Emanuele Corso
A new reality is beginning to unfold. This other-reality is inhabited by fabulously wealthy people who want, indeed are compelled, to become even more wealthy, since having all but a tiny percentage of the real world’s income is not quite enough – they apparently want it all.
The May 2011 edition of Vanity Fair reports that 1 percent of the U.S. population takes in 25 percent of all income and holds 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. There is today, it seems, an epidemic of consummate greed by people who profit on everyone else’s losses and who buy politicians with the same ease that normal people buy groceries.
To further their ends, the other-reality hosts pool-side gatherings at plush resorts for ambitious and eager other-reality wannabes to discuss how best to go about achieving their agendas. In these settings the wannabes rub shoulders with the other-reality folks and offer their services and willingness to assist the sponsors in their quest for an even greater slice of the National Pie.
We can only wonder what the rewards can be for providing such assistance. One example, perhaps, of what possibilities might exist is revealed in how Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, cheerfully responded to a caller he thought was one of the multi-millionaire Koch brothers.
Privatizing public education is one potential source of new wealth being explored by the other-reality people. Achieving control of the public education system that has existed, for better or for worse, in the United States for more than a century requires operatives appointed to governmental offices of education willing to carry out the agenda, New Mexico being one such example. Why not start the takeover process with politicians who could use a little financial help with their campaigns provided by “foundations” dedicated to the preservation of democracy?
A little help here and there results in such appointments to public office as I have described above, and pretty soon you are on your way to grading schools and grading teachers and, in the end, the inevitable conclusions that students are failing, teachers are failing and, of course, public schools are failing.
Our only hope then in this scenario is privatization.
If you think the above is exaggeration, please check out the following websites that were provided by a reader of one of my earlier essays, “Hemingway.” I share his annotations here, with my thanks:
“The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) sponsored model bills aiming to privatize public education, eliminate teacher’s unions, and make American universities adhere to the right wing and libertarian viewpoint.
“http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_Teachers
“The Kochs have given ALEC contributions exceeding $1 million—not including a half-million loaned to ALEC when the group had financial problems. The Kochs’ mistrust of public education can be traced to their father, Fred, who ranted and raved that the National Education Association was a communist group and public-school books were filled with ‘communist propaganda,’
“http://www.thenation.com/article/161973/alec-exposed-koch-connection
“Interestingly ALEC was behind the scenes in Wisconsin in the education fight. Read this article by Dr. William Cronin.
“http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/
“This is wrong!”
The Koch Brothers and others of their political persuasion, it should be pointed out, are not, lest we demonize them, the only example of moneyed people financing a social agenda. Money is power, of course, and the willingness to use it for social change has always been with us as a society. Recall the Carnegies and Rockefellers and presently Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and so on, who are using their fortunes to sponsor scientific exploration and the advancement of technology and knowledge and create a safer disease-and hunger-free world.
Who is failing what?
Let’s examine the failing schools agenda and how it is being rationalized for public consumption. Are teachers failing? Who says so and what is their agenda? Watch this exchange between the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a teacher) and a “reporter” from a Libertarian “news” organization:
Teachers seem to have become a favorite soft target for the industrial reformers. Teachers are a convenient target for several reasons including their own unions, which have failed to seize the moment and take control of the narrative.
As an example of the assault on teachers, one of Governor Scott Walker’s first legislative “achievements,” in his opinion at least, was to disenfranchise Wisconsin teachers’ unions. An Aug. 10, 2011 item on the KOAT-TV website details the problems teachers in Albuquerque are going to face with a 7 percent increase in class sizes. And, rest assured these class size increases will result in matching increases in standardized test result failures.
This will be one more blow against the autonomy and authority of classroom teachers, setting them up as scapegoats for politicians. Teachers will be blamed for the failures and the privatization band will strike up its familiar marching tune –Privatize, privatize – Oh the results you’ll see. You won’t believe your eyes!
Tests can also exert a corrupting influence, as we recently saw in the exposure of widespread cheating of No Child Left Behind test results in Atlanta. According to ABC News in reporting the story at the time: “In Georgia, teachers complained to investigators that some students arrived at middle school reading at a first-grade level. But, teachers said, principals insisted those students had to pass their standardized tests. Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators until they felt they had no choice, authorities said.”
In New Mexico, 87 percent of schools fell short in the statewide evaluations. Are schools failing? The best answer is, probably, yes, and for good reasons. Are privatized schools doing better across the board? Not really.
It isn’t that privatized schools, as such, are instruments of some hidden social control agenda. Many are not. The KIPP charter schools, for example, are first-rate. The administrators, teachers and students are motivated. The educational results gained by these schools are excellent, with a high number of graduates going on to college, although I am not in favor of using that as an absolute metric for assessing schools and public education.
But, more importantly, KIPP schools motivate their students to learn. They mentor and develop their teachers in earnest, they engage parents, and they engage children holding their attention for a longer school day and week than public schools do. The “sample daily schedule,” as posted on the KIPP website, gives teachers two hours of prep time between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., during which time they also teach three one-hour classes and get a 40-minute lunch break and an hour for “advisory meetings.”
The hours 3-5 p.m. are a blend of electives, prep and meetings. These particular charter schools are educating children with great success.
However, in spite of all the good these schools the question remains, why can’t public schools do the same? Why can’t the existing public schools system be charged with the same responsibility, given the same resources and accomplish the same results?
Authentic education
I have stressed many times in my essays that education is not a manufacturing process and uniformity is not the objective of authentic learning. There is no such thing on Earth as a “standard child,” and by that reasoning alone standardized testing as the ultimate measure of pedagogical success is false out of the box.
To claim otherwise is to trivialize human nature and human experience – it is, in fact, dehumanizing. To contend that standardized testing is a fair and proper method of assessment betrays a diminished view of humanity and ignorance of the educational process.
The key to authentic education is interest, and when interest is absent, so too is authentic learning. Needless to say, authentic learning and teaching go hand-in-hand, and neither can function when a teacher cannot devote an appropriate amount of time to each learner.
So, when a school system increases class sizes and decreases the number of available classroom teachers, no claim to authentic teaching and learning can be made. This is a prescription for failure writ large.
Class sizes must be adjusted to reasonable levels if effective teaching and learning are to take place. Next, parents must be as fully engaged in the process as they are required to be in the charter school schemes.
In a recent news report about the push to eliminate, by statute, social promotion in New Mexico, Robin Gibson (A fourth grade teacher at Sandia Base Elementary School) said, “… it’s unreasonable to think all students learn at the same pace. Kids are all coming from different backgrounds and we need to work with them and not punish them for something they can’t control.”
So, what is the answer to this push, this fixation, to punish kids who don’t learn at the same rate as test writers think they should? How about doing away with grade levels at the elementary level, and instead setting performance standards for matriculation? So simple.
This is what real school reform needs to be about, the simple recognition that children, just like adults, do not all learn at the same rate.
Next, in the lower grades, do away with the fixation on standardized testing. Tests can certainly be useful as diagnostics (their only real value actually), instruments of policy and policy making, or, just as easily, justification for the privatization of public education.
There are people out there waiting to pounce on failed schools and failed school systems. The hucksters will promise greater instructional success with lower costs and greater uniformity of results across the board. This will be brought to you by people who have social control and profit foremost in mind.
These entrepreneurs can buy with ease politicians and acolytes; the real victims will be children, and the greatest loss will be felt by society itself. Is this the new reality we wish to subscribe to, making rich people richer and, at the same time, impoverishing public education and consequently our children? It will be a hollowing out of the social contract and of our civil society.
These possibilities cannot be taken lightly and certainly cannot be dismissed as paranoid rant – it has happened to other countries and societies throughout history and it can happen in the United States just as easily. It does us well to consider that those who do not remember history are destined to repeat it.
What must we do to make schools safe from privatization and loss of public control? In my opinion, perhaps the most important first step must be to depoliticize public education. This is a matter of grave consequence, as partisan politics have no place in the process of schooling.
Authentic school reforms must be immunized against politicization, commercialization and interference by people whose only qualification is that they have managed to be elected or appointed to public office. Educators must speak out forcefully, defend their expertise and demand control of the process of schooling.
I think class sizes must be held at a level where each child can receive proper attention. How can teachers teach where class sizes clearly exceed any possibility of individualized attention? I cannot emphasize this class size issue too strongly. Each child as a learner is a unique center of experience and each child learns at a rate particular to that child, so how then can any normal human teacher accomplish the level of individualized attention required to instruct each child with large class sizes, and why aren’t parents up in arms over this breech of trust?
Parents must be fully integrated into the educational model as the ultimate source of motivation and discipline. Being educated and being able to test out are two vastly different things. The question is, simply put, what are we after in public education – educated individuals or test-taking automatons?
Emanuele Corso has been a New Mexico resident for over 30 years. Prior to that he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, where he received his doctorate in education policy studies. He taught “Schools and Society” and “School Reform” to graduates and undergraduates. He holds two master’s degrees and a bachelor’s in mathematics. He is currently working on a book, “Belief Systems and the Social Contract,” which he started when he was teaching at Wisconsin. You can find him online at siteseven.net.