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:
In compiling the news for this weekly feature on OpenLeft, I find myself straddling two practically parallel worlds of education and the progressive left. And unfortunately neither understands the other very well. You would think that because Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the truly landmark events in the progressive movement, that there would be a permanent synergy between these two communities. But even though the Wall Street Journal seems to believe that teachers and the Democratic Party are grand partners in a money laundering scheme, the reality is that there is disconnect and dysfunction between these two communities that is readily obvious and sorely debilitating to each.
In the world of education, there's a peculiar language that seems impenetrable to outsiders: i3, RTTT, CMOs, Response to Intervention, differentiated instruction. Sides are taken over issues that seem only tangentially related to mainstream news. And not only is "politics" rarely brought up, but any kind of left-right polarity resembling the political world seems sketchy at best. For a profession that you would think would epitomize a progressive outlook - that of cultivating the minds and souls of future generations - educators only occasionally refer to the existence of something "progressive" about their calling, and when they do, it is obscured in some hazy academic debate that happened a long time ago in a university far, far away.
In the progressive left, education is rarely a point of discussion among prominent bloggers and pundits, and when it is, the discussion is usually uninformed or not particularly, well, progressive. A quick glance at the dkosopedia entry for "education" gives you a pretty good idea of the sad state of the progressive left's knowledge of education.
Furthermore, even when the two separate worlds of education and the progressive left intersect, which is all too rare, the cross-over tends to benefit neither.
Why does this matter? It matters to educators because today, more than any other time in recent history, they find themselves to be reduced to pawns in a political war not of their choosing. Unable to practice their profession to the standards they would hold themselves to, fearful of the future of their livelihood, and saddened by the sight of underserved children forced into test-taking factories, they find themselves powerless and without a strong political base to push back against the Washington Consensus that is ruling their world. It matters to the progressive left because how can it profess to be a legitimate force for positive change if it's willing to turn its back on the nation's children - which I've been maintaining in Left Ed that it currently is doing.
Events this week provide the perfect examples of what I'm talking about.
According to the Washington Consensus on public education, all the Serious People agree that the one important "success" of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy was that it had "advantages for low-income and minority students" because it forced states to focus on the interest of these children. This is, of course, utter nonsense.
As Linda Darling-Hammond points out in The Nation, after eight years of NCLB, "the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988," and a "growing share of African-American and Hispanic students" now find themselves in "highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities."
The reality is that no one in DC-land is any more "focused" on addressing the issues of race, income and school reform than they've ever been. Instead, America's first black President is ironically perpetuating America's blindness to the history of racial and socioeconomic inequality in public schools and taking our country in the exact opposite direction of what could create a brighter future for children raised in poverty.
It's true that the political leadership of our country has never openly embraced the connection of race and income to education. But the policies of the Obama administration so fly in the face of what is known about the relationship of race and income to school reform that one has to consider if what is afoot is a concerted attempt to undo any progress that's been made since Brown vs. Board of Education broke the back of racially segregated schools.
A man who worked for the Urban League back in the 60's once told me a story about how people's perceptions are influenced by the powerful in our country. He was working on a project to encourage local business start-ups in a rural black community, and one of their first projects involved setting up an icehouse run by a black family. This was before most poor rural communities had refrigeration, so ice was a necessity that they felt the community would buy into right away. Unfortunately they were wrong, and the business struggled.
What they found was that the blacks in the community continued to purchase their ice on the other side of the tracks at the white-owned icehouse. So they sent a task force back to the neighborhood to interview the locals and ask why they weren't buying their ice from their black-owned neighborhood icehouse. What they were told again and again in their interviews was "the whiteman's ice is colder."
This story is analogous to the way that school reform is being sold to us. Just as ice can be made colder only by its chemical substance being altered, schools can only be made better if the very substance of them - their safety and inclusiveness, the curriculum and instruction, and the involvement and engagement of the community - is altered.
But in the face of this undeniable fact, what we're hearing from the Obama administration is that a strange alchemy of "test scores," "data tracking," and "charter schools" are going to alter the substance of education.
