First, ask yourself if this is the kind of school you would want your child to attend:
Children who followed all the rules were given points that could be exchanged for goodies at the school store. Those who resisted the rules or were slackers wore a large sign pinned to their clothes labeled "miscreant." Miscreants sat apart from the others at all times including lunch, were denied recess and participation in all other school projects and events.
Or like this:
And children who talk to "miscreants" at or away from school risk the same punishment if apprehended. In fact, it becomes the duty of other students to report offenders who are associating in any way with "miscreants." If they do not, they, too, risk the same punishment. New recruits, then, learn compliance through the exercise of coercive power and constant surveillance.
Then ask yourself, why is this form of schooling being hailed as hugely successful by our leadership in Washington DC and showered with billions of dollars in taxpayer money?
Then, and maybe only then, do you start to understand the real machinations behind the governance emanating from Washington DC these days.
In a terrific three-part blog post at Schools Matter this week, Jim Horn revealed what goes on behind the scenes at KIPP charter schools - the darling of education reformers who claim it to be "best program serving severely disadvantaged, minority-group students in America today." Although I strongly urge you to read all three parts, what stood out most to me was his placement of KIPP schools, and the charter school movement in general, in the context of civil rights and a wave "cultural eugenics" dominating public policy decisions. (The triple-post consists primarily of excerpts from a chapter he authored in the bookthe Gates Foundation and the Future of US Public Schools].
Once one sees how the rationale for treating the nation's poor black and brown school kids gets boiled down to forcing them into apartheid-like schools, then it's really easy to see the rational behind other public policies to, for instance, solve the deficit problem on the backs of the working poor.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's how Horn opens his salvo:
If threats, punitive measures, or wishful thinking (in any combination applied by liberals or conservatives) would have worked in the public schools to bring about the closing of the achievement gap between black and white, or rich and poor, then the children of the poor over the past twenty years may have been spared, perhaps, the continuing steroidal remedies and monstrous ministrations that are now accepted practice in many urban schools trying to keep pace with the demands of NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress decree. And even as sanity insists that poor children will find the more rigorous national tests (now on the drawing board) even harder to pass than the less-rigorous state ones that they now fail in droves, the next likely tough-love chapter in the reform-schooling of urban America appears to be moving into alignment, explicably borne forward by willful ignorance, political hubris, moneyed arrogance, and a national advertising campaign to publicize a new secret weapon in the continuing crusade to raise test scores and close the achievement gap. The reformers' new secret weapon is a non-profit corporate chain of charter schools known as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP).
Horn provides detailed accounts of the internment-like environment that often characterizes KIPP schools as "a strict and unwavering socialization process that depends upon a stringent behavioral catechism and psychological realignment. Sometimes referred to as KIPP-notizing:"
The three weeks that KIPP students spend in summer school is devoted to an intensive socialization and enculturation process for new students soon to begin fifth grade, and for other students who are learning the compliance demands of the next grade level. New students must learn the SLANT rules, which means to "sit up straight, look and listen, ask and answer questions, nod to show understanding, [and] track the speaker" (Browne 2008, 58). They must learn that any rule infraction will bring an instant corrective response, and they must learn that the smallest misdeed will be no more tolerated than the most egregious offense. New recruits practice walking, getting off the bus, sitting in the cafeteria, and going to the bathroom the KIPP way. Students must learn that KIPP rules apply inside and outside of school. "Miscreants" must learn, for instance, that isolation and ostracism from the KIPP family is total as long as the punishment lasts.
The purpose of enforcing such draconian approaches is explained-away as being "necessary" - what's "right for "those" children - as being a "No Excuses" approaches to educating the urban poor. What happens in fact, as Horn explains, is that many more of the most unfortunate simply fall through the cracks of the KIPP-school factory floor while our society's ruling elite remain in denial of the expanding inequality that dominates our society:
The longer KIPP's abusive and extreme measures are allowed to function as a palliative, or excuse, for our society' refusal to act against urban poverty, apartheid schools, and racism, the closer that this dominant culture comes to the forced moral bankruptcy that awaits those societies that proclaim equality while practicing torturous interventions against the children of its least equal citizens as an inexpensive shortcut to preserving the façade of equal opportunity.
How does this relate to the findings the heads of the Catfood Commission? It's simple really. In the eyes of our political leadership - whether you're talking educational policy or financial policy - governance is an enforced compliance to a ruling cultural elite. That's why as Dean Baker pointed out at Firedoglake this week, the pathological compromisers on the center left can continue to ignore the real scourges of poverty, unemployment, and deterioration of the working classes while letting Wall Street, the real "bad guy in this story," totally off the hook.
Much in the same way that apologists like Peter Orzag calls the shredding of the welfare state "progressive," Democrats for Education Reform brand the transmogrification of public education into test-taking factories as "progressive" as well.
What matters to this crowd more so than the real impact of policy decisions on people's everyday lives are the goals of the business class to balance the books. Basically, what we're seeing is rule by spreadsheet - the goal being to make politics, social justice, and human rights subservient to economic calculations that satisfy Wall Street.
Like the welfare state, public education is easily targeted for being "wasteful" when it openly embraces more progressive forms of principles rather than the supposed "strict accountability" of KIPP-inspired test-taking factories. After all, the ends of progressive education are inherently non-quantifiable. What indeed is the economic benefit of opening a child's mind to the broad horizons of human thought and natural diversity? What is to be gained monetarily by educating him or her to stretch the mind toward challenging conventional wisdom? Excel simply won't work this out for you.
The fact that the tidal wave of rule-by-spreadsheet is slamming so obviously on the shores of public schools is not merely coincident. It is formulaic of how the general welfare is being undermined in policy-making across the board.
Like the non-compliant of KIPP schools, only a "miscreant" would have a problem with this.
