Of Fish, Ducks And Schools

Time for a little civics lesson. Capitalism is an economic theory. It’s concerned with things like the means of production, cost control and profit. Democracy is a political theory. It’s concerned with things like equality, justice and freedom. Capitalism is great at making affordable, efficient toasters, not so good at creating a just and vibrant society. Democracy can lead to a just and vibrant society, but affordable, efficient toasters…not so much.

In America these two systems live side by side and theoretically Capitalism’s resource exhausting hunger for greater and greater profits at lower and lower costs is mitigated by Democracy’s boundary setting functions, which we commonly call laws. These laws theoretically protect the most vulnerable in our society, both people and resources. They assure fairness in the dealings of capitalistic enterprises and monitor the quality of its products.

Theoretically.

The reality is that you don’t have to look very far in America today to see that the relationship between Capitalism and Democracy is, at best, dysfunctional. From home lending practices to food safety requirements market driven values have invaded and replaced democratic ones, so instead of justice for all we get buyer beware as a national motto.

Democratic values contain a concept called the common good. The common good is what everyone in the society benefits from whether they are directly affected by it or not, like the fire department, which, hopefully, most people will never directly benefit from. To maintain the common good everyone is asked to throw some money into the pot and we call that process taxation. The important thing to remember is that in a democratic society the people get to decide what the common good is, and how important it is to the overall function of the society. This requires a literate and aware citizenry which is why the fundamental democratic common good is education. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Capitalistic values have a common good too, it’s called profit and it’s arrived at by any (hopefully legal) means necessary.

Which brings us to charter schools. On the surface, charter schools are schools in which public money (taxes) is given to private entities (school management companies) but more fundamentally what this means is that schools based on the democratic value of the common good are replaced by schools based on the capitalist value of profit. Democratically based schools attempt to educate all students with an eye towards the development of individual potential. Capitalistic schools value cost containment, operational efficiencies and standardization. Some results of the change in value systems are immediate and unsurprising. There are whole web pages devoted to the scandals and failures of school management companies—some have been accused and/or convicted more than once. These companies have caused students to be discriminated against, schools to close with little or no warning, and money to disappear.

All of which calls into question the central selling point of charter schools which was that being organized like a business, they were in a better position to improve educational outcomes than the “dinosaur” public school system.

So, are they better? We’ve had charter schools since the mid 90’s and according to the most recent study done by CREDO, the Stanford University based research organization,  Charter Schools are no better than public schools (pdf):

CMOs on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning. The difference in learning compared to the Traditional Public school alternatives for CMOs is -.005 standard deviations in Math and .005 in reading; both these values are statistically significant, but obviously not materially different from the comparison.

Translated from the edu-speak what that means is there are good charter schools and bad charter schools but when you look at them as a whole, not much difference between charter and public. Here’s my question: Where is this promised nirvana of education that was supposed to be brought about by applying free market principles to schools?

We started down this path in the 80’s with the Nation At Risk report which told us our economy was in trouble if we didn’t improve our schools. Then came the boom 90’s, but no one tried to attribute that to the schools. Now the economy is a mess again. Is it the schools? Well, if you accept that Hedge Fund Managers, Bankers and their political enablers all presumably went to school, then yeah, I guess the economic mess is the schools’ fault. Truth is the whole business does it better mantra is code for we’re looking for new markets to exploit. America has never needed business values to make its schools better.

Saying Capitalist values can lead to better schools is like saying because fish can swim, ducks should be able to play violins. Education in a democratic society isn’t about profit—neither making it, nor providing it for others—it’s about seeing that the next generation has the tools to build a better democracy.

Schools that don’t respect democratic values can’t be expected to do a good job educating students in a democratic society, but schools that don’t respect education as a value in itself can’t be expected to do a good job at all.

 

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other (Sort Of)

Earlier this summer I got to be part of the beta test team for a MOOC here at the College of Knowledge titled Thinking Like A Writer. It was developed by the Writing Rhetoric and American Cultures Department and as far as I know was their first foray into electronical pedagogtiatin' in a massively multiplayer format.. Our job was to walk through the first assignment and make sure all the pieces worked, the flow made sense and developed in a way that was supportive of the process. The assignment itself was to think about a skill we've developed and to think about how we learned to write and see where it went from there.

It was a good assignment because it had just enough structure at the beginning to support writers initially, but was vague enough at the end to allow for built up momentum to take you wherever it would. It was also nice to write in a group (which I seldom get to do these days) and ping pong ideas and suggestions back and forth in those little instant communities that develop around a common goal and a common interest. Comfortable maybe is a better word. That's good for students writers...well, all writers really. Anyway, a good time was had by all and I was kind of pleased with the results, even though it was just a toss off exercise to test the system. I hope I didn't disappoint my group and without further ado, I present Fred the student writer:

The first thing that comes to mind is learning to ride motocross was a lot more painful than learning to write, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were painful in different ways--for me anyway. People think learning to ride a motorcycle in the dirt is like learning to ride a bike, and I suppose that’s true—if you learned to ride a bike by being strapped to the seat and pushed down a hill with a 30 degree slope. Then, when you were about halfway down your instructor shouted, “Hey, forgot to tell you how to brake. My bad.”

Learning to write, on the other hand, is injurious only to your mental health. First, of course, are all the rules, many of which I didn’t even know were rules until after I broke them. I’m not talking about spelling and grammar, those two spinster sisters of writing that used to scowl at me from their perch on the classroom bookshelf between Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. No, I’m talking about the whole point. I mean, thesis, topic sentences, the sacred five paragraphs and the holy 500 words. What’s it all for? It seemed to me purpose of writing was so we would be quiet while our teachers read the paper.

When learning to ride motocross, each lesson has immediate implications. Don’t want crash in that turn? Better learn how to decelerate correctly. Learning to write was much more amorphous, much more diffuse. Want to get a good job some day? Better learn what a summary close is. I never saw the point of the “you’ll thank me for this in twenty years” pedagogy.

However, there comes a point in the acquisition of any new skill when it suddenly makes sense, a sort of eureka moment, and you think “I’ve got this.” That is a very dangerous time.

In motocross it’s called muscle memory when you finally stop thinking about what you are doing and just feel it. That’s when you become one with the bike, and the course. For me that happened on brilliant June day at a place called Red Bud Trails in Buchanan, Michigan. The Red Bud track was a fairly complex one with a lot of hills, twisty terrain, woods and even a small creek. It had been kicking my butt for months, but that day I was on fire. I went through the turns like I was glued to the track. On the straightaways I could feel the front wheel coming off the ground, a sure sign I was a rocket. The trees that lined the track became a green blur as I tore past them.

Now, they say we all have a dual nature which is usually characterized as good and evil—angel and devil if you will, sitting on opposite shoulders, but I think it’s more basic than that. I think our natures are made up of the part that thinks we’re going to live forever and the part that knows we’re going to die. It was probably that latter aspect of my nature that wrested control away from the former long enough to inform me as I sped down the track that mere inches from my body were FREAKIN’ TREES, MAN!

And that’s when I had another eureka moment. I had convinced myself I was an expert at something, but had failed to factor in the price of this new found confidence in the face of the unyielding laws of physics. Additionally, I learned that muscle memory is also about my body carrying a grudge when I treated it disrespectfully.

There comes a point when you feel one with writing as well. When you stop thinking and just feel the piece, a time when the trees become metaphorical, but no less painful. I learned that in my 12^th grade literature class, presided over by one Otto L. Holt Jr. a classical scholar of Jamaican heritage who sometimes became so overwhelmed with the beauty and majesty of the literature he would stand on his desk and “declaim” Homer from memory.  Junior (we called him Junior because we were a bunch of incredibly sophisticated and urbane 17 year olds) was diligently trying to teach us to write like the masters, and we were resisting him with equal fervor. It was during the unit on Donne that I decided rhyming was no big deal and attempted to join the pantheon with my own version of Ode To A Flea.  As I had been one with my bike that day on the track, now I was one with the muse so I knocked that baby off in about three minutes. On a whim I passed it to Elizabeth Arden with whom I was deeply, passionately, eternally in love that semester. She read it and she laughed…she laughed! And suddenly I knew what writing was for. It was for impressing girls.

The jocularity attracted the attention of Junior who confiscated my effort, glowered his way through it, then ordered me to the front of the class to “perform” my piece. One didn’t simply read out loud in Junior’s class, one “performed” the piece one was assigned. After five or six attempts, during which Junior’s face, as I was to learn in another English class, “could not unfrown itself,” and my classmates became increasingly raucous, he was finally satisfied I had given the piece an appropriate delivery and I was dismissed to the Principal’s office to repeat my performance.

Later, in detention, as I was reflecting on the wide range of responses to my poem, from Elizabeth’s encouraging giggle to the Principal’s stern lecture on the seriousness with which I obviously was not taking my studies, it occurred to me that just as I had overlooked the inviolable laws of physics that day at Red Bud, I had overlooked an important element of writing when I had come to the conclusion that I knew what it was for, and that element was audience. It was at that moment that I became a rhetorician, which in the long run proved to be a much better choice than motocross racer.

 

Welcome To The Republican Utopia

There really can’t be much of a question anymore as to the real purpose of educational reform in this country. Despite all the lip service paid to the good of the children and the country’s economic competitiveness it should be apparent, even to those with only passing knowledge of what goes on in America’s public schools, we’ve been conned, lied to, sold a pig in a poke as my father used to say.

Of course there were some people who from the beginning  saw through the bafflegab thrown up by supporters of rapacious capitalism looking for new markets. Alfie Kohn for one, Gerald Bracey before he passed away, George Hillocks, Denny Taylor, Elaine Garan, Gerald Coles, all of whom wrote books detailing the real agenda of the corporate pirates who were preparing  to pillage education under the auspices of Competitiveness and The Free Market. Even Diane Ravitch, an early supporter of the neoliberal model eventually saw through the dissembling and has since become one of the most vocal critics of education as a commodity.

They were ignored for the most part, marginalized and like the proverbial prophet in his own country, left talking to the wind. Unfortunately for a whole generation of children they were right and the true agenda of the “reformers” is becoming clearer and clearer with each new revelation.  A good example of that is right here in Michigan where Highland Park Public Schools were taken over by a state appointed Emergency Manager. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, an Emergency Manager is a person accountable only to the Governor who has the authority to suspend contracts, fire, hire, disband locally elected boards and committees and generally do whatever he or she feels like doing to “fix” the struggling district or municipality. In Highland Park the Emergency Manager’s name is Donald Weatherspoon and here’s how his tenure is going so far.

The emergency manager appointed to oversee the Highland Park School District’s finances denied Tuesday that a large collection of black history books, tapes, film strips and other materials were deliberately discarded into Dumpsters last week from the district’s high school library.

Well, mistakes happen, apologists might say. Incompetence can be found in many districts, but some may wonder what workmen were doing taking books off the shelves in the first place.

The recovered materials will be sorted and those that have historical value, Weatherspoon said, would go to a library or a museum that would agree to keep them. He said none of the materials would be sold. Weatherspoon said the district can’t afford to secure the collection. The Leona Group, the charter management company that began operating schools in the district a year ago, was offered the books. Weatherspoon said they took what they wanted.

You read that correctly. The collection was being given away. This in a district that has been accused of violating students’ right to read as described in state law, and where teaching assistants were ordered to falsify student records. If I may offer a bit of advice to Mr. Weatherspoon: it’s going to be a lot harder to convince people reading scores are improving if there are no books for the students to read.

Defenders of the corporate model of school reform would probably argue that this is an isolated case, confined to a local area and in no way does it reflect the values of the movement as a whole—the so called “bad apple” defense. That may be true, but Mr. Weatherspoon is certainly not the only rotten apple in the bushel, nor is he the biggest.

Two Indianapolis Public Schools might never have been taken over by the state if then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett had offered the district the same flexibility he granted a year later to the Christel House Academy charter school. In the case of Christel House, emails unearthed by The Associated Press show Bennett’s staff sprung into action in 2012 when it appeared scores from the recently added grades could sink the highly regarded school’s rating from an A to a C. Ultimately, the high school scores were excluded and the school’s grade remained an A.

Mr. Bennet left Indiana to become superintendent of Florida schools before news of his favoritism became public. He has since been forced to resign. When news of the impropriety reached Governor Mike Pence, he acted immediately.

 Gov. Mike Pence said Wednesday he is standing by Indiana’s system of assigning “A-F” grades to schools based on their performance despite reports that the state’s former schools chief worked to change the grading formula to ensure a top GOP donor’s school received an “A.”

Mike Pence—it will come as no surprise—is a Republican. The real tragedy here is the fact that children’s futures are being stolen from them. Because these free market raiders go after the most vulnerable schools, and because those schools tend to be the ones serving the most disadvantaged populations—populations for whom education is even more crucial to upward mobility—an entire class of children is being consigned to economic destitution.  Thanks to the greatest income disparity since the gilded age, climbing the economic ladder has become difficult even for those who have access to what remains of the benefits of the middle class. Take those few advantages away and these children become a generation born into poverty and sentenced to die there while the Weatherspoons and the Bennetts and the Pences of the world profit from their suffering. Welcome to the Republican utopia.