In last week's installment of Left Ed, I held up Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress as the prime example of how off-base, even anti-progressive, the leadership on the left is in the education debate. I pointed out how his Washington Post op-ed - a supposed "defense" of public school funding - actually does more damage to public schools by perpetuating the rightwing frame that America's system of public education is broken and "lagging" behind the rest of the developed world. I explained why Miller's interpretation of the results from the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, reveal how little the DC-centric leadership on the left understands about the strengths and weaknesses of the nation's education system. And I concluded that rather than accepting, as Miller does, the rightwing frame that America's public schools are "broken," and giving credence to irrelevant and erroneous yet popular conventional wisdom about education "reform," it's time for people on the real left to take the advice of George Lakoff and "shift the frame" of how the media communicates about public education.
This tendency of the leadership of the Democratic party to start political debates from a rightwing frame and then resort to the very same erroneous "data" that conservatives use as supporting evidence unfortunately is now often seen in the conventional media as "progressive," as evidenced by edublogger Alexander Russo, who called Miller's advice something from "angry ideal-less progressives."
Instead of fighting for progressive ideals, however, what Miller and the CAP are doing is, to quote Lakoff, "surrendering in advance." Real progressives know what this looks like on economic policy. A progressive economic policy argues that alleviating economic disparity is a moral and practical imperative and producing serious economic stimulus during a recession is more important than reducing the deficit. So why does Obama begin the debate with a compromise with conservatives on tax cuts for the wealthy and concerns about reducing the deficit? Because Obama, like so many others populating our nation's capital, is a sell-out to what Lakoff calls, "the superior message machine" that conservatives wield, which states that "deficits" are evil and "reduced taxes for everyone" are always good.
In the education debate, the message machine is 100 percent owned by the forces of the anti-progressive. Public schools are "broken" and "lagging behind" the rest of the world, the problem is "bad teachers" (and who among us hasn't had a bad teacher?), rigid standards enforced by high-stakes testing are the solution, and the force of the "free market" - in the form of nationwide charter school franchises and increased privatization - must be unleashed to lead the way to a brighter future.
Backed by billions in funding from philanthro-capitalists, fed with report after report of objective sounding BS from well-endowed think tanks, and animated in powerful media channels like Oprah, NBC "news," and Waiting for Superman, the anti-progressive message machine in the education debate has achieved near-hegemonic predominance.
Like Yertle the Turtle, it's time for progressives at the bottom of the heap to start speaking out. But the pushback can't be focused merely on negating the anti-progressive arguments. "That will only make their arguments more prominent", as Lakoff explans. Instead, the pushback has to be focused on building a "movement" based on some very basic and understandable moral "truths," such as equality, empathy, and human rights.
So, confronted with the current landscape in the media, what would a more progressive side in the education debate be saying?
This week, as the progressive blogosphere seethed in resentment over President Obama's cave-in to Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy, at least one commentator linked the debate over tax policy to education reform.
It was depressing enough when the president caved on extending $120 billion in tax cuts for the highest-earning 2 percent of Americans at a time of war and surging debt. As proof of White House fear and timidity, and Republican greed and myopia, the news doesn't get much worse.
That's $120 billion over two years that won't go to boost job creation. Nor will it fund a portion of the $300 billion we'll spend on wars during same period - instead, we'll borrow that abroad and hand the bill to the kids. Worse, none of that cash will be available to lure America's top young talent to the classroom by finally making teaching a prestigious, well-paying career.
Oops - I forgot - no one in the tax and budget talks was talking about transforming the teaching profession as part of America's long-term economic recovery plan. After all, that would mean thinking beyond 2012. Yet the education world was rocked Tuesday when students in Shanghai, in that city's debut on a respected international test, outscored dozens of other countries in math, science and reading.
The "respected international test" that Miller is referring is, of course, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, and the supposed stunner about this year's results is that PISA ranked American school kids 23rd or 24th in most subjects while students in the city of Shanghai outscored the rest of the world.
Miller laments how this is yet another "grim reminder of our lagging schools" and concludes that the argument about taxes and school improvement needs to be re-framed into one where retreats on tax cuts need to be equated to our deteriorating education system. In his call to arms, he exhorts the education reform movement's famed poster-person, Michelle Rhee, to lead the charge:
As part of her newly launched advocacy group, Students First, former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee should take these scary new findings to editorial boards, business groups and PTAs in every state. Only when enough of us wake up to the fact that we're losing badly in today's global education race will we have a hope of getting serious about turning things around.
Although Miller's thinking might strike many on the left-end of the political spectrum as sensible and logical - i. e., tax cuts for the rich = less money to improve our deteriorating schools - his argument will actually be quickly and summarily dispensed with in the broader debate. And it should be.
