What ? How can he say that ? We all know that the schools are failing. We hear it all the time; failing schools, failing schools. It might as well be all one word, like liberalmedia. It must be true, right ?
Well, maybe not. Simple notions, endlessly repeated; that's the formula for propaganda. I don't believe that the schools are failing and I think I understand the motives of those who keep insisting that they are.
First let me say that, like many others, I believe that we are in the midst of a Stupidity Crisis in America. It's like the movie Idiocracy out there; people are stupid, they don't know anything. Schools are where people are supposed to learn things, so it seems logical to blame them for the Stupidity Crisis.
But think about a forest fire. Fire breaks out in a drought-stricken pine forest, it spreads rapidly and crews have difficulty containing it. Maybe they can't contain it. We don't say that the firefighters are failing. We understand, they were overwhelmed. It's like that with the schools. They're doing their best under adverse conditions.
Those conditions are what I want to talk about here. When NCLB was first implemented, teachers were not allowed to discuss factors that might explain poor educational outcomes. They were told: No Excuses. These are not excuses, they are reality. The first issue I will address is SES.
SES stands for socio-economic status. You can't understand educational issues without taking SES into account because education begins in the home. The simplest way to describe SES is family income. The failing schools are in the poorer neighborhoods, those with the lowest property values. Test scores can be predicted by zipcode.
The most obvious factor in SES is the parents' education. Family income is a statistical proxy for education since income generally goes up with education. An upper-middle class family will usually have one, quite often two, parents with college degrees. Studies have shown that a child from a home with educated parents will be exposed to a larger spoken vocabulary. There may be books in the home. There may be music lessons for the child. There may be an adult to help with math homework, and the child may be less likely to hear "That's OK, I sucked at math too."
Another reason SES matters is that higher income parents can spend more time with their kids. A single parent working two low-wage jobs just doesn't have that much time for reading to Jr. or making sure that the homework is done. And, of course, it can be even worse. Ask a teacher from a low SES school and you'll hear horror stories; Dad's in jail, Mom's in jail, the kids don't have winter clothes, or shoes, the gas was cut off, the family lives in their car. This shit happens, and it's something to think about as political and economic forces work to lower the incomes, the SES, of large portions of our population.
There are also cultural factors involved in education and these cut across class lines. Simply put, the dominant culture in this country, the consumer/celebrity culture, works against education. The average American still watches TV for 4 hours a day, add computer time and you can see that there is precious little time for homework or for reading. Creativity requires a certain amount of boredom; the television lifestyle is about eliminating boredom. There's another issue too, television impedes intellectual development in children.
The concept to keep in mind when it comes to kids and TV is neural plasticity. Our brains are not hard-wired at birth. We form and reinforce the neural pathways in our brains as we use them. Children who are brought up passively staring at a screen often go to school unable to sit still or pay attention to a teacher. They are used to the rapid stimulation provided by TV. It affects kids to different degrees, but some end up diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Many are given Ritalin. Ritalin is a stimulant. It works because it supplies the feeling of being stimulated that the kids are used to.
So we've established that there are factors that lead to poor educational outcomes that are beyond the control of the schools. So why the failingschools meme ? Here's where it gets political. The Right doesn't like public education and they don't like school-teachers. Privatization and union-busting are the heart and soul of conservative policy. This explains the war against public schools.
The conservatives' ultimate goal is a voucher system, where tax dollars are funneled to private schools by means of vouchers issued to parents. Private schools are not currently outlawed, of course, and anyone who wants to can start one up or send their kids to one. What they're after is the replacement of the public system with a privatized one.
Conservative icon -Satan- Milton Friedman began advocating for vouchers as long ago as 1962 in his book of that year Capitalism and Freedom. His 1980 book Free to Choose, and the TV series that spawned it, contained lengthy arguments for vouchers. To quote from his 1982 Preface to Capitalism and Freedom, (h/t to Naomi Klein):
...There is enormous inertia, a tyranny of the status quo, in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
So there it is, we have our crisis, real or perceived, in education: The Schools Are Failing. The "solution" is vouchers. The whole idea behind NCLB was to use test scores to "prove" that the schools are failing, that they're not making adequate progress. If this were not the case, it seems to me, Congress would have funded the Act.
I believe that privatization is a bad idea. (Does the private sector serve us well in health care ?) I have argued that the "crisis" in education is not real and that the failingschools campaign is about managing perception. Please keep this in mind, whenever you repeat that "the schools are failing", you are cooperating with the right-wing.
Bibliography :
Friedman, Milton, Capitalism and Freedom, 1962, Univ. of Chicago Press ('natch)
Hart, Betty and Risley, Todd, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children 1995, Paul H. Brookes
Healy, Jane, Endangered Minds: Why Children Can't Think and What We Can Do About It, 1990, Touchstone
Kohn, Alfie and Shannon, Patrick, ed. Education Inc.: Turning Learning Into a Business 2002, Heinemann