Jack Rothman.
Co-authored by Amy Rothman, psychotherapist and
mediator in Los Angeles
American education just received another beating.
This one came in a December report from the Program for international Student
Assessment (PISA). While the United States is the top economic and military
power globally, once again our 15-year-olds scored below average in math and
only middling in science and reading. American students did not make it into
the top 20 on any of these tests across the 65 participating nations.
American education has been under constant
criticism since the middle of the last century. A galaxy of reforms has been
mounted to address the issues, but these have not produced noticeable results.
We live in a permanent environment of educational reform and educational
failure. The reforms focus on fixing things within the schoolhouse, but the
fundamental problem that needs fixing lies outside in the broader society.
Diane Ravitch's recent book, Reign of Error,
gives a thorough and well-researched review of our educational plight and can
serve as a field manual on reform issues. In the book she excoriates the
privatization movement she once championed, decrying charter schools, vouchers,
"Race to the Top" testing, numeric accountability, and the rest. She
believes privatization, under the guise of choice, seeks to neuter teachers'
unions, use test scores to fire teachers, and shut down overwhelmed public
schools. To Ravitch, this reform isn't aimed as much at improving public
schools as it is at replacing and Walmartizing them. It is a type of reform
that hedge fund investors drool over because it provides an unending pool of
potential customers to fill the pockets of corporate executives.
Ravitch favors an alternative approach, growing
from her belief that poverty and racial segregation are the "root
causes" of our educational woes. She points out that wealthy kids as a
group invariably get higher test scores than poor kids do, and her educational
proposals are designed to lift up schools for kids who are disadvantaged. Some
planks of her program include prenatal care for mothers, universal pre-school,
high quality after-school and summer programs, and smaller teacher-student
ratios. These sound like familiar liberal reform proposals, but apparently her
aim is to make them more real and muscular.
While these are valiant efforts to address our
education muddle, they miss truly addressing the root causes that Ravitch
herself names. The large and pressing issue we face is the vast socio-economic
disparity, including racial inequity, that exists within our society and the
effects that this disparity has on the lives of our children.
It is apparent that kids from the middle classes
and above grow up in an environment that is vastly more conducive to academic
success. These kids live in communities where they have books at home and
parents available to read to them. Language and ideas expressed around the
kitchen table are an aid to learning. The family presses on kids the value of
getting an education. There is a reasonable amount of privacy and a comfortable
space to study and do homework. Kids are taken to museums and enrolled in
private classes that teach art, music, and even cooking. These children have
many models of educated professional and business people around them and the
probability if getting a good job after completing school is a visible reality.
The contrast with kids from inner-city
communities is stark. These children are often surrounded by drug dealers, they
worry about getting shot while walking to school, and face continuing pressures
to join a gang. As a matter of course, they experience teen girls on the block
who are unwed mothers and have siblings who are incarcerated. Their streets
reek of blight and the buildings are adorned with graffiti. Their families
struggle to survive economically each day -- rationing their food stamps,
working long hours at two menial jobs, or traveling to work at a long distance
on public transportation. Unemployment is a constant specter. The inner city is
where the injuries of class and race disadvantage intertwine and the greatest
educational challenges lie. Of course, strong families and indigenous
institutions exist here and some kids come through with flying colors. But at
the risk of caricaturing, the consequences of persistent racism ought not be
downplayed
Fine teaching does little good when children are
hungry, sick, scared, lacking preparation, or worn down by atrocious life
circumstances. Giving disadvantaged kids iPads, attempting to boost their
self-esteem, or letting their parents choose a charter school doesn't overcome
the cumulative detriments dished out from living at the poverty level. To add
insult to injury, in wealthier districts, parents and residents boost the
budgets and augment the programs of schools through taxes, fund-raising, and
political influence.
Liberal educational reforms that focus on
correcting in-school problems -- but avoiding confronting the broader,
deeply-rooted reasons for our education failures -- are a flimsy effort.
Ravitch, at one point in her book says, "We know what works... opportunities
that advantaged families provide for their children." But her prescription
does not begin to budge the economic reality and living experiences of
disadvantaged families. It comes over as a fantasy.
Reform notions fall short because of an inability
to acknowledge that our market-driven economic system generates the inequality
that is crippling our children and dampening our schools. Ravitch notes that,
"Public education is in a crisis only so far as our society is... Without
a vision for a better society.. any talk of reform is empty verbiage." But
reformers will not name the deep crisis of our society and, even more, the real
economic remedies needed to overcome it.
In his powerful apostolic exhortation, Pope
Francis condemned "unfettered capitalism" as the villain in the
piece. He asserted, "As long as the problems of the poor are not radically
resolved... by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will
be found for the world's problems." And that includes education.
To "radically resolve" inequality, an
economic structure is needed that at core promotes cooperation and parity,
rather than one that at core fosters competition and inequality. There are
alternatives to consider along these lines -- structures that support economic
justice, such as worker democracy and control, consumer cooperatives, social
democratic policies, and democratic socialism. There are also more immediate
incremental policy options, like a living wage for all, widespread affordable
housing, cheap or free college education, single payer, and not-for-profit
health insurance- things that work against a 1 percent concentration of wealth
and for a better apportionment of our national resources among citizenry.
Most change, whether on a personal or societal
level, is unnerving at first because we cling to what we know to avoid facing
anxiety about the unknown. But as long as the realities of societal inequality
are obscured in the reform discourse, the public loses a chance to understand
what is missing in what has been done and what solutions down the road can make
a real difference in our educational predicament. Until educational reformers
are willing to expand their dialogue to include attacking inequality head-on,
we will continue to use narrow and ineffectual strategies that produce
frustration and failure.
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