Writing about Egypt & the worldwide neoliberal failure, I couldn't help but think about the devastating impact of neoliberal policies here at home, in particular regarding education. Jeff has written before about the Program for International Student Assessment and how its results have been misread and misrepresent, and his kind of detailed analysis is invaluable. But sometimes it helps to blunt, as well. In a recent email discussion my attention was drawn to an excellent blog post from mid-December, "PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid" by Mel Riddle for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, which had some data analysis that made things blindingly clear--especially when I made a couple of charts.
First off, here's what happens when use data about free and reduced price meals as a proxy for poverty rates, and group schools accordingly:
Then here's what happens when you take that data and use it for international comparisons:
So, it turns that when you adjust for poverty rats, US schools pretty much kick ass. Whouda thunk it?
Finally, just look at poverty rates and PISA scores side-by-side:
"They are stealing our future" is a phrase I've heard repeatedly from the Egyptian protesters. It's the same accusation that America's low-income children could say with just as much justification.
This week, the conservative movement in our country ushered in the "New Washington Consensus on Education." As noted on Flypaper, blog site for the rightwing thinktank Fordham Institute, backers of this bipartisan effort to make public schools conform to a vision of "competition, choice, and accountability" is the product of a confederacy of leading conservative pundits such as George Will, business interests who see opportunities for expanding profits, Senators from conservative and swing states, and the current presidential administration whose point person for leading the charge to bipartisan school "reform" is Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The "New Washington Consensus" differs from the old one in that it favors more "flexibility" in allowing states to determine the thresholds for accountability and a form of federal support based on "competition" typified by the Obama administration's Race to the Top grant program, which was heralded by the president in his recent State of the Union Speech as "the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation."
This may sound all well and good to some concerned citizens on the left of the political spectrum in that this new consensus resonates with themes of concern and commitment to public education and promises to lift the more punitive demands of No Child Left Behind. But anyone who considers themselves progressive should pause to remember that bipartisanship brought us the destructive path of NCLB to begin with - and the Iraq War too, for that matter.
Bipartisanship, in fact, hasn't been working so well for education. As Amy Stuart Wells pointed out at Education Week,
While it is a difficult moment to not support greater agreement across our political parties, the reality is that this increasing bipartisanism in education reform is not working for our students. In fact, the most agreed-upon solutions-testing, privatization, deregulation, stringent accountability systems, and placement of blame on unions for all that is wrong-are doing more harm than good. Achievement overall has not improved, and the gap between the privileged and the disadvantaged has widened. Parents across the country are fed up with the stress and boredom their children feel in schools that are driven by tests and competition. Internationally, countries with better safety nets to support children's well-being are leaving us in the dust. As President Obama noted, while the United States once led the world in education, we are now falling rapidly behind.
Despite this bad news, there appears to be no dramatic change of course on the political horizon, no healthy debate on the bipartisan agenda. Indeed, consensus on bad ideas in education has become much like a naked emperor-no one wants to break from the ranks and state a bold vision.
The reasons that bipartisanship on education isn't working are multiple. But rising to the top of the heap of the problems it spawns is the unified mantra for "competition" as a means to improve schools. After Obama hailed his RTT competitive grant program as a grand solution to our faltering schools, public school advocates at the Shott Foundation posted a stinging rebuttal:
Piecemeal programs like RTT, that require states to compete for resources in the form of grants, have not systemically solved the problem over the past two years, nor will they in the future. The role of the federal government is not one of a foundation, but as an agent of the people working to ensure opportunities for all. To date, 39 states either were non-participants or losers in RTT. How can the United States win if 39 states lose, let alone stay on a trajectory to increase the number of college graduates by 23 million above the current number? After two years of implementation and allotting close to $4 billion dollars, the initiative has only distributed resources in states that touch 24% of African American students, 15% of Latino students, 5% of Asian students, 0% percent of American Indian students, and 6% of ELL students. Additionally, poor rural states and their students have been grossly underrepresented in RTT.
In this "Sputnik moment," pairing the nation's 2020 goal with a RTT policy frame is analogous to challenging the nation to reach the moon and forcing states and communities to develop their own rockets to get there. As one Long Island grandparent passionately stated after New York Gov. Cuomo announced a similar competitive plan for that state, "Our kids are not game show contestants where parents should be forced to compete on getting them in the right districts or schools."
Education is a civil right and the federal government has the obligation to ensure all students' right to an opportunity to learn are protected, whether in strong or strained fiscal climates.
(emphasis in original)
That the competitiveness frame has never been proven to work for improving public schools never seems to be a consideration of the Washington Consensus. The whole concept of competition is in fact antithetical to what progressive education is trying to accomplish, as Alfie Kohn has long maintained and argued thoroughly.
If you believe that access to high-quality education is a fundamental human right, you should be just as suspicious of a competitive model for education as you would be of injecting competition into your community's fire and police protection. Forcing people to compete for essential services is not only unworkable - as those who are on the lower rungs of the economic ladder invariably are denied those service - it's immoral.
Again, from the Shott foundation:
A competitive-based frame like RTT works against the very purpose for which ESEA was created in 1965 as a part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty-to prevent states, districts, parents, and America's children from competing to have their right to an opportunity to learn protected. We urge the President not to lead America back to the pre-ESEA status quo days of states jockeying and politicking for federal funding; this approach has historically proven to do what the first two years of RTT has-leave poor, disadvantaged, and rural citizens behind.
The time has come for us to end the practice of avoiding the size of our challenge by creating limited initiatives like RTT that work only on the margins. As the President proclaimed, "America does Big Things," and a race that only impacts 11 of 50 states is far from "big."
So if competition has little to offer to public schools in both its lack of a proven track record and its conceptual clash with the values of public education, then why has the Obama administration colluded with others to embrace it?
The quick answer to that question is that it makes for good "politics." As George Lakoff wrote this week, Obama's "competitiveness narrative" serves a number of purposes in keeping him electable in 2012. But progressives have every cause to be suspicious of this strategy.
The competitiveness frame excludes half of what progressives care about. Abortion rights, under attack nationally by conservatives, don't help competitiveness, nor does gay marriage, worker rights, clean air and water, saving species and preserving natural environments, public financing of elections, helping the homeless, ending the war in Afghanistan, arts and humanities education, helping immigrants who are not well-educated, and on and on. Can these be made to fit the competitiveness frame?
Maybe.
Can you have unity without equality? Can you have productive industries without fair wages and organizing rights? Can you have long-term prosperity while destroying nature? Can you be economically productive without good health? Can you maximize production without women's rights? Can you educate a population without educating them in empathy and introspection and a vibrant sense of the aesthetics of life?
My sense is that in regards to the intentions of the New Washington Consensus on education, and by association the Obama administration, there is something more than just politics afoot here. Going back to the other pillar of the Consensus - "flexibility" - it's easy to see how those who are in power will have increased means to manipulate the system to conform to their own ideological - and financial -goals.
For instance, gaze upon the current debacle occurring in Wake County, North Carolina. As teacher and edublogger Nancy Flanagan recently wrote, Wake County, NC's largest school system, has enjoyed much success and widespread acclaim through, in part, enforcing - yes, enforcing, through government mandate - a diversity policy intended to rescue children of low-income families from being herded into high-poverty schools where they are, research shows, much less likely to flourish academically than if they were integrated into the schools that serve more affluent children.
However, a new Tea Party-backed majority of the Wake County School Board wants to shatter that track record of success. Under the guise of "flexibility" and "neighborhood schools," these ideologues want to enforce a system of competition and "choice" that will quite likely lead to a resegregation of black and brown children from their more well-off peers and, in turn, create a concentration of "failed" schools that can be immediately charterized into the hands of "education entrepreneurs."
As the ever-useful Jim Horn observes, there is a "financial incentive" at work in these "reform" efforts being pushed by the Washington Consensus. And that ends is to sequester black and brown children "in corporate charters" while "white children can be nurtured and sheltered behind the gates of their leafy communities," and doing all this "at public expense and under corporate direction."
Progressives everywhere need to push back against this New Washington Consensus. And fortunately, many are already organizing to do just that. Daily Kos' teacher and edu-blogger teacherken recently posted about the broad-based grassroots effort, Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action, and just this weekend he posted the first in a series of diaries describing the leadership behind this activism.
So what'll it be follow progressives? Are we going to stand on the sidelines? Or are going to join others to fight against the efforts of the Washington Consensus to privatize the public good and limit our rights to quality education for all?
As educators, parents, and persons who were once young and now thought to be elder, and thus, wiser, and more wondrous, and accomplished, within our own being we might feel we are less than we appear to be. Tis true; our parents, Teachers, Professors, and friends had such high hopes for us. Our own dreams were even more impressive. Most of us envisioned that we would reach the pinnacle as we progressed until we failed an examination, received a lower grade in a class, or "disappointed" our family when we did less well than they hoped we might?
Once again, Americans are up in arms or perchance, better armed and dangerous. Only little more than a week into 2011, citizens have had to confront their fears, feelings, all at gunpoint. It began on a calm, clear Saturday. In a Safeway Store Tucson parking lot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords held one of her customary Congress on the Corner events. It was January 8, 2011. Friends and admirers from each political Party turned out. Suddenly, cordial chatter turned icy cold. gunshots shattered the calm. People were slaughtered. Some survived. However, as a nation, we were all wounded.
Retorts followed. Seemingly, a culture was changed, or was it? Just as has occurred, many times in the recent past, people quickly took sides. Blame was ballied about. Solutions were also presented. Some argued for stricter gun control laws. Others used the occasion to validate a need for less restrictive restraints on gun ownership. Persons who held a position similar to the most prominent victim proposed a need to protect themselves.
This year, Christmas and New Years Days were days of intense reflection. Perchance, that is true every year and for every individual. I cannot know what is true for others. I am only certain that on each of these dates I was immersed in a rigorous course of study. My gifts or the curriculum came wrapped in a routine event.
The lessons covered were Empathy and Education, although perhaps these were presented in reverse order. Possibly, the truer program was entropy and encouragement. Each edifies. I wonder; on each of the two days these topics were intertwined. In my attempt to analyze and understand what I needed to learn or did, I invite your assessments. Please indulge me as I share the story.
Perchance, on this the twenty-second commemoration of a lesson learned, it is time to reflect on our first, foremost, and greatest Teachers. More than a generation has passed. In that time, I have acquired much knowledge. Yet, I am forever reminded that the more I know, the more certain I am. I know nothing with certainty. What I once thought was the greatest treasure, a tradition I could never part with, was other than it appeared. I never imagined what would become my truth. Today, I share the tale with you.
"The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers" ~ Jean Piaget [Swiss Psychologist. Pioneer in the study of child intelligence. 1896-1980]
"The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us" ~ Norman Cousins [Essayist, Editor associated with Saturday Evening Post 1912-1990]
"America's noble experiment, universal education for all" may have become but an idealized theory. In practice it long seemed the impossible dream. However, for the hopeful this statement was a reverie, although the veracity was virtually unrecognizable at best. Still the notion lived on. The powerful prose marveled many. That is all but believers in a for-profit privatized educational system. Today, corporate aficionados have conquered. Commerce controls School District Administrators. It shapes decisions made. Countless elementary and secondary school campuses are transformed in accordance. Big business buys and sells city classrooms. Our forefathers would have thought present-day headlines could only appear in fictional accounts. Nonetheless banners blare, "This Class Is Brought to You By. [fill in the corporate enterprise of your choice]"
The real kick is this. The right and the left who buy into their meme of "we are falling behind in competing with other countries in education" and get hysterical about it, seem totally OK with how countries beat us in health issues. Hypocrisy 101.
Yes, it's Hypocrisy 101. But it's also Oligopoly 101.
The US falling behind other countries in health care is not a problem, even though it blows a Grand Canyon-sized hole in our long-term budget, because the oligopolies control our health care, and make more money than God off of it as a result.
OTOH, the US falling behind other countries in educational tests is a problem, even if most of the problem is due to factors outside the classroom, because the oligopolies don't yet control our k-12 education systems, and don't make more money than Godd of it as a result.
Currently, I am writing for an educational organization. In penning my pain for what occurs in our schools today, it occurred to me the same impersonal approach, awareness, or lack thereof, is evident in offices, neighborhoods, and in our broader community. People pretend to or believe they " know" their fellow workers, their family members, and their friends. Yet, more often than not, I observe that this is not necessarily true. I, we, she, or he only comprehends what is visible on the surface.
Few choose to ask of, address, or answer the deeper concerns that life delivers daily; I offer this narrative and request your reflections. We all have our own tale to tell. I invite you to share yours. Please trust that I care; your secrets are safe with me. I suspect that others will honor you as I choose to do. I believe we all relate to sorrow.
Today the distress I wish to discuss is heartbreak, heartache, and heart felt feelings. In my own life, I am witnessing that many close to me are battling life-threatening illnesses. Their terminal diagnoses affect me deeply. They weigh heavy on those closer to the " patient" than I. I cannot begin to imagine the pain long-suffering persons feel. Yet, through the quiet trials and tribulations of a teen, who supposedly studied under my tutelage, I learned. What we hide hurts us most.
(Another special edition from a regular Left Ed commentator known to all. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
To listen to the discussion going on right now about teacher quality one would think that most teachers were suspect, poorly trained, over paid, inefficient and in need of firing. All we need to do, the reformers cry, is the simple task of reforming America's failing education system. Of course the key to doing so rests universally with dealing with the rampant hordes of bad teachers. Bolstered by their evil teacher unions, these bad teachers have systematically taken over our schools, held local school boards hostage, and under the guise of fair wages and better working conditions looted taxpayer coffers with their outrageous salaries and benefits. Then thanks to tenure's legendary job for life benefits, they get to kick back and ruin our children's futures care free.
Sigh. The fairy tale above throws so much crap at the wall that its easy for the public to lose one's way in figuring out is what is truth or fiction. That's probably by design. It allows "reformers" to move the Overton Window on Education to the right more effectively that way because something is going to stick. For example, what were you people thinking in New Jersey when you elected this guy:
On merit pay, Christie said he wants to prohibit seniority or graduate degree attainment in fields other than math and science from influencing salary increases for teachers. The large pool of funding needed to start a merit pay program would come from the savings of firing bad teachers through tenure reform, Christie said.
In this short quote there is so much being flung at the wall that one might miss the larger arguments being made by "reformers" like Gov. Christie.
There are multiple factors behind the "bipartisan" push on "education reform". But one of them is the long-standing liberal/conservative agreement that education is a pathway to prosperity. Of course, the meaning of this belief is historically quite different to liberals than it is to conservatives. For liberals, education is a way out of poverty for the disadvantaged, in combination with broader systemic and institutional reforms. For conservatives, it's a way of reinforcing the Horatio Alger myth--that individual success through virtue, hard work and diligence is the answer to poverty, rather than any sort of social reform, no matter how modest. For neo-liberals, who have come to accept--more or less--the conservative reframing of the politically possible, the logic of the conservative arguments prevail, along with minor tinkering that's an almost private homage to ideals abandoned in fact, but still given lip-service to.
Of course education remains a pathway to better living for most individuals. But what's better for the individual isn't simply additive for society as a whole. And this reality for society as a whole can trickle down to the individual level as well. Just ask any "overeducated" job seeker in any number of fields or situations over the past 20-30 years. What's more, things mount up. The end result is that incomes for the college educated have been relatively stagnant overall for some time now (individual fortunes may still vary considerably, of course.) I made this point in my diary "Higher Education, Lower Wages" in October 2009, which included the following graph, showing the relatively stagnant incomes of the college-educated, compared to those in the top 5% and 10% of income-"earners":
This is evidence of a relatively over-supply of educated workers. There's still a premium for a higher education, but that premium is not keeping up with the more general increase in income for higher-income individuals as a whole.
But another way to see the problem is to realize that most of the future job projected with our economy does not involve a demand for people with higher education. He's a chart I just created, presenting data from the ten fastest-growing job categories listed in the Economic News Release "Table 6. The 30 occupations with the largest employment growth, 2008-18", last updated December 11, 2009:
Aggregating these jobs by the level of training required, we see that over half of them require nothing more than short-term on-the-job training, 70% require no college, and 86% require nothing beyond a 2-year associate degree:
While many muse as a culture we cannot continue "Waiting for Superman" to transform our schools, others expect our Teachers to be Supermen or Superwomen. Some say private school Educators are superior. Only the Instructors employed in public educational institutions are flawed. There seems to be agreement in our society; these Teachers cannot take the lead. The system, critics cry, out must change. Philanthropists proclaim they are here to save the day. Privatization is the only way to work through what has been a woeful failure. No, Administrators and the current Administration avow; Teachers are the problem. We must assess their performance and pay Educators accordingly.
After two diaries in a row on the emerging fascist threat, this may seem rather tame by comparison--a note on the spread of anti-federalist ideology in the realm of education. But when you recall the role that federal courts played in desegregating Southern Schools and how central that was to Civil Rights Movement, suddenly things start to get a lot clearer.
Senate candidates Ken Buck (R-CO) and Sharron Angle (R-NV) have both received significant attention for their absurd claim the federal Department of Education is unconstitutional, but because House races generally receive much less media attention than the higher-profile Senate contests, it's unclear just how common this radical position is among the GOP's full slate of candidates.
A questionnaire circulated by Liberty Central, the right-wing group led by Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas, sheds a great deal of light on this question - and the answer is not pretty. Of the 60 candidate questionnaires submitted by current GOP nominees for a House or Senate seat that ThinkProgress reviewed for this report, at least 49 adopt a view that would declare much - if not all - of federal education policy unconstitutional.
The Liberty Central questionnaire includes the following question:
The overwhelming majority of GOP candidates who submitted this questionnaire answered “no” to this question, a position that would drastically limit the federal government’s ability to help struggling schools, and which could also threaten Medicaid and other essential programs. Several of these candidates offered ahistorical, ideological and occasionally paranoid constitutional theories:
For preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other purposes.
Sure sounds like tyranny to me, right? Federal government meddling where it was never meant to be,until the progress of human history utterly changed the nature of the world we live in, but fortunately, our Constitution had enough breadth in its founding vision and enough foresight in how it was framed to allow it to adjust, largely because of the General Welfare clause--which can be found both in the Preamble and in the powers of Congress, a sticky little "detail" that our aspiring fascist rulers are eager to bury beneath anything they can lay their hands on, as Think Progress goes on to illustrate:
Quite frankly, there is not much of a choice here: if you don't vote, you will condemn us to changes in our country that will be hard to live with and harder to overcome in the future.
For instance, Republican Senate candidates Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Rand Paul in Kentucky, John Raese in West Virginia, and Dino Rossi in Washington have all pledged to roll back or eliminate the minimum wage.
Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania have all talked about privatizing Social Security - or eliminating it altogether.
(This Sunday, Jeff's computer was down & my power was down. Michael, a regular commentator on Left Ed diaries posted this as a wonderful replacement. Now that I'm back in the swing of things, I'm promoting it to keep our education beat going. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
This is a poor substitute for one of Jeff's posts - but I was hoping to talk about this, so here goes...
So Friday night I wrap up my work and start flipping channels for some mental relief. As I'm shuffling past A&E - not a usual stop - I hear this familiar sounding teacher telling a couple of students that they can't go to the "resource room" and that they should just "give the quiz a try" right there in the classroom. As a teacher, this triggered a professional double-take akin to jamming on the breaks while driving 50mph. Did he really just say what I think he said?!
As I sat there watching "Teach: Tony Danza" I was amazed. In less than 20 minutes I saw a person obviously passionate about education who did things that would get most first-year teachers in severe hot water - if not fired. All I could think was "Who let this guy in front of a class?"
The answer was Philidelephia's Northeast High School.
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