Anti-charter school activists could learn from Orwell
Kathleen O’Toole
The anti-charter school activist group Network for Public Education recently released a report on the classical charter school movement. Its findings have all the simplicity ridiculed in Orwell’s Animal Farm: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” In the case of the NPE report, this would be: “Progressive education good, anything else bad.”
In fact, the report is a polemic masquerading as information. It is stuffed with dubious citations and smears organizations — including my own, Hillsdale College — for supposedly advancing politically biased K-12 education. Given the NPE has received funding from the Tides Foundation and the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation (among others), it is no surprise that the NPE projects its vice onto other organizations.
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The report exemplifies another famous passage from Orwell’s blistering satire as well: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” NPE claims to embrace parent involvement in education and a “rich curriculum for all children,” as does the classical charter movement. But its breathless condemnation of anything non-progressive makes clear that some “animals” are far, far less equal than others. Its denunciation of Hillsdale-affiliated schools takes an even paranoid turn. These schools, it says, place “right-wing clues on their website to attract families with Christian nationalist beliefs.” What clues? “… red, white, and blue school colors, patriotic logos, pictures of the founding fathers, using terms such as virtue, patriotism …” Horrific.
In fact, the scare term “Christian nationalist” is the key element of the NPE report, despite the term’s lack of definition within. Describing such people as “resentful of a world that won’t stop changing” is no definition, although it speaks volumes about the attitudes and intentions of the report’s authors.
The report does not stop at insult, however, but goes on to accuse Hillsdale College and its affiliate schools of breaking the law. Charter schools are public schools, and as such do not provide religious instruction. The report insinuates falsely and irresponsibly that these schools effectively do just that. Most of our work in K-12 is available for public scrutiny. Our curricular materials are available online, for anyone to inspect. Any sensible and honest reader can see that they do not entail religious instruction.
Any sensible reader can also see that the report’s claims overall are baseless and entirely political in motivation. In support of their claims, the authors seem to rely almost exclusively on headlines from sloppy news articles. Without leaving the comfort of their desk chairs or even picking up the phone, the authors cite opinion pieces by people who have never met with Hillsdale College, comments by public officials who have never visited a Hillsdale-affiliated school, cherry-picked remarks by supporters of the college when speaking in different contexts, and the like. As a model of research, the report does not even rise to undergraduate-level expectations.
This is all a missed opportunity, to say the least, as the classical charter movement has made a pivotal difference in American education. When progressive fads such as whole language and social-emotional learning overtook many schoolrooms, classical education persevered within private and charter schools and did much to redeem learning with tried-and-true curricula and teaching. The success of classical education’s emphasis on explicit phonics, content-rich curricula, and teacher-led classrooms speaks for itself. Even in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the schools in Hillsdale’s network of classical charters outperformed their conventional public school peers.
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The day before NEP published its report, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine — no friend to conservatives — admitted that a recent, thorough study of charter schools “finds, unambiguously, that students on average gain more learning in charter schools than in traditional public schools.” Clearly, Chait’s opinion is built upon facts, while the NEP’s “facts” are built around its opinions.
It is no disrespect to Orwell to wish reporting on education would resemble his satire less, and reality more.
Kathleen O’Toole, Ph.D., is assistant provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College.