I have long known of the injustice of our modern public education system. Living with educators and with plans to join the supporting cast of the learning process I now must now reflect on that issue with more clarity and depth. It is to my advantage that this argument follows the same logic as my business arguments. Corporate models do not create businesses that invigorate communities in fact they do the opposite; so why are they being introduced to our classrooms.
Since its initial implementation No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been a bane to true education. Standardize tests, like the ones on which NCLB relies, are great for evaluating a system’s ability to process and regurgitate information. This treats a child as a system and reduces educators to data entry specialists. The primary purpose of education is not to provide a child with information but to give them the tools to process information. In short school is not supposed to tell you what to think but instead how to think. This return to memorization of information for the purpose of test taking is not progress.
Here in the hinterlands I have also come to be familiar with the phrase "Baldridge System". This is on the surface a simple system of top down and bottom up evaluation. It works great in the corporate world so of course it must work everywhere. Now teachers who are already reduced to trying to make children into perfect testable products must also evaluate the same administrators who will evaluate them and teach the kids how to fill out evaluation forms on them and contend with surprise inspections from some Baldridge review committee. The school commissioner here loves Baldridge so speaking against the Baldridge System is not a wise career move.
The vilest roadblock to a child’s education is in essence the oldest of course: money. The frontlines of the class war are the class rooms and the school board budget meetings across this country. Moving to the country has become like focusing a microscope on the troubles of this nation so that I can see them one at a time instead of the mad jumble I got in Portland. A recent bond measure here has increased the taxes people pay towards education all over the district but most of the money is going to build and improve schools where the wealthy families live. It is near criminal that the students who already have the advantage of supportive parents who can be at home and have the wisdom to help their children with their work and can provide their children with the resources to help them with their education outside of school also have the best equipped and staffed schools in which to learn. The parts of the community where the parents have to work three or four jobs, where the parents have little if any education to speak of, where the parents are more likely to be under the influence or threat of crime and drugs, are the ones who are expected to get along with the least funding. The only thing worse then using money to fix all your problems is wasting money on something that isn’t broken to begin with.
Economic and educational gaps are signs of budding aristocracies and once those gap’s are in place they feed off each other. The right-wing Reich thinks that if the masses are poor enough and dumb enough they will accept the will of the rich in exchange for their charity and protection. They forget that people with nothing to lose are the first to fight for what little they have.