By Chris Satullo
It’s one of American politics’ most tired gimmicks: A president pauses during a State of the Union speech to call upon guests planted in the House balcony to stand up so they can receive an ovation.
Presidents of both parties do it. The practice exploits ordinary people – their suffering, their good deeds, their identities – as pawns in a partisan argument. I’m so done with it.
President Trump’s use of a Philadelphia girl and her mom during last week’s SOTU took the phoniness and falsehood to DefCon 1. We can only pray the fiasco hastens the end of this tiresome trope.
The girl’s name is Janiyah Davis. She’s a fourth-grader at MaST II, a new spinoff of the Math, Science and Technology Charter School, which is a top-three charter school in Philadelphia. What’s more, Niche.com ranks MaST in the top 16 percent of all charters in the nation and of all high schools in Pennsylvania.
But you’d never know that from Trump’s speech. He spun a tale of Janiyah not being able to attend a Christian school in the city anymore due to cost and being “forced” to attend a “government school,” his voice dripping with disdain as he uttered the phrase. (See the recent fine oped by my good friend Jon Zimmerman deconstructing the phrase “government school.”)
Trump seemed unaware that Janiyah’s mom, Stephanie, was delighted that her daughter had won one of the highly coveted spots at MAST II in a lottery among 6,500 applicants.
He also announced that his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was offering to pay, out of her Amway-and-auto-parts-generated fortune, the tuition for the Christian school that the girl, by her mother’s choice, no longer attended.
This was all in service of bashing Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, for supposedly nixing a plan to offer state tax credits to people who donate money to support scholarships to private and religious schools – which is interesting, because Pennsylvania has had this program for years, and Wolf just approved a $15-million boost in state support. (His sin: He didn’t support a GOP plan that would have added $100 million to the program, likely at the cost of regular aid to public schools.)
On one level, why be surprised Trump got his facts wrong and doubled-down on a misleading tale? Just another day at the office for him.
(But could we pause for a sec to wonder at the rank incompetence of the staff that proposed Janiyah as the poster child for these tax credits? It actually wouldn’t have been hard to find some child who attends a lousy urban school somewhere whose parents did wish they could afford an alternative. After all, increasing the supply of underfunded urban public schools that underserve children has been core to the Republican program for decades.)
But what’s most fascinating here is how this mess-up uncovers the true agenda of conservative propaganda about “parental choice.”
Janiyah’s mom actually enjoyed a choice she exercised to good impact. She moved her child to an excellent, free, publicly funded charter school, which operates with some well-deserved independence within the larger Philly school system.
Yet somehow DeVos, that supposed apostle of parental choice, didn’t view the little girl finding a great home at a charter school as a success story. Why not, given how most advocates of choice campaign for more charters?
Well, charters still operate on public (read: tax) money in connection with a public system. So, to DeVos, they apparently must be sneered at as “a government school.”
Philly has been experimenting aggressively for nearly two decades now with a variety of approaches to revamping failing schools and creating wider educational choice for parents. (Taken as a group, Philly charters have the second-largest enrollment in Pennsylvania.) The original shove in this direction came from Republican governor Tom Ridge, but it has endured and matured under several Democratic governors and three Democratic mayors.
I covered all this for more than a decade as a columnist and the editor of an education reporting team. Some blunders have been committed under this reform banner, but some real successes have flowered, too. The MaST cluster of schools is one of them.
My stance has always been that it was wrong to ask any child and any parent to wait patiently while urban school systems moved in their usual, stubbornly slow way to fix their worst schools. No, I’ve contended, many eggs must be broken and much money spent to create better public options, now. For this kid, right here, right now, entering first grade today.
Look, I have definitely seen, in Philly and elsewhere, how teachers – not as individuals, but in their organized union voice – can be an impediment to the needed urgency.
In fact, time was when I would defend the push for school choice to liberal friends who decried it as a heinous conservative plot to destroy public education. I would argue that school choice, properly conceived and funded, could serve as an urgent rescue plan for the most underserved children and families. (By the way, my belief that a publicly supported choice system can work is not purely theoretical. We actually do have one in this nation, where government support flows steadily to a tripartite system of public, private and religious institutions. It’s called higher education.)
But, to my sadness, over time I came to suspect what the Trump-DeVos follies last week proved beyond a doubt: The Republican Party no longer has any intent of deploying choice as a means to improve public education (if it ever did).
The party, in its Trump-DeVos iteration, simply wants to end public education, for three interwoven reasons:
1. Education is not a mere individual consumer good. It is a public good that should and must be supported through public funds. It is in fact one of the main reasons we have government. But modern conservatives hate on principle the idea of public goods being delivered effectively by government, using tax dollars. On principle and out of political pragmatism: A large portion of their power is funded by the donations of affluent people who see buying lawmakers as a cost-effective way to keep their taxes low.
Here’s a key tell: School choice might have worked in some places if it had been accompanied by infusions of funds to support experimentation, evaluation and replication of new school models and programs. But, in the hands of the Republicans who pushed school choice plans through state legislatures, it was driven by the fantasy that choice would end up costing less, not more.
It was also accompanied by a stunning lack of interest in whether the new moves choice advocates were pushing – whether vouchers, charters or cyber-charters (i.e. subsidized home-schooling) – were actually producing better results than the status quo. In fact, advocates took an aggressive stance against any real, data-driven evaluation; the mere fact that vouchers, charters, tax credits existed was taken as proof of success.
2. Evangelical conservatives have long believed – not without evidence – that public school instruction is controlled by people who don’t share their value system or view of the world. They did not like the way public schools taught their children to question things their parents did not want questioned. To a point, I understood that view, without sharing it. (My two kids went public schools all the way.)
But as America’s right has moved steadily into a bubbled consensus that is increasingly counterfactual, anti-intellectual and anti-scientific, this tension has grown intolerable. The justification for using public dollars to subsidize private schools shrinks when those schools teach children things that are demonstrably untrue.
Think of Janiyah. She now attends one of her state’s best science schools. Do we want to see public tax credits deployed to send children like her to schools that might scoff at evolution and climate science, might teach her the world literally came to be in seven days and dinosaurs shared the earth with our ancestors?
3. The beginning of the end of conservative patience with public education came with the rise of unions and collective bargaining laws in the sector in 1970s, a development I covered first-hand as a young journalist. Ending the former fiscal exploitation of teachers made public schools hungrier for tax dollars (see point 1). It also molded teachers’ unions into a powerful source of campaign cash and political ground troops (as well as anti-reform inertia). As those unions inevitably gravitated to the one party willing to spend tax dollars on public goods (i.e. Democrats), Republicans came to view them as major political foes. Whatever other language conservative advocates draped over the battle for school choice – sometimes somewhat sincerely – it was always in part about curbing the clout of teachers’ unions.
So we have ended up where we did in the Capitol last week, with a recklessly inaccurate POTUS carrying out a stunt dreamed up by his breathtakingly incompetent education secretary to dismiss the very idea of K-12 education being a proper function of government.
All while blasting an urban school system that has – despite missteps, chronic low funding, union resistance and charter scandals bred by a Republican allergy to regulation – at least honestly tried to create decent options for public school parents who can’t just buy their way into private school.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.