The Phantom Hope of School Choice: Reynolds-Anthony Harris and the Common Failure of Adults to Be Adults

Reynolds Anthony Harris stepped forward today in his opinion piece for the Star Tribune (Counterpoint: “Private scholarships are a lifeline for our kids drowning in mediocrity,” April 21, 2017) as yet another adult who refuses to be an adult in urging solutions for K-12 education. 

The common feature of all arguments for innovation, choice, and opportunities beyond public school that have lately appeared in the Commentary pages of the Star Tribune is avoidance of the hard work and rigorous thinking that will be needed to make the requisite changes for the provision of an excellent education to all of our precious young people, of all demographic descriptors.

Harris is a founder of the Minnesota Harvest Initiative, which in his article he conveys is “educating parents about ways we can improve access to good schools.”   He notes that one means of assuring such access is through “Opportunity Scholarships,” found in legislation included in tax bills passed in the Minnesota House and Senate but pending approval by the Minnesota Department of Revenue. 

Harris explains that under the legislation, low- and middle-income children would have access to scholarships, funded through tax-advantaged private contributions made to nonprofit scholarship granting organizations with 501(c)3 status, to attend a school of their choice.  He argues that these privately funded scholarships would help remove financial barriers for students aspiring to attend private schools.  His own view, expressed as a counterpoint to a prior opinion piece (“Taxpayers must not pay for religious education,” Star Tribune , April 4, 2017), is that the proposal would not decrease public schools funding, currently almost $18 billion, rendered to the K-12 public schools of Minnesota.

As in the case of the accolytes of Ted Kolderie (witness Jay Haugen, Jeff Ronneberg, Lisa Snyder, Les Fujitake, and Lars Esdal, “Education  in Minnesota Badly Needs Innovation,” Star Tribune, January 23, 2017), Harris refuses to fulfill the obligation that adults have to articulate the knowledge, wisdom, and ethics of the human inheritance to young people who long for adult guidance.  Neither choice nor innovation offer sure routes to better quality education.

 

Excellent education should first of all be defined.  Neither Harris nor the disciples of Ted Kolderie specify the components of the excellence that they seek in education.  

 

Be reminded, then that

 

an excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts in logical grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors,

 

and that

 

an excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

From Harris and the Kolderie adherents we get only a quest for better schools and innovative solutions, not any specificity as to what constitutes a good school or what innovation will actually provide an excellent education to all of our young people.

 

Harris and the devotees of the Kolderie fail to be adults. 

 

They recoil from the hard work necessary to overhaul our locally centralized K-12 school districts for the impartation of common skill and knowledge sets to all of our treasured young people.  They fail to recognize the role that true adults have always assumed, around village campfires and in community councils, to transmit to the young generations the information, values, and wisdom considered collectively important by the elders.

 

Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, extending village collectivity to a great new nation, knew that genuine democracy depends on shared skill and knowledge sets, that the exercise of individual options and the foundation for innovation begins with the ability to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” as in the humble testimony of Isaac Newton, with Einstein one of the two greatest scientists to grace humanity.

 

Institutions of public education will be the conduit for the knowledge, wisdom, and values of the national village to the Newtons and Einsteins of our future.

 

Adults must be adults.

 

And when more adults become adults our children will receive the education for which they have been waiting a very long time, and we in the United States will become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.