Jack Schneider and Julian Vasquez-Heilig:Jack Schneider, an education historian and professor at Holy Cross, is correct that education and education reform are incredibly difficult policy arenas – perhaps even harder than rocket science, as he argues. This complexity is why some education reformers are wrong to think they can improve education by simply by passing another top-down mandate on public schools or by changing a cog in the proverbial ed-machine.
Schneider
But Schneider descends into his own simplistic (and unrealistic) explanation of ed reform, including rhetorical flourishes about baking brownies and launching rockets.
Referencing Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s foray into charter schools, Schneider says imagine “philanthropists deciding to apply lessons from their successes in domains like DVD rentals to ‘disrupt’ the NASA ‘monopoly.’” No billionaire would dare leave their area of expertise (like DVD rentals) to disrupt something as complicated as NASA, so why do that to education, Schneider appears to argue.
Yet private corporations like Virgin Galactic (founded by a guy with a record label), Blue Origin (founded by an online retailer) and Space X (founded by a cyber-cashier) are “disrupting” space exploration at this very moment.
Not surprisingly then, Schneider makes a fairly poor defense of school choice when he plays “Devil’s advocate” on his blog, “Beyond the Rhetoric,” as part of a discussion about vouchers and segregation with Julian Vasquez-Heilig, the director of the Doctorate in Educational Leadership at Sacramento State.
Vasquez-Heilig
Schneider offered no resistance to Heilig’s slippery slope argument that vouchers will lead to socio-economic segregation. (Isn’t the current school zone system already segregated that way?) He fails to correct Heilig’s misstatement that “current case law suggests that private schools are able to discriminate based on race.” (They cannot; see Runyon v. McCrary). Worse still, both agree vouchers have a “sordid” racial history, without any recognition of the very real racist history of public education in America.
