Arguments Against Charter School

Neo-liberalism is essentially an ideology based upon the privatization of public goods and services, with a strong focus on austerity and laissez-faire economics. This new ideology is apparently seems spreading towards education within the United States. The fundamental problem displayed in the last four weeks worth of articles, documents and excerpts is that the arguments stated against this neo-liberalization don’t actually make any sense logically, misunderstand neo-liberalism or are just straight-up strawmen. What the articles themselves seemingly try to argue is: that the trend of increasing neo-liberalizing of education is not working or is outright damaging. However, as the arguments are broken down, these arguments fall apart completely.
One must first consider the context of the situation, in this case the sample size and the scope of what we are dealing with, before any actual arguments can be made. For example, in the fall of 2016, there was a 10:1 discrepancy between number of students going to public schools compared to private schools. This statistic points to a massive difference between how many students actually end up in private education and public education. Also, the trend that was inferred from some articles, specifically: “privatization” and neoliberalism being on the rise, is also inaccurate, and the statistics show the exact opposite, where the number of private schools has gone down, while the number of public schools has remained the same. Firstly, the big argument used against neo-liberalism is the charter school initiative, and its classification as neo-liberal.
The main issue with using this as an argument is, if you break down what a charter school is: a publicly funded, privately run school, is it doesn’t actually fit the description of what a neo-liberal program would be, specifically, the publicly funded part. Charter schools, as far as their present status is concerned, are an abomination that takes two separate ideologies and mixes them to form some sort of weird strawman to attack the new trend of neo-liberalization. Charter schools should not be considered neo-liberal the same way private schools are as a result of their inherent nature, and if someone were to seriously argue against neo-liberalization, they should argue against “absolute” private schools, as that has all the accoutrements of being neoliberal. Instead charter schools were chosen as a strawman to attack, when charter schools should not even be considered neo-liberal at
all. Another confusing major argument discussed repeatedly within these articles was the issue of standardized testing, that when broken down, once again shows a misunderstanding of what neoliberalism is. Apparently, authors seemed to tie together standardized testing scores and their effects on teacher/school evaluation with neo-liberalism. Their argument stressed their ineffectiveness as a grading metric which is a largely accurate and acceptable position to take, however why standardized test scores are tied with neo-liberalism is not understood. Again, the fundamental principle of neo-liberalism is no direct government intervention, and generally the biggest standardized tests tend to be massive government sponsored ones like ISAT, Reach, SAT and ACT. In a real neo-liberal school system schools would not have to rely on any sort of government-sponsored test for pupil, school or teacher grading, they could establish their own criteria. The last major argument that seemed apparent was the issue of how these new neo-liberal schools are structured in terms of curriculum, in this case towards the market demands of society and STEM and away from critical thinking and more humanistic forms of education. In discussing this we must again return to the definition of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism would be giving choice to schools to function as they want, so if the current trend towards schooling is STEM, then some amount of schools can choose to operate under that philosophy, that does not mean all must though. Some schools can instead focus more on the arts, humanities, philosophical or theological theories, etc. This is different than how a public school district operates, which in general relies on agreement from multiple parties: the parents, teachers, high level bureaucrats and certain state or federal governments. A school under the neoliberal system can instead choose its curriculum on its own without needing multiple parties with high numbers of people to agree on things. This choice given by the private sector is actually a solution to the issue of curriculum described by many opponents, not a problem.
In summation, the current Educational situation is not yet there to announce any sort of failure of neoliberal education, especially when it is such a small aspect of the current education landscape and it is in the stages of infancy.
The current arguments against it seem to be muddied and rely on weak evidence like charter schools or misunderstanding of what a neo-liberal educational system would look like. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the arguments presented but as far as I can tell, they are incredibly weak or are strawmen. A neo-liberal education would give more options for parents and students to pick and choose what they are looking for in a
school.