Epigraph: “At the present time, public education is in peril.” – Diane Ravitch, The Birth and Death of the Great American School System, 2010
I call it deprogramming, Ronald Reagan would have loved it. Every teacher knows what I mean, whether they call it that or not. To be a teacher is to be constantly and completely bombarded by all of the other stakeholders with nonsensical impossibilities that neither solve problems nor help educate.
This year my deprogramming, that is, recovering from the burdens of teaching, has been an outlier in the sense that in only my first year teaching, had I accumulated as much stress. The pressures of existing as a solitary cog in a cheap, poorly oiled machine predictably contribute to the droves of teachers on their exodus from the profession. It’s but part and parcel of America’s educational crisis. The latest saga is playing out in the Houston Independent School District between a decades-old GOP privatization playbook and a genuine & honest educational system designed for all communities.
Thanks to my aforementioned period of psychological dissociation – time I’ve had to return to being human – I’ve finally found the time and energy to give an account. What follows is applicable to almost any state in the country – a piece of the playbook, if you will.
Is it the age of wisdom, or the age of foolishness? The dichotomy breaks along clear lines between two camps and they are not created equal. It’s a classic Tale of Two Cities, the Two Americas, a real rock-and-a-hard-place situation. In education it looks like a political push for privatization and charter schools; or what the Victorian England of Dickens’ time called “ragged schools.” There is one school system for the payer and one for the pauper. One for the children of the Empire and one for the Palestinians. The minority in this dichotomy is a shabby political force that is overtly wealthy, fundamentalist, and politically entrenched in Jim Crow’s remnants. The other is the remaining 95% of the population. Noam Chomsky called it “selection for obedience,” when speaking on what he called The Lying Elites Game in 1991.
What is happening at HISD is simply a theatre in the ongoing national story of an educational system that tests, rather than teaches students to read or critically think. The Gap is widening between the Two Americas but students from both are failing. Students from poorer districts and communities who consistently underperform compared to their wealthier classmates, according to national data, aren’t learning to read or mathematics and students from the other end of the wealth spectrum, clearly, are not learning history.
An article in the New York Times from 2016 cited the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford saying “sixth graders in the richest school districts are four grade levels ahead of children in the poorest districts.” Stanford Magazine called it The Gravity of Inequality. The Atlantic went a step further a year later, mourning “America’s lost Einsteins,” or excelling students who lack opportunity. More recent coverage in March from the Economist used data from Springfield, Massachusetts from 2007-2022 to show what they called Graduation Inflation, or the phenomena of soaring graduation rates alongside plummeting intelligence. An excellent gauge of this idea is shown in the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy’s claim that 130 million Americans read below a 6th grade level. Since 2017, when the Hill called literacy the “low-hanging fruit in improving education,” the low, and dropping level of literacy has been covered by major news outlets such as the AP, the Guardian, American Public Media, Forbes, and the LATimes, just to present a few.
The system is broken and everybody knows it. Fewer still understand that the maintenance of the broken clock that is national education policy, is by design. It’s broken in all of the ways that perpetuate privatization. Before resigning to Doom, it’s important to recognize the reality, that the cup is half full not half empty. In the classroom they are the 5% children who – for any number of reasons on a long list – may interrupt the learning of the other 95% of students. On any given day, for any given reason, this amorphous 5% of students will not allow class to continue without disruption. It’s often simply the students that need the most help, and to a classroom veteran, it’s just another Thursday.
Even with a veteran teacher, however, no student can receive proper services in a system being run as an industry and gutted like one absorbed in a merger. The effects of industry are an irrefutable theme of Charles Dickens’ body of work. You cannot blame Oliver Twist for his tumultuous Victorian shift in fate or his reactions to such a situation. An argument could be made to blame Bill Sykes, although he’s thoroughly a capitalist, that’s how this system unfolds. Those 5%-er students may never learn the necessary lessons, at which time they become absorbed by the system, and in adulthood their sins will get them elected to Congress or the State Legislatures, once again in position to interrupt the peace of everyone else. In adulthood the 5% can benefit from the nihilism that festers in a system that was never created to be equal. Whether to our credit or detriment, thousands of cock-eyed reforms – decade after decade – from a couple handfuls of wealthy foundations have been implemented to fix it in districts across the country. But that’s just it, it cannot “get lean” as a business would in times of crisis. Only foundation building will, over time, remedy our country’s stupidity problem. When a broken clock is correct twice a day for near a century, it becomes clear what’s effective and even more abundantly clear what is not for those who are paying attention.
There are many names for the age-old myth that a complex system can be fixed by a single solution. Like Mike Miles believing you can fix a morale problem by tricking students to participate in some corny & tone-deaf skit in a poorly planned, frivolous, and dangerously overcrowded arena. Or by simply restructuring and eliminating libraries, one can please Mike Morath, an Abbot appointee. Historians of the profession, such as Jonathan Kozol, Dana Goldstein, and Diane Ravitch have written volumes about the solutions to education. However, their tomes aren’t filled with instructions for success, they are instead filled with dizzying examples of the sleazy political machinations that cloud the purpose of the system in the first place. For the record, from the three authors listed, indicators of successful education systems are: a strong curriculum, experienced teachers, effective instruction, willing students, adequate resources, best practices based on empirical evidence and a community that values education. These are things I like to call “circular solutions,” the foundations, if you will. Each solution aids and strengthens the likelihood of the others’ success. So, for example, shuttering some of the district’s highest performing minority schools with solid community involvement beckons of an ulterior motive of the Third Future variety.
Every couple of decades there are recycled reforms legislated to “fix” education and make it some heavenly rendition of a learning environment available to all. These magical “fix-alls,” whimsical fads, magic feathers, silver bullets, panaceas, utopias, or “royal roads to learning,” depending on who you ask, keep finding their way into the criteria for “success,” and they are once again being paraded through Houston’s Independent School District. The point is that none of it exists except in the minds of people who fancy themselves educational gurus, yet only hold qualifications that fall squarely outside the realm of childhood development, cognition, or pedagogy. The solutions are clear, but must be pursued in conjunction with each other, not crude reactions to the whims of a philanthrocapitalist. Since at least 1815, Americans have recognized the need to reform education, but after two centuries we seem to know a lot more about what proper education isn’t than about what it is. From those same authors that have comprehensively covered school districts throughout the nation, there’s a much longer list of what education isn’t, or what it shouldn’t be. Education should not:
- Be a free market free-for-all
- use psuedo-logical fads, magic feathers, silver bullets, etc.
- strive for privatization or deregulation
- use performance as a standard of measurement
- Contain vague standards
- use standardized tests as the sole measure of success
- decentralize to the point of chaos
- Over-centralize to the point of manufacturing consent
- engage in philanthrocapitalism
- Implement merit based pay for teachers
- Place noneducators in positions of power
- Take pedagogy from educators
- Continually reorganize
- Only focus on math and reading
- Place too much value in what tests measure
- Close neighborhood schools
- Allow charter school cherry-picking of students
- Be underfunded or understaffed
- Have high turnover rates
- Ignore disadvantages associated with poverty
- Worship data
However, the sinister cycles of history and the blind greed of American politics have demonstrated their commitments to the latter list. For profit. Who, how, or why someone would want to generate profit from a genuine public good is a question for the therapists. I know not what drives a selfish or ambitious public employee, to me it’s an oxymoron.
Epigraph: “Freedom! you asking me about freedom. I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is, ’cause I’ve never been free. I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.” – Assata Shakur
As it stands, our education system is using a practice that inherently skews a measurement that, at its core, doesn’t measure cognition, intelligence, or critical thinking ability. We have ceded half a century of pedagogy to noneducators and ignored the effects of poverty on our children and society. The result – other than 130 million barely literate Americans – is a predictable and preventable collapse in social institutions. Like, for example, the rule of law; but that’s all a little too heavy for now. It all ultimately distills into a ubiquitous lie told enough times over the course of enough decades to be brought to the forefront of every educational experience of every student in the country on a daily basis, and still fail in grandiose platitudes of yesteryear.
For they are children, they know not what they do until we teach them. The window for doing so between all of the destructive policies since roughly the time of the Industrial Revolution has narrowed significantly. Yet not out of reach of hope and good policy. The live embodiments of the failure of education in America is ourselves. It’s our inability to be productive and efficient together. This is a story about adults in education bending the purpose of a universally accepted community good by using test scores that measure nothing and policies dreamt up by one of the most privileged classes of people to ever exist: the ultra-wealthy. But who can we possibly know who to believe when everyone is screaming, “FOR THE GOOD OF THE CHILDREN!”?
