School Wars by Melissa Benn is truly a remarkable book.
Although Benn is writing about the British school system, her audience is clearly international. So the reader quickly learns that British public schools are really private schools, and Benn uses the term private school as much as possible. Academies are like American charter schools. Free schools resemble our vouchers.
Benn laments the growing privatization of British schools as large for-profit corporations begin to find their way into the British educational system. Some are even international with Edison Learning now on both sides of the big pond.
And Benn does not confine herself to Britain as she goes after KIPP and the Harlem’s Children Zone in the States. Who knew that HCZ’s Geoffrey Canada is paid $400,000 per year?
But Benn’s issue with privatization is not simply the question of public tax money being siphoned off into corporate profits rather than going to the education of children. Benn’s real issue is how schools sort children through entrance requirements. This issue is especially sensitive in Britain with a long practice of testing children at age eleven. At such a ridiculously young age, British children are steered to either universities or trade schools based upon their test scores.
“One of the most destructive of mainstream educational ideas is that of fixed abilities and pathways,” writes Benn.
So when she writes about both KIPP and Harlem’s Children’s Zone, she lets her readers know that neither program is shy about screening kids or kicking them out if they don’t measure up. Canada expunged an entire class of middle-school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees.
She tells the reader, in the very first sentence, that she sent her own children to a local common school that had no entrance requirements. She stanchly defends “all-in” schools which are willing to take all children without sorting through to get the most talented or committed students.
“Politicians like to pretend that parents choose schools; most education experts would agree that, on the whole, schools choose pupils,” declares Benn.
But she is just as hard on state schools which have entrance requirements. In Britain such schools have the title “grammar” schools, and they sort students with a vengeance.
In American, and here in Milwaukee, liberals defend public education but often look the other way when our public schools establish entrance requirements. They may even send their children to such schools like the six Milwaukee public high schools that have entrance requirements. Benn will have none of that.
Nor does Benn think much of establishing entrance requirement in urban settings, like Milwaukee, as a mechanism to advance poor, minority children. Benn does not want to save a few; she wants to save everyone, and believes that even British conservatives are beginning to see the light.
House of Commons’ David Wiletts, a leader of the conservative Tory party, questioned the value of sorting children when he stated in 2007, “…We must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright poor kids.”
Benn wants “all-in” schools that will take everyone; no more sorting.
(An excellent analysis of Benn’s book can be found at The Nation, “Side by Side: On the battle for Britain’s education,” November 1, 2011.)
