By Susan Turk

February 12, 2012—St. Louis—A motley crew of politicians around the country, governors and the like, proclaimed January 22-28, 2012 National School Choice Week.   Events promoting school choice were held in many cities. St. Louis’ took place Wednesday, January 25 at Loyola Academy. The event was sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, an institution founded and funded by petrochemical billionaires David and Charles Koch.   Americans for Prosperity also has a PAC which supports Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.   AFP also funded Herman Cain’s campaign. The Koch’s and AFP heavily funded Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s campaign in 2010.   The Kochs are the funding fathers of the Tea Party movement.   The problems we face in St. Louis and across Missouri, keeping our public schools funded and open are due partly to the antipathy of these wealthy ultra-conservatives to public education.

Aside from promoting school choice, the Koch’s favorite issues ar e free market capitalism and smaller government, policies that increase profits and lower their taxes.   Besides holdings in oil and coal, the Koch’s own Georgia Pacific, the biggest supplier of plywood in the country and lots of paper product companies. Angel Soft, Quilted Northern, Soft n Gentle, Dixie Cup, GP Copy Paper, Spectrum paper, Mardi Gras napkins, Vanity Fair, Zee napkins, Brawny and Sparkle paper towels are theirs.   Koch Industries produce most of the nylon, spandex and polyester that we use.   Why am I telling you this?   Consider what you subsidize if you patronize their products.

School Choice Week events were also endorsed by Singuefield front groups the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri, and the Children’s Education Council of Missouri, both of which are staffed by Laura Slay and Katherine Casas, wife of 79th district state rep candidate Martin Casas, The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice ( www.edchoice,org ), founded by free market economist and father of the school choice movement Milton Friedman ,   the Koch funded Heritage Foundation, the Koch funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which pre-packages state legislation, The Black Alliance for Educational Options, and Michelle Rhee’s Students First, which has been hired to squire ALEC generated school choice legislation through the Missouri legislature.  

The panelists were Fox News commentator Dick Morris, St. Louis Tea Party Co-founder Dana Loesch, Show Me Institute Director and UM Columbia Economics Professor Michael Podgursky, and Slay administration Education Liaison Robyn Wahby. The panel was moderated by local blogger Jim Hoft, aka the Gateway Pundit.   Hoft identified Loesch as part of the Breitbart empire (as in Andrew Breitbart). Loesch is a commentator on CNN and has her own talk radio show.

Morris, Bill Clinton’s political advisor and re-election campaign chair, resigned due to revelations that he had allowed a prostitute to listen in on his conversations with the president.   Morris has since ceased to associate with the Clintons. Hoft introduced Morris, the author of many books as, “a respected political analyst.” 

 Approximately 100 people attended the event.   A quick survey of the audience found only 6 of them to be African American.   Then again, a similar school choice public event held at Harris Stowe State University in April, 2009 resulted in a contrasting audience of African Americans with very few Caucasians participants.   For some reason, school choice events other than legislative hearings seem to self-segregate.

Highlights:

Morris started off by defining school choice as, “an elemental human right.”

He described 3 phases in efforts to create quality in public schools starting in the 1960s.   The first increased state funding.   Morris claimed nothing got better.   (In reality achievement did increase during this period.) The second phase upgraded science and math curricula, and increased teacher training.   The third phase began with No child Left Behind in 2001. He said reading scores have been flat for the last 30 years and math scores have worsened.  

His solution is for everyone to be allowed to be creative and to let people vote with their feet to the most effective schools. (This ignores that many parents are not interested in the most effective schools but in the school closest to home or the school where their child is safest.) Because of Republican cuts to education budgets, it has become necessary to get better education for the same money or less.   This led to the development of charter schools.   He considers that to be part of a revolution in public education in the U.S. where choice will be the norm.

Morris said that Washington DC had the highest spending on education and the lowest graduation rate.   So increased spending does not increase test scores.

He mentioned that Mitt Romney studied education when he was governor of Massachusetts.  Romney found that the most important resource was the teacher.   Class size and equipment didn’t matter.   Unions prevent firing bad people and promoting good people.   He blamed the unions for the 1/3 of teachers who quit within their first 3 years and half who quit by the end of 5 years of teaching. (Rather than blaming how hard the work is and how low the compensation is.)

Morris recommended a free market approach towards schools. “Then we should close empty public schools.” He also said if St. Louis doesn’t move towards school choice, we would become like Detroit which lost about 240K or 25% of its population between 2000 and 2010. He also said they have classes of 60 in the Detroit Public Schools and teachers demanding bonuses. Their district imploded and suffered a state takeover.   He said the teachers’ union was a parasite insisting on bad quality education, driving the city down, leading it to a death spiral.

“We need to close more schools and fire teachers.   NCLB provides for this to happen but there is no will to carry out the provisions.   We need to understand there will never be the political will to close schools.   Fire stations and hospitals close.   So, we need to empty schools out and close the empty ones.”

“Public schools close not because of performance, which is why they should close, but because of enrollment. They should close if they are not performing but there is no will to throw teachers out of work because of failing test scores especially if they are protected by a union.”

Podgursky called for allowing children from the unaccredited St. Louis and Kansas City school districts to attend parochial schools at public expense.   He advised the need to repeal the Blaine Amendment to the Missouri Constitution to enable public money to fund tuition to parochial schools.   Catholic schools work and should be used. He lamented that they’re closing.

He saw a need for a market solution.   Because one size doesn’t fit all kids, you need different vendors.   That’s why markets work.   The public schools are standardized.   They take a one size fits all approach.   (He obviously hasn’t been in a public school lately.)

Morris, on the other hand, said, “Breaking the power of the teachers’ unions would solve the problem.”

Pogursky said personnel is where most of the money goes.   Teachers are paid according to scale and are not accountable for performance so it is not market based.   The average salary for public school teachers in the U.S. is $49K. If class sizes were larger they could raise salaries.   He claimed that private schools have larger class sizes and better teachers.

Loesch , a city resident, homeschools her children, but wants good alternatives for the SLPS which she termed, “Not great.”   H er friends send their children to private schools.   She doesn’t plan to homeschool forever and at some point she will need to look at public and private schools for her family. She claimed to spend 40-60 hours each week homeschooling.   She said we need more muscle from parents. She spoke of how highly motivated the St. Louis homeschooling community is. If the legislature is threatening to curtail their rights, they drop what they are doing and head off to Jefferson City within the hour.   Hundreds of them descend on Jefferson City at a time and stop the legislature from passing laws impacting them.

She insisted that the public schools are not underfunded.   We spend more on our schools than all countries except Switzerland.   She claimed teachers are unaffected by funding because of tenure.  She said that teacher pay has no effect on test scores.

She reported the average teacher salary is $53K.   That equals the median U.S. income.   She claimed that was $13K higher than private school pay .

She pointed to improved test scores in New Orleans where most public schools were replaced by charter schools after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  

Loesch said she didn’t like the common core standards being forced by the federal government through NCLB and RT3.   Having so much power over education emanating from Washington DC erodes parents’ rights. Parent apathy in reference to education is troubling.   We need more parents to be active and to fight.   More parents should be on school boards.   She lamented the board currently running the SLPS being an unelected entity.

Wahby stressed having quality options in neighborhoods, otherwise people will move out of the city. (She never mentions that middle class families returning to city schools would instantaneously create that quality.) She said it was a challenge to get word out about the choices (which already exist) in the SLPS.

She added that money doesn’t solve the problems.   It depends on the way the money is used.   You have to use the money you have creatively.   We need to appropriately fund for high quality schools including paying for teacher quality, are schools safe, and pleasant, with arts, music, sports and up to date technology.   Money is not the solution but   schools need appropriate resources.

She said it was a challenge to work with the teacher’s union, that what’s working should be replicated and what’s not should close.   In the charter schools, teachers are paid differently.   They work longer days and a longer school year.   There are not enough charter school seats.   There are waiting lists for high quality district schools, charters and the voluntary transfer program.

St. Louis lost 29k residents between 2000 and 2010, 22k were children.   She said the city can’t grow without good schools.   There has been a race to New Orleans of education entrepreneurs, young people and non-profits that have resulted in the opening of new schools so the mayor’s office has tried to encourage opening new schools here.   They have been responsible for 13 charter schools opening which she described as incubators that are magnets for talented young educators.  She said we want to be open to young people and to education businesses and education non-profits.  

She said it was in the best interest to support good schools in neighborhoods and school choice (which seems to be contradictory because school choice is causing neighborhood schools to close).

The audience was friendly to the speakers.   There were only a handful of supporters of the SLPS in the room. No one is organizing SLPS parents at present; not the administration, the SAB, the union or the parent assembly, and they aren’t organizing themselves.   Meanwhile, the other side, the side that wants to close their schools, is well funded and organized.

School choice advocates seem to want to circumvent the issue of some people being disinclined to send their children to school with children from different racial, ethnic or social groups and wanting public money to help them.   Many of these folks support minimizing taxation and government spending.   But they have found something they want government to fund.   They are using the issue of poor academic achievement among low income students who often belong to minority groups as a wedge to open the door for all students regardless of their advantages or disadvantages to be able attend the school of their choice.   But we all know that isn’t going to happen, especially as regards disadvantaged students of racial or ethnic minorities.   They will not be allowed to jeopardize the accreditation of affluent suburban school districts.   Plus, the legislature has never fully funded the education foundation formula and HJR43 this session proposes a constitutional amendment restricting revenue growth to the rate of inflation and population growth so there will never be enough funding. If more children become entitled to fewer education dollars, if more kids get a slice of the pie, the slices will have to get smaller. Everyone will starve. So, how to respond to this?

What supporters of public schools need are snappy comebacks to the rightwing litany of attack.   Watch readers are invited to share their own arguments in response. Send them toSLS_watch@yahoo.com .   We will publish what you send.   Let us know if you do or do not want attribution for your suggestions.  

Here are some suggestions from us.