Not All Politicians Are Elected

It may seem as though I am painting all politicians with a broad stroke, and indeed I am, with some justification. Public education is under attack, as it has been arguably since the 1980s. Rightwing politics is the politics of privatization and corporatization; and that ethos has dominated across elected governing bodies, from local school boards to state legislatures to the halls of Congress, for forty years. So-called local control has not ensured that public schools operate for the common good because local governance, even when a community’s elected officials are centrist or liberal in orientation, often is overwhelmed by regulations laid down at higher levels and mired in the multilayered bureaucracy by which they are enacted.

Local school bureaucracies are as much to blame for the woes of public education as is the distant machinery of state and federal entities. Superintendents and lower-rank administrators often rise in the profession because they are politically savvy, rather than because they are knowledgeable about education or committed to public schools that truly serve their local community. The common law phrase “in loco parentis” has been applied to teachers, in particular, and other persons or organizations who function “in the place of a parent.” I suppose the phrase “in locum a legislatore” might equally apply to a superintendent or other bureaucratic functionary who serves “in the place of a legislator.” I have written previously that school leaders need to stop viewing themselves as vassals of the state and instead reclaim their intended role as servants of their local community.

Parents and teachers are justifiably frustrated when they see firsthand the demise of learning and the destruction of potential among their children and students because local leaders, instead of listening to and acting on community concerns, are marching to the faceless corporate cadence of distant masters. For example, testing instead of teaching is a counterproductive strategy if real learning is the goal. But that’s a big “if.” Learning for too many politicians is not the goal at all; control is. And money pays for control. Public education is expensive, and more and more public money is being funneled into private enterprises where a significant portion is used to line politicians’ pockets to keep them voting “right,” which is invariably counter to the common good.

The simple solution—though one that is hard to attain—is to vote out those politicians at every level who act contrary to public will and the common good. But that’s not really enough. Local communities also need to root out bureaucrats who work “in locum a legislatore” and by so doing fail to serve the public that employs them.

Truth Teaching

An ugly truth about American public education is that Truth, writ large, has become an endangered subject. Schools have always had to battle censors and would-be censors, from the library to the classroom to the computer lab. Overprotective parents, bureaucrats, politicians, and others have long sought to control what students learn, often by denying teachers and students access to factual information. Free speech has never been free in school. The problem is getting worse, not better.

Let’s talk racism, for example. It’s a big example because racism touches every aspect of our social fabric and therefore every aspect of the school curriculum, ranging from underrepresentation—of authors of color in literature anthologies or libraries and lack of attention to historic figures who didn’t happen to be white—to outright misrepresentation. An example of the latter is a recent Texas decision, as reported in the Washington Post:

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

Furthermore, Texas school children are supposed to be taught that slavery was a “side issue” to the Civil War.

It’s easy to pick on subjects like literature and social studies where Truth has gone missing. But consider the compulsory over-testing of English and math skills that has pushed other subjects to the curricular fringe or over the edge entirely, such as music, art, civic education, and any sort of practical training—what we called in olden times home ec and shop. The truth is that the world of work, the world of human endeavor, does not rely merely on the ability to bubble in correct answers about standard prose and basic arithmetic. Turning our young into test-taking automatons is hardly an effective strategy for reaching the vaunted goal of “college and career readiness,” the latest in a legion of empty education reform mantras.

Racism is largely absent because it is, to use Al Gore’s pet phrase, inconvenient truth. Moreover it is a truth that is as plain as the nose on your face, to pile on another cliché. But it is a truth that must be ignored if we are to keep our future citizens in ignorance. And that is precisely what the rising rightwing proto-fascists (to borrow Henry Giroux’s term*) want in order to solidify and expand much of the political power they have already grabbed.

The threads of racism run through the social fabric of our country: in the wealth gap, in voter suppression, in subtle and not so subtle redlining and sundowning, in the grading of schools to reinforce the negative effects of poverty, in police brutality directed against blacks, in the over-population of our prisons with nonwhite inmates, and so much more. If we cannot teach this inconvenient truth, then we can never hope to change.

Writing in a recent article** Henry Giroux commented, “The United States has become a country that is proud of what it should be ashamed of.” That sentence calls to mind all of the recent waving of the Confederate battle flag by “patriots” hiding behind “heritage” to flaunt their fundamental racism.

Truth. How inconvenient.

Where are the rebels in our classrooms, our administrative offices, our school board meetings, our parent associations, our legislative bodies, who are willing to speak truth not merely to power, but to our children who deserve it most?

*Henry A. Giroux. Proto-Fascism in America: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy, 2004.

**Henry A. Giroux. “The Racist Killing Fields in the U.S.: The Death of Sandra Bland.” TruthOut, July 19, 2015.

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.

Common Core: 4. Aren't We Already "Globally Competitive"?

CCSS leaders want a national curriculum so that all students in the future “will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.” The underlying message is that students—and, by extension, the United States—are not able to do so now, a conclusion that has little foundation. Let’s look at this conclusion from two perspectives.

First, critics of education often point to disparities between the performance of U.S. students and their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere on international achievement tests, such as PISA, which is administered in more than fifty countries. The lower U.S. ranking, say critics, is evidence that American students are not “globally competitive.”

However, there is a strong correlation between student achievement and family background, with socioeconomic status being a key factor in student achievement as measured by standardized tests of all sorts. Students disadvantaged by poverty do predictably poorer, as a group, on measures of academic achievement. Schools universally, not only in the United States, are relatively powerless to change this fundamental dynamic. When PISA results are controlled for SES, the ranking of U.S. students is considerably higher.

Finland, for example, is often cited for ranking far above the United States in student achievement as measured by PISA. However, in Finland only 1 in 25 students lives in poverty compared to 1 in 5 in the United States, according to Duke University professor Helen F. Ladd (in Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence, Working Paper Series SAN11-01, November 4, 2011).

The Common Core standards do not take into account the effects of SES on teaching and learning. CCSS is top-down policy, and as Ladd points out, “while education policy makers have direct control over school quality, they have less control over educational outcomes because of the role that context—and particularly the family background of the students—plays in shaping educational outcomes.” Adopting the Common Core is likely not to make any difference in American students’ ability to be “globally competitive” for this reason.

Second, there is little evidence that America is not already globally competitive. Put aside the rhetoric of politicians, pundits, and policy wonks who decry our so-called failing schools, and the cold evidence is that the goal of becoming globally competitive by promoting a top-down, “rigorous” curriculum is largely disingenuous. By the numbers the United States is far from being a poor global competitor. Internationally known scholar Yong Zhou (http://zhaolearning.com) runs the numbers this way, drawing on a variety of authoritative sources:

• Japan, which was expected to overtake the U.S. because of its superior education in the 1980s, has lost its #2 status in terms of size of economy. Its GDP is about 1/3 of America’s. Its per capita GDP is about $10,000 less than that in the U.S.

• The U.S. is the 6th wealthiest country in the world in 2011 in terms of per capita GDP. It is still the largest economy in the world.

• The U.S. ranked 5th out of 142 countries in Global Competitiveness in 2012 and 4th in 2011.

• The U.S. ranked 2nd out 82 countries in Global Creativity, behind only Sweden in 2011.

• The U.S. ranked 1st in the number of patents filed or granted by major international patent offices in 2008, with 14,399 filings, compared to 473 filings from China, which supposedly has a superior education.

Comments Zhao, “Obviously America’s poor education told by the numbers has not ruined its national security and economy.”

The key factor that the Common Core leaders have failed to take into account is poverty and how SES affects teaching and learning. Ladd, cited earlier, suggests that “strategies designed to address the educational needs of low income children will cost money, could be complex and undoubtedly will need to differ from place to place depending on the local context.”

The Common Core State Standards contain no provision for responding to “local context.” Such rigidity will ill serve students everywhere.