Ravitch Thought Experiment

Diane Ravitch today:

Suppose you wanted to destroy public education.

Suppose you wanted to make it so unpleasant to be a teacher or a student in a public school that everyone began to long for a way out. What would you do?

Let’s see. You would subject kids to tests repeatedly to the point that their parents complained bitterly. You would take away art and music, maybe physical education too, to make more time for testing. You would open a few charters, which would scoop up the best students, the strivers, and exclude the troublemakers. You would leave the public schools as refuges for the kids rejected or unwanted by the charters. Wouldn’t it be likely that all the motivated parents would clamor for a way to get their kids out too? Then there would be charters for the “good” kids and the public schools would be the dumping grounds.

Do the same for teachers but in different ways. Threaten them with termination if they don’t comply. Tell them their experience and education don’t count. Tell them their quality will depend on their students’ test scores. Watch their spirits droop as their best students leave for charter schools. Be sure to put non-educators in charge and lecture them regularly about how they are responsible if any child should fail. Snap the whip to keep them on their toes. Never treat them as professionals but as lazy time-servers who need constant reminders of their inadequacy.

In time, public education would be stigmatized and avoided by all who could get away. Is this where Race to the Top is going?

So you might say, why would anyone want to do that? What's the motivation? I don't know, why would anybody want to destroy Medicare or Social Security?

Corporate education reform is brought to you by the same people who are telling you that everything "public" is bad for you. It's brought to you by libertarian and neoliberal market ideologues who think that the only voting with one pocketbook is the only voting that has any real legitimacy, and that the democratic process is bunk. And as we've seen in the Senate, these people are doing whatever it takes to make their fantasy of ineffective government a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I understand that issues surrounding public education are complex and confusing. If you're not paying a lot of attention, it's easy to accept the basic media narrative about "failing schools" and "ineffective teachers", many of the so-called reform ideas might seem reasonable. What's wrong with charters? Why shouldn't parents have a choice? What's wrong with holding teacher's accountable? What's wrong with testing kids. How else are we going to find out if they are learning?

Well, of course, there's nothing wrong with choice, accountability, and assessments, but there are ways to promote those that also support the basic health of public education, and there are ways to do it that profoundly undermine public education. And corporate reform--as it is embodied in Race to the Top and its Republican predecessor, No Child Left Behind, are clearly designed to undermine it. 

I think that the irony of neoliberal market ideology is that it presents itself as 21st century thinking when in fact it is 19th century thinking. It's not Liberalism 5.0; it's Liberalism 3.0. The corporate reformers are trying to turn our schools into industrial age factories, not into the kind of place that prepare kids for the world that will require them to be nimble and adaptive learners.

 

Comments

[Jonathan]

There could be a long conversation about what is the purpose of education. I would like to see such a conversation happen publicly. It is manifestly not happening, despite all the media attention to the so-called educational system (it is anything but a system). The debate just keeps spiraling in hellish circles.

I have no idea what education's purpose is now, in 2013, and I have spent almost my entire life in the educational system, primarily as a student up to the very highest level, but also as an educator of sorts. And I still don't know what it's all about. If the purpose of education is to make nimble and adaptive learners, then I support Dorothy Sayers' contention -- made, by the way, well over half a century ago when all the same debates were raging, at least in the UK -- that a human being should be able to be trained how to learn and how to think straight by no later than the age of sixteen. The fact that the supposedly brightest and most privileged among us are educated almost to the age of thirty --or even beyond! -- and still find themselves under-prepared for the economy or life in general, is an absolute disgrace and should give us cause for some serious soul-searching. I say it again, all this talk of reform will be fruitless unless it leads us back to the most fundamental questions. What is education for? How do we distinguish between these terms: education, culture, training, skills? Why is adolescence being prolonged into the "mezzo del cammin di nostra vita"?

The technocrats could not be doing what they are doing if the general population had any idea at all of what education was for. We are treating education exactly as anyone treats something the use and value of which has been lost sight of. Until we get that sight back (assuming we ever had it, which I highly doubt), the technocrats are sure to win.