Rationing the Educational Edge

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Why do we educate everybody, in the USA, despite the fact that many of our citizens could not could afford a private education for their children?  (Why do we lavish any sort of education on the poor and downtrodden, if we don't even issue them a free automobile, that mark of citizenship?)  The long history of public education in the USA brings out the different view the Founding Fathers of the nation had of what would make an excellent republic, than the view we believe those who have grabbed the reins of power in modern America to have.  To those of us who are accused of being liberals, it seems clear that the Founding Fathers, even though they were by no means unanimous in their vision, wanted what was best for the general population, while at the same time protecting private property, which they saw as each person's right to keep what was his hard-earned wealth.  Modern oligarchs, in contrast, seem to take the position that no one deserves anything they can't afford.

As society evolved, and cynics were able to break down the philosophical bases of the American Republic into dollars and cents terms, what was written into the constitution and encoded in early laws was seen to be a very uneasy compromise between what was good for all, versus what could be afforded by each one.  Today, the few who own most of the wealth of the nation look with great skepticism at their financial obligations: Why, they ask, should those of us who have the greatest wealth, have to fund highways, hospitals, schools, the arts, and science and research?

In a recent Bill Moyer's interview, he discussed Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error, in which she points out the dangers of permitting the continued migration of Education, which has been a part of the social contract, and a cooperative venture so far, into the private sector (and its exploitation for profit).

Let's look at the problem from the point of view of the Fiscal Conservative.  On the one hand, when we pay for public education with tax dollars, and hand over the monitoring of whether the dollars are spent effectively to government inspectors, the taxpayers are likely to see what goes on in schools as ongoing apparent ineptitude.  This is not how we do things in my sweatshop, says the Fiscal Conservative.  But lately, some of them have looked at education, and they see an opportunity to make money.

So far, thank goodness, not every entrepreneur sees education as a money-bin, but Diane Ravitch clearly sees an alarming trend, namely that consortiums of  hedge fund managers are taking over charter schools in certain cities, and removing public education entirely from the supervision of those who used to be responsible for educational quality control.

Public education is complex, and unfortunately the simple metrics that the private sector tends to advocate for the measurement of government "efficiency" cannot take into account all the parameters of what goes into the quality of what is called "Student Learning Outcomes."  But teachers, out of desperation, have taken it upon themselves to study the government data (and of course government is mostly helpless to resist the bottom-line that the most vociferous taxpayers put forward in the name of The Public,) and have noticed the very plausible trend that teachers who have students who live below the poverty line have classes that perform below average.

From the point of view of private enterprise and capitalist economics, it seems like a good idea to segregate students from below the poverty line, and students better able to afford quality education.  Though this seems the most "practical" solution to the problem, from a philosophical point of view, this sort of segregation goes against all the instincts of anyone who is even slightly liberal in his or her views.  But Diane Ravitch is noticing that there is not a strong stand against this tendency to privatize education within the Democrat Party.  Many Democrats have bought into the conservative line, and are eager to play along with the plan to privatize public education, and in some cities, completely replace public schools with Charter schools, which, Ms Ravitch asserts, do not have better results than public schools, as they claim in their marketing.

Unfortunately this question has many aspects: an educational aspect (what will work best for my kid's education?  Must I sacrifice my own children to my political philosophy?), a political significance (what is the right thing to do for the nation's children?  Can we save all the public schools, or focus on private schools, which seem to promise a bigger bang for the buck?), and an economic aspect (how is the nation's and the taxpayer's money best spent?  Is it worth putting good money after bad into the bottomless pit that public education has become?) and a social justice aspect --I'm struggling for a phrase here, and this is the closest I can get--(Is it right to make a child's education depend on the parent's ability to pay?)  So the privatizing forces have multiple ways of pushing forward their agenda.

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