There Is Nothing ‘Great’ About Education!
Neither what we have NOR what is planned.
"That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond."
Senator Paul Wellstone — March 31, 2000
First an apology for the long break: Always an optimist, the events in education this year had me thinking pessimistically and my teaching background taught me that nothing good came from my pessimism. That said when reality is dark, ignoring it is not optimistic: Reality MUST be faced and optimism is – in my most firm belief – a requirement for success, as pessimism is a guarantee of failure before you start.
The crisis in education IS far worse than it has ever been in my lifetime, a future I have been warning of since the beginning of this newsletter and before. At the start the problem was how we were educating, from my view: Now the GOP threatens to abolish public education and return to a ‘great America’ in which education is a privilege of the wealthy businessmen and plantation owners.
The voucher program being touted as the best option is based on the ridiculous notion that somehow the private sector will educate the entire country for less money than is currently being spent on public education. The failure of this notion is obvious in the ruination of state budgets in those states that have adopted vouchers – they are simply financially unsustainable.
An AP News article discussed the precipitous rise of voucher costs:
In the coming school year, voucher programs are expected to cost Florida taxpayers almost $3.9 billion, or about $1 in every $13 from the state’s general revenue fund. In Arizona, it’s nearly 5% of the general budget.
An analysis by The Associated Press found the costs in Iowa, Ohio and Oklahoma are over 3% of state general spending this year, or are projected to be in the coming budget year.
Spending is a smaller portion of the budget in states where the scholarship programs are still ramping up. Those include Arkansas, Indiana, North Carolina, Utah and West Virginia.
Eventually taxpayers will ‘discover’ this massive hole through which their taxpayer dollars are being given away to the privileged to subsidize an education which even the GOP no longer pretends is available to the vast majority of Americans. In the style of understatement our media is increasingly adopting the AP article says:
“Even if they’re being funded by separate revenue sources, it can feel like school choice programs and public schools are competing for the same slice of an increasingly smaller pie,” said Page Forrest, who analyzes state finances at the nonpartisan think tank Pew.
How did we get here?
Since Ronald Reagan started the GOP on restructuring American education his views might be summarized in his declaration the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity”. Gary Clabaugh in an opinion on Reagan’s education legacy said:
“That sums up Mr. Reagan’s educational legacy. As governor and president he demagogically fanned discontent with public education, then made political hay of it. As governor and president he bashed educators and slashed education spending while professing to value it. And as governor and president he left the nation’s educators dispirited and demoralized.”
The presumption of Reagan and the GOP is that ultimately education must be viewed as a business – their go-to presumption for everything the government does.
Education is NOT a business.
Our nation’s success – indeed our very survival – in this planet’s future requires us to grasp the truth that the purpose of government is and must be to improve the lives of its citizens. When this bottom line is thus so impossible to quantify or grade, business strategies cannot provide answers. Our nation’s worship of capitalism has created a narrative – worshiped by the GOP – where everything will work better when treated as a business: Whoever owns the business can certainly expect to make a lot of money. In healthcare this has created the only privately-owned healthcare system in the civilized world; made it very expensive; and yet still fail to serve a significant percentage of its citizens. Viewing the lucrative profits healthcare has generated the oligarchs are salivating over doing the same with education. The fact that this is impossible bothers them not a whit: Likewise they are unconcerned with the damage done to society.
Thus we have a party claiming to be a movement that is doing everything within its power to eliminate public education.
So when this party fails in their endeavors – through our efforts or due to their lack of competence and foresight – are we going to strive to re-establish our school system? Heaven forbid! The politicians had been doing a remarkably effective and bi-partisan job of screwing up public education for over four decades; the effectiveness of the GOP attacks can be attributed in large part to the ineffectiveness of the school system they were attacking.
What must be done?
As Sun Tzu observed: “In the midst of chaos lies great opportunity!” and we have chaos; with the virtual certainty of even worse chaos. The optimistic view – or silver lining according to my Grandmother – is to grasp this opportunity to make major changes not just in the system, but in our approach to how we educate our children.
Bertrand Russell gave an address in 1959 to the people living a thousand years later which should resonate today; less than a century:
“I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral:
The intellectual thing I should want to say… is this: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts.
…The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
What must be done is have the goal of education be to teach this view.
This means scrapping a great deal of what is currently both considered essential and deeply ingrained culturally: Such an upheaval would require a lot of chaos to even be considered – but what if:
The first thing that must go is all forms of competition in education – grades at the top of the list. Many schools have operated on a pass-fail basis for decades. But I’m talking about getting rid of grade levels as in first through twelfth. There should be no ‘required knowledge’ to be granted access to the next rung on a ladder you may or may not wish to climb. In thirty six years of teaching the most salient truth I have observed is the totally unique way in which each child learns; yet our entire educational philosophy is mired in a system where all must march in lockstep towards a goal, with no input on its determination. Currently in education we don’t even require the students to achieve ANYTHING before moving them too the next rung – ready or not. The result is a system with the dubious honor of convincing a large percentage of our children that they are stupid, the only evidence of which is their failure to maintain lockstep in a system whose requirements become more ridiculous with every educational bill passed by Congress.
The foundational strength of public education in the United States arose from the principle that education would be both funded and controlled at the local level, which fundamentally it is. Growing up in a racially segregated South showed me the many ways in which local and state governments abused this power, and Brown vs Board of Education addressed this. Unfortunately Congress also decided their expertise was needed to design the curriculum, set standards and micro-manage the entire process: Their profound ignorance has been on display to everyone in the teaching profession ever since – of course teachers have NEVER been consulted.
While ensuring that education meets Constitutional muster and enables every child within our borders to receive a quality education – and providing funds to make sure such is possible – should certainly fall on Congress’ shoulders, the actual control of how the educational process is carried out can and should be under local control. Let’s give back the power to control education to the local school board, where it has always been and belongs.
There are many who claim such an overhaul of our approach to education is impossible. My response is twofold: First, the chaos is not yet bad enough – just wait; and second many of the impossibilities involve things that may well not be part of a totally redesigned system. If you don’t have grade levels, how necessary is it for all children to spend eight hours a day in school. Might school buildings themselves be re-purposed; indeed if we remove the baby-sitting portion of a teacher’s day how much more teaching might they be able to do – from personal experience I would say A LOT!
The design and management of a dramatically different educational system would be a tall order and an understanding of both the science of learning and the art of teaching would be required – both areas in which our politicians could not be less qualified. This change must come from the people and they must demand that its creation and operation be by those qualified.
Who could be trusted to design and manage such a system? THE TEACHERS!
https://apnews.com/article/vouchers-scholarships-state-budgets-9b11a30169b7bbfdb79520e45af01222