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I attended the recent debate between the two main candidates for Dallas ISD District 2 at Mata

Montessori school.

On one side of the stage, Lori Kirkpatrick, a physician assistant at Parkland Hospital; on the other,
businessman and incumbent Dustin Marshall.

The debate was quite brief but still revealed a striking, if by now familiar, distinction between two
visions for public education.

Kirkpatrick spoke of the "gift" of public education to society, conveyed an empathy for schoolteachers
working under hostile conditions, and underlined the long run cost to society of not providing teachers
and students with the necessary resources and support.

In contrast, Marshall touted his MBA credentials, expressed concern over an apparent mismatch
between teacher evaluations and student test scores, and focused on the need to craft incentives to
drive below average teachers out of the profession and expose "failing" schools.

According to this logic, parents would then have the knowledge required to choose between public
schools -- as if the choice of where to locate one's family is comparable to choosing between buying an
apple and an orange at the grocery store.

This hard-nosed business approach to overseeing schools actually has a long history; indeed a failed
history. Yet it's an irony that no matter the facts and evidence, this same approach is pursued
relentlessly by those very people who portray themselves as objective and rational.

Why is it that this "business-driven" approach to public education has such a failed history?

One reason is that treating teachers as self-serving individuals driven only by monetary incentives to
achieve high class test scores can lead them to respond in kind by gaming the system to save their jobs.
Notorious and extreme examples of this have been documented in places like Baltimore, Washington,
and Atlanta.

But the more general answer to this question was given by the renowned scholar, James Q. Wilson.
Public schools are by their nature "coping" organizations in contrast to "production" or "procedural"
organizations. This means that their operations and outputs are not easy to observe or measure. This is
an intrinsic characteristic of public schools. To think of a public school as some kind of black box with
well-defined measurable inputs and outputs is a pretense; indeed a dangerous and dehumanizing
pretense given all the individual futures in jeopardy of being tagged as failures at such an early stage in
life.

There is a further irony here. All this emphasis on test scores, rote learning, and impersonal teaching, is
only deemed necessary for students in public schools. For students in private schools it's often just the
opposite: intra mural sports, Shakespeare, and joyful inquiry, often encouraged and taught by
outstanding former public school teachers who reluctantly fled the system to escape the mindless
obsession with constant assessment, monitoring and micro management.

Its therefore not surprising that the issue of public v. private schools has come up in the race between
Kirkpatrick and Marshall; in particular, concerning why the incumbent, Marshall, chooses to send his
own children to a private school while promoting himself as the best qualified person to be public school
trustee for Dallas ISD district 2.

Marshall took umbrage at the suggestion his decision had any kind of broader significance, explaining
that he sent his children to the same private school that he attended and of which he had such fond
memories, claiming that one of his motivations in running is just to help others experience the same
positive start that he had at private school.

Of course, from the perspective of a private citizen, where one chooses to send one's children is no-one
else's business, and there are plenty of circumstantial reasons one can think of as to why a parent may
choose not to send their child to the local public school.

But one cannot help be struck by the audacity of someone who thinks that, armed with an MBA and a
sense of nostalgia for his own private school experience, he is somehow particularly well qualified to be
a public school trustee.

First, what does it mean as a matter of public policy to treat some private school experience as a kind of
ideal to which public schools should aspire? Again we're comparing apples and oranges. Public schools --
which will be the winning candidate's sole responsibility -- differ in fundamental ways from private
schools.

Unlike private schools, public schools are subject to elected school boards, class size requirements,
building regulations, as well as all kinds of state regulations, such as being required to cater to students
with special needs. Teachers in public schools must have state certification and public schools must
comply with a state-approved curriculum.

Private schools don't have to do any of this. Further, private schools are not subject to the U.S.
Constitution, including the bill of rights. Public schools, in contrast, have no discretion in such weighty
matters.

So while one should not begrudge Dustin Marshall his fond memories of Greenhill School, it does not
necessarily seem the appropriate kind of experience one should be looking for in a public school trustee.

Interestingly, in his debate with Kirkpatrick, Marshall sought to allay any fear that he was some kind of
educational extremist, stating that he disapproved of the recent appointment of Betsy DeVoss as United
States Secretary of Education.

But why is it so many people agree that DeVoss is objectionable and unqualified? The question was
recently put in an interview to Diane Ravitch, former Undersecretary of Education to George H.W. Bush,
and arguably the leading national thinker on public education.

Ravitch responded (about DeVoss): "Well, she does not understand anything about education except for
escaping from public schools. She's never taught. She's never supervised. She's never attended public
schools. Her children did not attend public schools. She thinks that public schools everywhere are just
awful ... She's a billionaire and she has spent many millions of dollars advocating for vouchers and choice
and charters and home schooling and cyber charters for every other alternative but not for public
education."
If these kinds of criticisms of DeVoss are appropriate, are they not also pertinent to others, such as
Dustin Marshall, whose experience as a student and parent is limited to that of private schools?

Of course, unlike DeVoss, Marshall does not explicitly advocate for vouchers and charter schools. Indeed
it would be foolhardy to do so -- the public is, and has been for a long time, strongly against these
ideologically-driven programs. Further the persistent failure of charter schools to demonstrate any kind
of superior performance ought to be an embarrassment to the advocates of "school choice."

It is for this reason that Marshall's opponent, Lori Kirkpatrick, is undoubtedly correct in emphasizing that
one needs to look beyond words to specific actions in assessing where one comes down on this highly
charged political issue. In this regard, Marshall's recurring advocacy of competition as the panacea to
the problems of public schools -- student against student, teacher against teacher, school against school
-- is telling. Rewards the winners and drop the losers -- precisely the kind of thinking that led to the
original idea of vouchers.

How on earth did this Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest paradigm come to be seen as appropriate for
public education? And how is the system supposed to replace all these unwanted and unvalued teachers
that Marshall is so keen to drive out the system? What better and more experienced people are going to
replace all these outgoing teachers as working conditions become increasingly hostile?

But perhaps that is not something we should be concerned with. Diane Ravitch points out that many of
the "school choice" advocates seem to think that computers can do much of the work formerly done by
"inefficient" teachers. Again though, the plan is selective. As Ravitch puts it: "the poor will get
computers, the rich will get computers and teachers."

The truth is that public education has always served two alternative visions. One sees it as essentially
about knowledge and enrichment, as education for life as a citizen through the cultivation of
independent critical minds, and therefore crucial to a functioning democracy.

But there has always been an alternative vision, one that sees public education as serving quite different
goals: promotion of obedience to authority, political passivity, and conformity; the diagnosis of what
someone's place in society should be at an early age, the tagging of the unfit, and the nurturing of a
small elite that will get to oversee the ignorant masses.

The two visions are irreconcilable. Take your pick.

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