Jajuna

I had to chuckle today when I saw this column in the New York Times by David Brooks. It offers heaping praise for Obama’s $4.3 billion dollar “Race to the Top” education program. I was struck by the piece because Brooks so effortlessly refuses to question his own assumptions. Essentially, education secretary Arne Duncan and the federal government have created this fund to reward those states that most enthusiastically embrace what Brooks refers to as “real educational reform”. What this “real reform” signals is more school privatization,  union busting, voucher schemes, and standardized testing.

What really gets Brooks excited though is merit pay. I can understand why. Who doesn’t think good teachers should be rewarded for a job well done? The problem is that whenever it has been attempted historically it has been a miserable failure - breeding a toxic mix of cronyism, resentment, and animosity among teachers. For example, in the school I taught at in Chicago we had “merit pay” which basically meant whoever was “in” with the principle and administration received a bonus (for more on merit pay as well as other insights into the history of school reform see the Tyack and Cuban book “Tinkering Toward Utopia”).

According to Brooks, the integration of merit pay “will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs.” And what would be the criteria for judging the value of a teacher? He states “there is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores.”

Test scores!

Standardized tests are nothing but a bludgeon: a malicious instrument which deadens the talent and creativity of teachers as well as the joy and curiosity of students. In other words, test scores do not, can not, stand as a measure of anything which resembles actual learning.

This quote more or less gets at the political resonance of all this:

“I’ve been deeply disturbed by a lot that’s going on in Washington,” Jeb Bush said on Thursday, “but this is not one of them. President Obama has been supporting a reform secretary, and this is deserving of Republican support.”

The republicans love Arne Duncan and his version of “reform” because it continues the trend set by the Bush administration to treat education as an adjunct of the corporate state. This means more teaching to the test, more punitive accountability schemes, and the perpetuation of corporate managerial frameworks, economic values, workforce discipline, and business interests - not too mention opening the public education sector to huge profits. For an account of what is deeply wrong with this agenda check out this article by Mark Slouka in Harper’s Magazine. It is a deeply prescient critique of the current corporate led regime of school reform and a brilliant defense of the liberal democratic tradition in public education. This quote is emblematic:

What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.

In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.

That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.

The evidence is mounting that the health care reform bill will not include a public option. As reported today by Democracy Now, a recent Business Week article entitled “The Health Insurers Have Already Won” suggests that the medical-industrial complex, in collusion with their anti-democratic right-wing allies, have managed to shape the health reform debate to such a degree that it is all but certain that the Obama administration and the democrats (many of whom are also owned by big pharma and health insurance corps) will cave on the public option. Here is a qoute from the article:

The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling.

As insightfully outlined by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, this reform agenda is shaping up to be nothing more than a corporate sham and an utter disgrace to democracy. It represents an absolute indifference to the public good by both the Obama administration and the democrats. If they abandon a public option there will be nothing in place to keep the insurance companies honest and will guarantee trillions of dollars funneled directly from taxpayers into government subsidies for the health insurance companies. The abandonment of a public option will thus enable the further upward redistribution of wealth from the public to the private and is painfully indicative of the steady erosion of the American democratic project. I fear it also signals the looming failure of the Obama presidency.

In the newest edition of Rethinking Schools Fred McKissack reminds us that while Obama’s election marks an historic moment for racial justice in America it far from signals the achievement of a post-racial society.

From his article:

Exactly how can we be in post-racial America when nearly 40 percent of black children under the age of 5 live at or below the poverty line? How are we in post-racial America when the level of school segregation for Latinos is the highest in 40 years and segregation of blacks is back to levels not seen since the late 1960s? How are we in post-racial America when the gaps in wealth, income, education, and health care have widened over the last eight years? In 2006, 20.3 percent of blacks were not covered by health insurance, compared to only 10.8 percent of whites. For Latinos, a whopping 34.1 percent were not covered. In 2007, the unemployment rate for blacks was twice as high as that for whites. We are all Americans, but the pain of poverty is disproportionately cracking the backs of minorities. There are those who insist that the gap in wealth, income, health care and education is due to an inherent culture of victimization. If people of color only worked harder, they’d be fine, we are told. But it’s a flawed premise. This economy has never provided enough jobs for everyone. The funding of education gives a leg up to those who grow up in wealthy districts. Lack of health insurance is a necessity for those without the means. And institutional racism persists. Now is not the time to avert our eyes from the prize. Indeed, the nation needs to refocus its attention on tearing down the walls that keep us from living in a truly post-racial America.

If we are to “tear down the walls that keep us from living in a truly post-racial America” then we will have to radically recommit to the ideals of public education in a democratic society. This is why Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan marks such a dangerous moment for the future of race, education, and democracy in America. Which path will the new ed secretary follow? The path of privatization, high-stakes tests, and zero-tolerance instituted in Chicago? Now is not the time for more market driven solutions to social problems. If we are to realize the promise of a more egalitarian multicultural society where all children are afforded the same life chances regardless of race, class, and gender then foremost on the politcal agenda must be to institute broad-based progressive reforms for public education. Its up to us to push Obama and Duncan down this path.

Currently there is  a growing mobilization of corporate interests who view the excessive emphasis on rote-learning and high-stakes testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act as harmful to workforce development. Enter the 21st Century Skills coalition whose board of directors is made up of representatives from some of the most powerful corporations in the United States. This network has developed an educational framework which they are pushing on individual states and are agressively lobbying to make official policy under the Obama administration.

At its root the 21st century Skills partnership represents a pro-corporate plan for education which advocates widening curricular mandates in order to produce more entrepreneurial, flexible, and creative workers. On the surface the proposals may strike some as representing much needed progressive reforms, for instance the skills framework calls for media and civic literacy programs. However, when one spends any amount of time reading the policy papers  of 21st Century Skills their agenda appears far from civic oriented. Instead, it promotes the privatization of public education and the commercialization of curriculum. For those concerned with the direction of public education under the Obama adiministration, the 21st Centruy Skills partnership is definitely an entity to start monitoring.