Regressive Policy, Brutal Honesty

Virulently regressive, rightwing education policy is attempting to turn back the clock, handicapping all of our children, whose lives move forward not backward.

In American society writ large, recent events involving unarmed black citizens confronted, in some cases without cause, by white police officers that have ended in the gun deaths of the black citizens have turned a national spotlight on institutionalized racism. The election of a black president, far from signaling a post-racist era, has revealed deep and pervasive racism at all levels of society. At the very top, it has exposed the naked, deep-seated racism inherent in American conservatism, particularly among its extreme elements. For example, the association between the Ku Klux Klan and Tea Party radicals has become fixed in American culture, and the Republican Party has not distanced itself from its most regressive bedfellows. Indeed, the opposite often has been the case. In true trickle-down fashion, this regressive radicalism is reflected at state and local levels in increasing blatant ways.

Embedded racist, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic policies in schools are leaving the true public out of public education. Textbook dishonesty is approved policy in states such as Texas, where Moses has been morphed into a Founding Father and the Texas Board of Education has tried to pretend slavery never happened. While Texas frequently is the most egregious example of dishonest education, ideologically driven curricula that depart from fact are common is many states in which rightwing conservatives exert power over education policy. Democratic principles, civic education, science, and racial equality are among the radical taboos.

The brutality of the war being waged in American public education must be met with brutal honesty by educators, parents, and thinking citizens if there is to be any hope of reclaiming American democracy. Blatant, brutal racist actions in recent weeks have turned back the clock on race relations to the civil rights era of the 1960s, and people are responding now as they did then by taking to the streets. A similar activism is now needed to preserve public education, and the pro-education activists will need to be prepared to combat a brutal, no-holds-barred regressive response.

Thoreau reminds us: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Nowhere is this more true than in public education, where we all must mount a vigorous campaign to reclaim our schools for the children they serve, rather than the ideologues who would pervert the course of education for their own selfish ends.

Keep Calm and Carry On

The phrase and its cognates, ironic and otherwise, embody essentially what thinking parents, educators, and concerned citizens must do now that rightwing conservatives have enlarged their stranglehold on the body politic: Keep calm and carry on. This is not the time to slacken efforts to educate not only students in school but also the general public. Centrists and left-leaning liberals have been failing on both counts, and the failure cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the right. Public education is being co-opted, but those who believe in public education as a cornerstone of American democracy have yet to mount a successful resistance.

Beginning in the 1980s the right has consistently coupled denigration of public education with the promotion of nothing less than an ideology of ignorance. As I have suggested in earlier writing, the denigration had its foundation in falsehood, the vastly flawed and deceptive A Nation At Risk report, which set forth a wholly misleading notion that the public schools were—and are—failing. This label of failure has stuck, largely because of repetition in the face of evidence to the contrary. Lies repeated often enough begin to sound like truth, regardless how preposterous. A great many educators, parents, and members of the public, including elected officials, who ought to know better have been lured into the lie and subsequent actions to "fix" the public schools, all of which have resulted in the current state of chaos.

Maintenance of democracy depends on an educated public, and so it follows that it is necessary in order to move the United States toward its current governance status as a corporate oligarchy that the right, those duped by or in the pay of the oligarchs, must foster an ideology of ignorance. Rejection of science—climate change, evolution—is a manifestation. Mass propaganda, often touted as legitimate news, lifts a page from the playbook of every anti-democratic movement in history. Lie to people using words they want to hear and they will do the oligarchs' bidding, no matter how contrary it may be to their self-interest. 

The goal of the ideology of ignorance ultimately is to destroy public education, to sufficiently undermine the people's faith in the people's schools that they will eagerly embrace a balkanized system that resegregates the schools and ensures that socioeconomic status will continue to be the basic determinant of educational success or failure. Increasing wealth disparity in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is maintained in part by ensuring that schools continue to sort rather than educate, a process that is strengthened by the overuse and misuse of standardized tests. Such testing does not, and never will, improve education. It does, however, strengthen a class system of haves and have nots in which "have not" means "never will have."

What to do? Keep calm and carry on is a start, but it's not enough. Here are a couple of ideas. First, let's stop teaching to the test. It merely creates students who are good at taking tests but haven't really learned anything except to hate school. Everyone is better served by a rich curriculum from which satisfactory test scores are a natural outcome. Teaching a rich curriculum is even more essential in the face of limited resources caused by politicians siphoning off public funds to line the corporate pockets of test purveyors and charter school managers, both of which have demonstrably abused the public trust.

Second, let's work harder to educate our citizenry about the necessity for public education that raises people up rather than keeping them down. Public schools should strive to equalize opportunity, not merely provide a source of cheap labor for the corporate grist mills. The absence of this truly public education effort perpetuates the ideology of ignorance and ensures the dominance of the corporate oligarchy as effectively as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and big-money political campaigns.

It's all well and good to sit back with the view that the oligarchs have sown the seeds of their own destruction, and eventually the downtrodden will rise up, a la the French Revolution, and start whacking off a few of the economic aristocrats' heads. (Ironically, the right has ensured through lax gun laws that the downtrodden will be well armed.) But I for one would rather we prove that education, which we claim can be a powerful force for democracy, actually can be used to that end.

Professor Media*

From the broadsheets and banned theater of America’s founding era to TV news, Twitter, and sitcoms today, media have been our professors, teaching us about our world and shaping how we think about and respond to important issues. Mass media are more directly educative for most adults than any type of formal schooling. Increasingly, as the current mania for standardized testing narrows the school curriculum, media also are surpassing classroom teachers as our children’s most influential educators.

This media-education interconnection is complex and often problematic. While media have helped to shape progress on some issues of importance to American democracy, they also have contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression, but it does not ensure truth. Societally reflective sitcoms, for example, have paved the way for progress on social issues, from civil rights to marriage equality. But biased political advertising and propagandistic “news” have contributed to political stagnation and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Media are seductive. We spend hours on “screen time.” Those who control the media well understand that what is portrayed and how it is framed shapes socially shared knowledge. The rise of corporate oligarchy in the United States has been achieved, in part, through concerted propaganda passed off as truth. What this means is that, if we are to reclaim American democracy, greater attention needs to be paid to the educative power of media—and not merely to the traditional forms (movies, radio, television) but to new media that we carry with us in our mobile phones and tablet computers. According to a Pew study last year, one in three Americans gets news through Facebook.** And two-thirds of adult Americans use Facebook.

For media consumers—which means everyone, children and adults—it has never been more important to exercise effective credibility strategies, such as critically examining claims of “truth.” A quote attributed to American economist Thomas Sowell is apt: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” However, such understanding must be taught, not just in schools but through the media themselves.

Principles of journalism must cross all platforms, from sitcoms to news reports. Are “facts” accurate, credible, verifiable, contextually appropriate, and unbiased? Whether the purveyor is a talking head or a comic character, how is “truth” situated? If we subscribe to the biblical admonition that the “truth will set you free,” then we also must invoke the first part of that quotation about “knowing the truth,” which is the real challenge, regardless of the context.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

** http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/

Back When...

“Back when the United States was a democracy” is not a phrase that most Americans have ever hoped to use, but unfortunately the past thirty years has seen the United States slide down a slippery slope from democratic governance to corporate oligarchy. The oligarchs, both named (such as billionaires David and Charles Koch) and unnamed, have managed to create an America in which, like the old saw, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The wealth gap between rich and poor is now worse in the United States than in most of the developed world. A university study* this year concluded that government policies reflect the desires of the wealthy. The authors believe “that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

Who knew during the Red Scare of the 1950s McCarthy era that the Republican Party would become a far greater danger to American democracy than communism? But now that Republican politicians are openly bought and paid for by corporate oligarchs, the United States is well on its way to being merely a democracy by tradition but not in fact. “Conservative” is a meaningless term in that so-called conservatives actually conserve nothing but are bent on the destruction of democracy by every means, from blatant propaganda paraded as news to a mix of legislative action and strategic inaction (witness the current do-nothing 113th Congress on track to pass the fewest substantive pieces of legislation of any congressional session in the past half-century).

Education is a key tool by which radical rightwing, anti-democratic policies are promoted and set in place. The first major effort in this regard was to undermine public education. That effort can be pinpointed to 1983 and the Reagan era “big lie”: A Nation at Risk. In spite of decades-long debunking of this commissioned government report, the message that America’s public schools are failing has persisted, giving rise to successive, largely ill-conceived waves of school “reform.” The report was the opening salvo of what has become endless war, largely promulgated by radically “conservative” Republicans on public schools. Short of an absolute takeover, it has been sufficient merely to sow chaos, to keep schools, teachers, parents, and students off balance and having to respond to rolling assaults, such as every-changing standards and a seemingly endless barrage of mandated tests. All the while, public money for schools is being siphoned off to line corporate pockets, whether in the testing industry or the charter school industry.

Average citizens have been hoodwinked—intentionally set upon by unscrupulous pundits, politicians, and policy makers, all of whom are robbing them blind, literally, as well as robbing average Americans of a prosperous, forward-looking future in a truly democratic nation. While there is still time, though full recovery will take generations, it is essential for parents and educators to reclaim their schools and for American voters to reclaim their democracy—by whatever means necessary. Currently there is a groundswell of opposition to the vast testing movement that has undermined teaching, damaged students and teachers, and stolen public school funds for private gain. This resistance movement needs to be nurtured and to spread. It is a wakeup call that everyone who cherishes this country must hear.

*Gilens, M., and B.I. Page. (2014, April 9). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Pre-publication. Subsequently published in Perspectives on Politics 12(3): 564-581.

Is Resistance Really Futile?

Public school people—teachers to a lesser degree because they have less power, administrators and school boards to a greater degree because they have more power—have collaborated in the assault on public education by policy makers bent on privatizing and corporatizing truly public schools out of existence. Resistance is necessary, though difficult to be sure. But is it futile? I don’t believe so.

What if, for example, school people stopped buying into the notion that school curricula must, in our standardized test-driven era, be reduced to teaching to the test? School “leaders” have forced the operational notion on many classroom teachers—and convinced many parents—that tests measure excellence and, thus, to achieve excellence all teaching must be concentrated directly on succeeding at the tests. In other words, teachers are compelled to teach to the test. Some teachers do this willingly; others are scared not to. This attitude narrows curricula, cutting out important learning and, in fact, diminishing learning in precisely those areas that are the focus of testing.

Simply put, teaching to the test doesn’t work. So why don’t we stop doing that and, instead, teach well-rounded curricula that allow students to excel in areas that truly interest them while gaining the so-called basics that are tested by the invasive, over-priced tests foisted on schools by misguided (and, in some cases, not even well-meaning) policy makers?

Explicating the ills of teaching to the test would take more space than is practical in this blog and so I’ll point readers to two worthwhile articles. The first is “How Standardized Testing Damages Education,” a July 2012 update on FairTest, The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, at http://fairtest.org/. Because international comparisons are so important to policy makers, however ill-conceived and misused such comparisons are, it is worth noting in this report: “The U.S. is the only economically advanced nation to rely heavily on multiple-choice tests. Other nations use performance-based assessment to evaluate students on the basis of real work such as essays, projects and activities. Ironically, because these nations do not focus on teaching to multiple-choice and short-answer tests, they score higher on international exams.”

A second article is Craig Jerald’s “Teach to the Test? Just Say No,” a July 2006 article on Reading Rockets at http://www.readingrockets.org/article/26096. The article is even more pertinent today than it was nearly a decade ago. Jerald writes, “It is time to overturn the common assumption that teaching to the test is the only option schools have when faced with high-stakes testing. Over-reliance on ‘drill and kill’ and test-preparation materials is not only unethical in the long-term but ineffective in the short-term.”

Resistance to the pervasive yet unfounded notion that standardized tests must perforce control curricula and teaching must become a priority of school people. Absent a reassertion that teaching is much, much more than testing—or teaching to the test—public schools will continue along a path to obsolescence and eventual abandonment as thinking parents seek alternatives and rapacious policy makers jump in to offer privatized, corporatized schools that are the antithesis of public education for the common good of American democracy.

Internet Limits Also Limit Learning

Two controversies converge around the issue of access to the Internet, our Information Highway. One involves filtering Internet content in the name of protecting children from the highway’s seamier byways, which has resulted in large measure from the decade-old Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The second hinges on current debates about so-called net neutrality, or the maintenance of equality of access and treatment of data on the Internet, something that some would like to abandon in favor of privileging certain users who can afford to use the fast lane, relegating the bulk of users to the slow lane.

An alarming number of policy makers and school officials are advocating the elimination of school librarians, something so patently short-sighted and ill-advised that it seems incredulous to thinking parents and educators. In the Digital Age the concept of “library” has expanded exponentially. Libraries have never been static repositories, whether of clay tablets, scrolls, printed books, or digital files; and librarians are more essential than ever before in history to order, select, advise, guide, and teach relative to these multimodal resources.

And so it is fitting that the American Library Association in its recent report, Fencing Out Knowledge: Impact of the Children’s Internet Protection Act 10 Years Later (from http://www.ala.org) finds that “over-filtering,” as a result of CIPA, limits legitimate access to educational resources and, according to ALA President Barbara Stripling, “consequently reduces access to information and learning opportunities for students.” This is all the more worrying in light of two current trends, namely, 1) the aforementioned elimination of librarians, who are information-savvy folk prepared to guide the young and uninitiated along the Information Highway and its many byways, and 2) the vast amount of resources now available, sometimes exclusively, on the Internet that cannot be captured or replicated in physical, books-on-shelves libraries, librarians or none.

Education is about access to information, and a too-vigorous attempt to “protect” learners blunts learning. That’s the bottom line.

But it leads naturally to the second controversy. Net neutrality is related to the “common carrier” concept, which in common law countries refers to persons or companies that transport goods or people for the benefit of the general public, in contrast to “contract carriers,” which transport only for certain clients and can refuse transport for others. Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been considering new rules that would permit Internet service providers to use faster lanes of data transmission to favor certain users, namely wealthy corporations.

Blocking or limiting access to Internet content is anathema to education for the common good. Commodifying access by privileging wealthy corporations at the expense of rendering everyone else second class risks substantial educational harm to institutions and individuals and upends the democratic ideals of equity and equality regardless of socioeconomic status and other potentially discriminatory factors.