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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Focus on Education: Diane Ravitch

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I have no right to address this issue, because I’m reacting to a report of a book by Diane Ravitch (see here for a brief bio, and a summary of her latest ideas)  that I have not read. This author seems to be saying most of the things that I have tried to say, and has said them better, and has more information with which to support her points. Rather than state that she has said these things, (which she may have), I’m saying them for myself.

The furious testing that goes on is misguided. I’m not at all against tests; I think they allow students to know how good they are. But that’s all they should do; they should not be used for anything else. They should certainly not be used to assess teaching. It is unfortunate that there are no better ways to tell whether a teacher is doing his or her job than to assess his or her students —and in the fee-for-service atmosphere that we find at the present time, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative—there is nothing that can be done, as far as I can see. If tests are going to be administered, someone is sure to use them in a way that they find convenient. All over the world, it seems that tests are poisoning the water of education, and as tests become increasingly indispensable for establishing the value of people, other abuses inevitably come into play: private tutoring, available only to those that can afford it, and, I’m sure, someday corruption and bribery will not be far behind.
Teaching is a profession that seems to destroy those who take it up. The social climate is such that so much hangs on the outcome of education that everyone looks for a scapegoat, and the teacher is a natural one. Don’t be too surprised if very soon only the scum of the earth will take up teaching. No amount of marketing or PR will serve to persuade any but the most gullible into the trap of taking up teaching. You truly have to be naïve to want to submit to the humiliation of being a teacher in the United States of America, the land of the brave, and the home of the constant testing!

The effectively privatizing of education, towards which the US is being pushed, by commercial interests, obviously, will inevitably create economic stratification of education as much as there is stratification in other aspects of society. While society rebelled against racial segregation in the sixties, today segregation of all sorts is being encouraged by the conservative elements among us, and the very people who are aghast at the increase in the use of Spanish across America, and at the access that the underprivileged have for all sorts of goods and services, will prefer to have their children educated in an environment free of what are probably perceived as the marginal elements of society. The rush to embrace Charter Schools, Diane Ravitch seems to say, is just the desire to have minority-free classrooms in disguise. Even if such a motive is furthest from your mind, be careful: to have poverty and diversity hidden from your child’s eyes is not the best thing for your child.

I had forgotten what a broadening thing it was, to have a college education. Those of us who have had the privilege of schooling beyond the twelfth grade sometimes forget how different the world is as we see it, from how it must seem to those who only learn about the world outside through the distorting lens of the Evening News, or worse, Fox News. Or through telescopes from their bedrooms.  Some of the inexplicable attitudes of people like the former governor of Alaska become a little more understandable. The attitudes of conservative members of Congress who have actually had an education are truly inexplicable.

The main job of a teacher, as I see it, is to teach the student to understand and love the world, all of it, all that it has been, and all that it is now, and to delight in how things work (when they do work). But that will not happen, because it isn’t profitable.

I was recently made aware of several books that had titles something like: How Science Poisons Everything, in opposition to another book that said something like: God Isn’t So Great. It’s time someone wrote a book titled How Business Poisons Everything, or How the Profit Motive Destroys Everything We Hold Dear, Including Education, Society, Our Homes, Our Children, Our Government, And World Peace. So There.

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AND ANOTHER THING.
We’re told that Diane Ravitch has come out against not only No Child Left Behind, but also Obama’s program and slogan: Race to the Top.  If you read Ms Ravitch’s bio, you learn that she was educated at Wellesley, an excellent, very selective East Coast college (no criticism there; I live on the East Coast myself) which was, until a few decades ago, a women-only institution.  If we go on the assumption that her elitist education had an impact on her thinking, we might begin to understand why she first supported clumsy initiatives like No Child Left Behind, and then abandoned them.

Any idealist who has received a good education knows that there is an amazing amount of things out there that would be even more amazing if people weren’t so dumb.  And certainly, ignorance is the greater part of dumbness.  So it isn’t surprising that anyone with any sort of heart who’s been to college wants to set out to change the world; and plans brimming with energy, like No Child Left Behind, promise to be almost the only thing that’s going to make any sort of difference in the monolithic monument to stupidity that US schools appear to be, from the outside.

The inside, too.  Except for a few cracks here and there, and a little intelligent erosion around the edges —and let us be grateful to the intelligent termites who have kept working at the pile of petrified crap for so long— the monument survives.

There is some suspicion that politicians in office are sort of divided on the issue of education.  It seems obvious that cynically, an ignorant electorate is to be desired, because they will believe anything.  But it is not easy to pile lies upon lies, because lies are harder to defend than the truth, and so there is something to be said for an intelligent, educated, well-informed electorate, which is able to knowledgeably judge what the issues are, and judge how well you have addressed them.  When it comes to competing with foreign technology, though, we have two options: import educated labor, or educate our own.  Neither option is easy, with folks being as lazy, and as hostile to all things non-American as they are!

It is not that the rest of us want our youth to remain ignorant.  It is just that the American approach had become: leave it to the professionals.  If they don’t fix it, sue them.  We forget that we can’t do that in every case, but we continue to do that, because it is the lazy thing to do.  I don’t know what Ms Ravitch advocates; there is no simple fix.  The road to good education is long, and it takes first raising a generation of young people who value education for its own sake, who must grow up to become teachers who value teaching because of their love of children and their hate of ignorance, and their faith in a better world, and become parents who are actually interested in what their kids are learning each day, and know the constraints under which their friends, the teachers, work.

I know.  I know.  It’ll never work.  Perhaps something like No Child Left Behind might be easier. . . every decade or so . . .

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