What the so-call ed Education Reform is all about

The goal of No Child Left behind and all the so-called allied state education reform is to bring all of public education under corporate control. This is not a conspiracy. It is clear, straight-forward and unabashed. Every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has endorsed it. President Obama heralds "We must ensure that our students will be able to compete in the global economy" almost every time he talks about education. All such endeavors to undermine democracy begins by scaring the shit out of us 

This one began with a corporate created presidency- the now exalted Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as you may remember appointed a commission - The Commission on Educational Excellence - and that Commission issued a report, A Nation at Risk, That report, in its second paragraph evoked terrifying images associated with McCarthyism.

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.                       

Overblown, pompous, ridiculous, But this is America and stupidity sells. Especially if pitched here, there and everywhere.

David Berlinger and Bruce Biddle, two highly regarded scholars, responded with the careful and measured The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools. (1994). They acknowledged weaknesses and needs to improve in US public school, but in the main they attacked the report for its sloppy research and over the top criticisms and thus missed the point completely. What has to be understood is that the entire premise is pure unadulterated bullshit.

What is fraudulent is the notion that US workers compete with Japanese, Chinese, Finnish or any designated others someplace or somehow in that misty and mysterious global economy. There, they are supposed to square off as George W Bush's challenged his father, "mano a mano." Such competition has never ever existed. Nor is it likely to. What such palpable nonsense does is deflect attention away from the real problems in the economy (and also in education). It is not "mediocre educational performance that caused the 30 year depression of wages through a never ending loss of decent jobs replaced with an even larger number of poverty jobs –minimum wage with no opportunity for upward advancement – creating the illusion the economy was doing just fine. What Democrat doesn't proudly exalt over the 22 million jobs created during the Clinton administration, either omitting or not knowing that more than half of those jobs were "lousy" jobs and were plunging the country along the path leading to its collapse.

Today, when hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost every month, one company, Walmart, currently employing well over 1 percent of everyone who works in the United States has a work force that is growing while almost all other firms and public agencies are going in the opposite direction. However, it should be noted that very, very few people can raise a family from what they earn at Walmart. It is the Walmarts (MacDonalds, Holiday Inns, et al.) phenomenon that brought about this recession/depression. We collapsed because more and more families unable to live on what they made were forced to rely on an ever accelerating debt, When the housing market came tumbling down Jack, Jill and a lot of other folks were no longer able to refinance to go further in debt to buy what they did and didn’t need. That meant stores couldn't sell and the spiral characteristic of a depression began. Pretty simple. Far too complicated for the likes of Ann Coulter. But then, what isn’t.

Back to the corporate takeover of education which is really an integral part of the corporate takeover of the entire political economy. The goal of those in control is to concentrate wealth in ever fewer hands at the expense of everyone else. What had to be denied and not given any opportunity to gain credibility was the idea that such concentration of wealth in so few had negative consequences for the many. That concentrating wealth in so few is toxic - toxic for the environment, toxic for the economy, toxic for politics, toxic for a democracy - had to be kept from the public. It was not that the emperor had no clothes. He had plenty as well as jewelry, and automobiles and yachts, and lots of houses and all kinds of whatevers. The more than amply clothed emperor was poisoning the well, but that could not be told, And if attempted, a plethora of loud mouth buffoons spewed the airways with ignorance and bigotry to overwhelm truth. The very same people who could say, in response to a puny effort to limit wages of CEOs receiving government bailout money that "$500,000 is not much money" also could say in actions louder than words 'a livable wage for all striving to meet adult responsibility is far too much.' What they don't want to have said is that it is impossible to concentrate so much money in so few hands without destroying the viability of the economy. This is even more powerfully true if the economy and the environment are to be reconciled.

What this has to do with education should be quite clear. The last thing in the world the corporate dominated economic and political process could tolerate would be an independent public school in which students would be encouraged to learn how the world really works. However, to say out "Mama don't allow no thinking done in here (public schools)" would generate a huge outcry and who knows what else, Keep in mind that Gallop after Gallop poll revealed that a great majority of parents were satisfied with the education their children received and there are a lot of those parents. Fifty million children go to public schools everyday. Imagine what would happen if these 50 million (and their parents) understood democracy, economics and the principles of organizing. That could not be permitted to happen. Indicators of that possibility surfaced in the 1960s. The civil rights movement energized students. Martin Luther King Jr. was moving to extend his movement in the direction of peace and the elimination of poverty. There was threat, vague and not yet fully organized or even conceptualized, but a threat nonetheless. No better way to nip it in the bud and recapture the initiative than to find a way to takeover a school system that was generally well accepted and for a great many actually appreciated.

To do that it was necessary to connect to some deep seated fear. What better way than to scream to the heavens that our teachers had conspired against us. Dark forces had taken over school systems. Big bad unions were in control and were undermining competence. What could be more frightening than raising the specter that the people in control of our schools to whom we entrusted our most precious resource, our children, were stealthily undermining America. When we were not watching they had managed to replace our wonderful school system with a “mediocre” one, so terrible that as a consequence, our economy, that which sustains our good life is being destroyed. The Attack of the Treasonous Teachers was worse even than the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Much worse, our whole future was endangered. By God. this “mediocre” education is “an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” implying that everyone else is arming and we are ‘naked before our, if not enemies, certainly our competitors.’ Good cold war talk. Always works. The attack on education was not based on any real threat from abroad or anywhere else. But one had to be concocted if schools were to be brought under corporate control. The same kind of corporate control now established over media and to a very large extent over the political process.

To provide a basis for concern there needed to be a focus and mathematics (and to a slightly less extent science) provided that focus. Mathematics became the hysterical element in this advertised reform, more accurately, the hostile right-wing deform of education – that is what I called it in its infancy when I was on the Santa Cruz School Board. That is what is was in the 1980s and that is what it is today as it has gathered more and more momentum and given enthusiastic support from those who should know better. It was not “The British are coming.” But ”Our kids don’t know algebra!” “Our kids don’t know algebra!”

Why math? For one thing it is easier to measure mathematic competence than say English. Hell, would you believe some countries don’t even speak English (And we should certainly do something about that). Science has problems. A lot of anti-science sentiment percolates among political allies. No one was against algebra. It wasn’t like evolution or even global warming. God was okay with it. Liberty University teaches it. And we would hardly want to begin to probe into social studies, particularly if we are truly interested in preparing docile workers rather than informed and engaged citizens. In the 1960s when students started to get engaged in citizenship they had to be shot down. This is a lot less messy.

So it came down to math. WE ARE LOSING IN MATH. Year after year students in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, even Finland, especially Finland, beat up US students in math. It was implied that just about everybody of importance is humiliating us. Do you realize what that means? Before long all of those countries will be lording it over us, just because we don’t know our algebra.

That does seem serious. We are losing in algebra. We are losing in an algebra that 90 percent of us will never use at work or anywhere else. Such an indignity is something we really need to get worked up about. I mean lets get real here. If we don’t take a stand here it won’t be too long until countries like Japan and Cuba will beat us in the “American Past Time” - baseball. They do? Just goes to show you. However, if math is that important how come we don’t making passing algebra a requirement for holding public office? Or for making a comment on Fox news? Already I like the idea better.

How bad is it really? Just where do we stand in the world? To find out we go to TIMSS  which stands for Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study  and it,  “provides data about trends in mathematics and science achievement over time.” So lets look at how our 8^th graders did in 2007 in math, more than 50% of which was devoted to algebra and geometry.

At the eighth grade, the average U.S. mathematics score was higher than those of students in 37 of the 47 other countries, lower than those in 5 countries (all of them located in Asia) and not measurably different than those in 5 countries.

Well that certainly proves we are in big trouble.. The five countries whupping us were Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. No China because China doesn’t do TIMSS. The ones not much different from us were Hungary, England, Russia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. We were well ahead of Australia, Sweden, Norway and Israel. Finland apparently sat this one out. And before getting all excited and concluding this pretty good showing demonstrates the benefits of the deform movement. Sorry to disappoint. In 1995, although a bit lower we were pretty much in the same position. Beaten by the usual suspects - the Asians - and holding our own with everyone else. Hungary, Sweden and the Czech republic were superior in 1995 but all dropped significantly since then. Must be all those “mediocre” teachers we sent over on exchange programs.

We are losing in Math to the same kind of kids that are beating us here. Check out the scores of Japanese youth whose ancestors immigrated here and compare them with those that stayed at home and see what you get. Same with Chinese except as previously mentioned China doesn’t let its students do TIMSS. However, Taiwan, Hong Kong (which is now part of China) and Singapore (which is essentially a Chinese City) do. When comparing the students there and their relatives here we find they beat us with their education there and with our education here. So our education is only “mediocre” for some of our students. Go figure

Does that mean our students do not need math? Of course not! But the math they don’t need is the math that is crammed down their throats with no emphasis on utility and organized for a work world in which fewer than 10 percent will ever use. They don’t need an externally developed proscriptive curriculum imposed on teachers and students. They don’t need the math presented as a series of topics with insufficient time for any cognitive consolidation. They don’t need exponential function one week, permutations and combinations the next, measures of central tendency the next, quadratic equations the week after. After which come the tests and the suffering the consequences. This is called, by those expert in deception, “Standards”and “Accountability.” Do as demanded or be denied graduation or access to the credential society. And as more and more students failed, the answer was to add more courses, rather than examine why it is that students were rejecting the math they were being taught.

The mathematics scare is a big con game - the excuse to put public schools into a straitjacket. The real purpose is control from afar by reducing teachers to robots and shriveling the intellect of students. Stripped of its deceptive rhetoric the intent of a corporate controlled education is to produce docile, unthinking workers by denying students the true benefits of an education that would focus on cognitive development and on a rich and nuanced understanding of how the world works. A world, regardless of math courses passed and SAT test scores, the vast majority merely by reaching 18, will assume responsibility for its stewardship. In fact, what those students know and probably, more appropriately what they don’t know will determine whether we as a species survive. Unless, of course you believe that a corporate controlled government is capable of solving species threatening problems and producing a sustainable society with, to coin a phrase, ‘liberty and justice for all.’ If you do, there is a bridge I would like to sell you. Oh, you already bought it.

Let's be clear here, control over public schools have always been politically contested. Usually the economically dominant did the controlling, but not always  and not the same in different places or at different times. Nor was the goal - docility - so narrowly defined. As previously noted the 1960s  provided a glimpse of what could happen when the economically dominant were seriously challenged. What makes the current situation different is that there is no serious opposition to corporate control and it is now centralized,  eliminating any possible local challenges. The circle is closing and tightening, The logical consequence of corporate control over education is total elimination of any manifestation of democracy. Hopefully something to think about before it is too late.

Enough of this bleakness. The next blog deals a much more pleasant possibility - democratic education.