The School Board Election Quandary - Part 1

If you don't have time to investigate those pesky school board elections, you aren't alone.  I think too many of us (myself included) have gone into the voting booth embarrassed that we don't have a clue who the candidates are or what they stand for.  We choose our candidates as though we are playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

And we pretty much end up voting for candidates whose names are most familiar, for some reason we can't quite grasp.  The reason ends up being the person with the most signs, or the biggest signs, or the nicest slogan, or the nicest name.  We maybe vote for the incumbent, just because their name is most familiar.

Really, there just aren't enough hours in the day.  And yet, these races are the ones that turn out to be most critical in our day-to-day lives.  They affect not just what is taught in our schools, but the qualifications of who does the teaching, the size of the classes, and the condition of the buildings our kids are taught in.

To make matters worse on election day, we have a system that flummoxed me for years, wherein we all vote for candidates from each district regardless of where we live, and sometimes we vote for one candidate in a district, and other times we vote for more than one.  I would not be surprised if some of us just skip over districts we don't reside in because we don't think we really are supposed to be voting for those candidates.  It is just befuddling.

So for the past few years, I spend most of my time following other races, and then ask knowledgeable friends what they think of the school board candidates.  And then, before I write here about it, I look up the candidates for myself.  But the issues behind the candidates turn out to be critical, and yet not all that complicated.  The face of the candidate, however, can be entirely different than what that candidate really stands for.  And so, that is where we need to begin.

The big battles, no surprise, have to do with magnets/charter schools and eventually, the elephant in the room, segregation.  There are zillions of studies of varying quality, and even more zillions of opinions, on the efficacy of magnets and charter schools.  And the magic word is "choice."

Here is my two cents.

The best schools have a mix:  they teach college and career track students equally well.  They provide quality services for special needs students of all types, from academically accelerated (I hate the word "gifted") to those who need extra time and help.  They have teachers who have a range of skills and class sizes that will allow those teachers to be most effective.  They challenge kids at all levels, and in all kinds of pursuits.

Because this is a huge task, magnet schools seemed to fill some needs some of the time very well.  From there, it became easier -- in the short run -- to create a magnet school for a special population rather than incorporate different populations into the community's schools.  That means traveling to the school, often many miles away.  It means having separate buildings where those special kids are segregated.  It means far too many kids aren't getting a broad enough education to be able to evolve as they grow up or as society changes.  And it means that kids are coming into contact only with others that share whatever particular learning trait we've decided to feature in that particular school.

Charter schools have different enticements.  They happen when a community is unhappy with their schools, and decide they want to take matters into their own hands.  They apply and get approval from state and/or county, and then elect their own board, which then makes its own rules and does its own hiring.  So, whatever they tell you, a charter school is only as good as the people that are running it.  The public relations promotion of charter schools has been intense, from advertising to movies.  They, of course, focus on the brilliant successes of the charter schools they highlight.  More objective studies report that the success of charter schools is no greater than that of public schools.  They both depend on the expertise and, yes, dollars put into them.

The problem with both magnets and charter schools is that they take tax dollars that should be spread equitably across the county, further exhausting public school resources.  To be honest, public school funding is a bang-for-your-buck situation.  If everyone pays taxes based on what they can afford, and then it is spent equitably across the area, we are more likely to see better schools across the entire area.  The way we are doing it now, we are putting more money into some specially designated schools, taking it away from public schools, draining them of resources and making them worse.  Which those who support charters and magnets THEN use to further promote the need for charters and magnets, further draining public school resources....  And so it goes.

There is a lot of money going into campaigns that are pushing for school "choice," the advantages of magnets and charters being the major talking point.  What it amounts to is that a lot of money will be going from our public schools into private schools, or schools that operate independently of public schools and the school board.  Follow the money.

And the candidates who promote "choice" are trained well in using the most enticing words and phrases.  But the bottom line is that some -- too many -- of our kids will be left out in the cold after the tax dollars are doled out to the special schools.  This is the downward spiral we in Charleston and South Carolina have been experiencing for far too many years, and too many generations of our children.  It is time to get back to the goal of real public education with good, well-paid teachers and school programs and campuses that we can be proud of.

I will be talking more about the specific candidates, the groups that are backing them, and that bizarre voting process next.