity because the state, by definition, cannot fail.  Failing schools demand and always "deserve" more money, more resources, higher pay for teachers--all ostensibly to make the school do better, but in reality, the outcome is a perpetuation of  sub-standard education.  Why?  Socialists are ideologically unable to admit failure or incompetence of state run and controlled activities.  At the bottom line it is state institutions which must succeed--and success is defined as perpetuation, not competence.  It has to be that way because socialist ideology requires it to be so. Voters who ticked De Blasio deserve it all.  Pity about the poor kids who represent collateral damage along the way. 

Like traditional public schools, some charters do under-perform, and the charter school movement is working hard to improve quality at every school. But study after study shows that high-quality charter schools are putting high school graduation and college within reach for many New York City students who once had bleak educational prospects.

Unfortunately, this opportunity could be imperiled. Incoming mayor Bill de Blasio has taken an aggressive anti-charter stance. His main point of contention is that the city¹s charter schools often share buildings with traditional public schools without paying rent.

Mayor Bloomberg introduced "co-location" as a way to turn unused classrooms into productive learning environments. Sharing space also tests the hypothesis that environmental factors make it difficult for children in certain neighborhoods to succeed in school. Charters quickly proved that theory wrong. For example, 88% of third and fourth graders at Success Academy Harlem 5 passed the state math exam. The traditional public school located in the same building only managed to attain a pass rate of 6%.

De Blasio opposes such things on ideological grounds.  Charter schools are not state schools--and therefore are sub-standard in the sense of being evilly unjust.  New Yorkers love him.  We predict they are going to end up hating him.  But for our money the dumb voters who bow, scrape, and genuflect before their statist household idols, and who, therefore, ticked de Blasio, deserve what's coming down the pike. 

Mayor-elect de Blasio views this space-sharing arrangement as an improper subsidy for charter schools. But the crucial fact here is that charter schools are public schools.  Traditional public schools in New York City don¹t pay rent for their classrooms, and they already receive more funding per student than charter schools do.

Charter schools start with a public-funding disadvantage, and now Mayor-elect de Blasio could put them deeper in the hole­ to the tune of another $3,000 per student ­ by forcing them to pay rent in the city with the highest real-estate costs in the nation.  If he succeeds, it¹s difficult to see any other outcome than fewer charter schools and fewer options for parents desperate to get their children into good schools ­ a tragedy for the 50,000 families who are on charter school wait lists in New York City.

Fifty thousand families on wait lists for charter schools in New York!  Herein lies a tale.  It is a generally true postulate that parents, (not state bureaucrats, unions, and politicians) have a much better grasp and deeper commitment to their children's educational success.  It is also true that they tend to make far, far better choices in the matter.  But to the ideological socialists such nostrums represent extreme heresy. 

Across the country, charter schools have produced particular academic gains among students in poverty, minority students and students still learning English. The same CREDO study that revealed impressive learning gains among New York City¹s charter school students also showed that, nationwide, black students in poverty who attend charter schools gained the equivalent of 29 extra days of learning in reading each year, and 36 extra days in math, compared to their traditional public schools peers.

Mayor-elect de Blasio made narrowing inequality a central theme of his successful campaign. In his election night victory remarks, he called inequality "the defining challenge of our time," and said, "we are all at our best when every child, every parent, every New Yorker has a shot."

What better way to give every child a shot at success than to let schools that are doing a great job educating kids serve even more? As he begins his tenure as New York¹s mayor, those of us in the charter school community wish Bill de Blasio the very best, and ask him to join with us to help give every child in New York City a first-rate education.

Nina Rees is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Slogans about inequality are standard socialist claptrap.  Socialists always have a certain kind of equality in mind when they thus harangue.  It is an equality deeply rooted in covetousness and envy.  De Blasio reckons that "we are all at our best when every child, every parent, every New Yorker has a shot".  Ok.  What does that mean? 

Does it mean that every parent should have a shot at getting their children into a school of their preference and choice?  Absolutely not.  That's not the equality de Blasio has in mind.  He means an equality created by the state, enforced by the state, and promulgated through state institutions.  To the socialist soul, better to have all schools as state schools and everyone in the muck together, equally, than to have some succeeding in non-state controlled education.  Everyone has a right to experience state controlled sub-standard outcomes or failure.  That's the socialist vision: everyone is better off when all New Yorkers go down the tubes together.  That's when the city is at de Blasio's best. 

Welcome to the wonderful world of progressive socialism.  It will likely be instructive to many souls.  It will also likely end in a few household idols being crushed up, ground down, and thrown out.  For the sake of those parents wanting better for their children, let's hope so.