The Alberta Teachers’ Association

David Berliner has long been seen as one of the top educational researchers in the United States as well as one of its foremost defenders of public education.

His most recent book is 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools. Co-authored with Gene V. Glass and students, the book is a comprehensive and provocative look at modern education reform, explaining how the perceived failure of the public education system is actually a myth that has been created and perpetuated by political and economic interests that stand to gain from the system’s destruction.

In a review published in the ATA Magazine in 2015, former ATA president Larry Booi stated that the book has considerable relevance to Alberta.

“There is an enormous (and depressing) resonance in the authors’ observations about most of the factors undermining public education in the United States when compared to Alberta,” Booi wrote. “The circumstances and threats may be more developed and pernicious in the United States, but they tend to be differences in degree rather than in kind.”

In keeping with this issue’s theme, the ATA Magazine recruited Berliner to comment on the current state of public education.

In your book, you speak to private schools “defeating the goals of a democratic society.” How do you see that playing out today?

The more you segregate society, by having the wealthy and the poor rarely meet—through both housing policies and through private schools that pick their students—the less likely you can have a thriving democracy. A thriving democracy means that advantages (good jobs, good housing, good schools, violence-free communities, good medical care) are open to all. It should be talent developed in our public schools, not wealth, that brings about adult achievements. To not nurture talent among the lower classes is antidemocratic, and so terribly wasteful of the untapped potential in so many societies.

In the book you state that charter schools are basically private schools. Are there any circumstances that lend themselves to charter schools being publicly funded?

I am not anticharter. If a group of educators in a public school district think they can do a better job of educating in their community, let them try! Industry has its skunk works: employees working on the side, on projects they think will pay off for the company, but not mainstream for the company. Apple and Google are both famous for that.

A charter is a skunk work. It should be governed by the local school board that charters it. Thus, it stays inside the democratic system of governance we have worked so hard to establish and preserve. A charter should never be profit making—schooling is a public good not a private one. What we want is for creative educational alternatives to traditional schools to be tried out. We seek schools that educate all our children, not exclusionary schools that bar kids because they are poor, English language learners, low performers, not Christian (as in North Carolina) and so forth. In this way charters can become the incubators of creative educational responses to our rapidly changing modern society.

Some public districts in Alberta have adopted a choice model with open boundaries and alternative programs based on language, religion, method of instruction, or specialized athletic programs like hockey or baseball academies. What are your thoughts on this type of model within a publicly funded system with democratically elected trustees?

See my response to question three—I am mostly positive about this, except for support of religious schools—but the U.S. and Canada differ on this, given our different roots.

My hesitation, of course, is the danger of overspecialization for kids too young to know enough to be boxed in, even if they say they want that. The young hockey fanatic or budding physicist may not make the NHL, or could end up deciding to become a stand-up comedian—and then what? Have they lost anything by specializing so young? I come down on the side of building generalists while kids are young and specializing when a kid is older.

It’s been said that the choice model of education can eventually lead to “educational apartheid.” Do you agree or disagree and why?

It does lead to apartheid. The U.S. has housing policies that give us an apartheid-lite system. Not the apartheid of South Africa, but an apartheid system based on the affordability of housing. Only in some rural towns are income groups mixed in schools. And that is because they don’t have so many neighbourhood schools. The neighbourhood school in the U.S. is killing us because our urban neighbourhoods are segregated by income and also by race and ethnicity.

The problem is that cohorts—the kids you go to school with—matter a lot. A general rule of thumb, not solidly backed by research but sensible nonetheless, is that schools where the poverty rates go above 40 per cent have a lot more difficulty getting high achievement than schools where poverty rates are under 40 per cent.

Choice schools that discriminate on [the basis of] income, or race or neighbourhood are likely to have more homogenous cohorts, and that can make a big difference in the lives of kids. It’s the difference between a school having a college-going culture or a jock culture, or a culture based on respect for teachers or an oppositional culture, a culture with a lot, or with very few absences.

Schools that pick the “best” kids/the easiest-to-teach kids, as charters in the U.S. do, leave the public schools with greater numbers of the more difficult-to-teach kids. That leads to school norms that may be more difficult to overcome. Cohorts matter!

Given that the “choice model” makes so much sense to some people at a superficial level, in spite of the research, how should advocates of public education respond?

Fight for choice only within districts—controlled by elected school boards, so democratic standards apply, and forbid profit making. Schooling should be a public enterprise to enhance the public good—no different than the reasons we publicly fund police and firefighters, both of which are under public scrutiny and control.

What specific actions can individual teachers take to stand up for public education?

Organize, vote, fight, walk out, and do it not for wages or for benefits—do it to save your democracy! Democracies are fragile. In mere months precious parts of democracies can be lost—think of Germany in the 20s and 30s. Think of Hungary and the U.S. now. What you want to do is preserve all the things that promote democracies and not those that lead to oligarchies, the real danger facing us in my country, and yours.