by Penny, Laura
– JOHN ADAMS1
Even though the school systems in the U.S. and Canada are governed by a patchwork of state and provincial regulations, schools sucking has become a trusty political football all over North America. Education is a campaign stump staple and a perpetual crisis, one many crusaders can cut to fit their cause. Fundies, lefties, righties, and customarily apolitical people worried about their wee ones all spin the state of the schools to support their opposing pet initiatives. They can advance their particular agenda, be it religious, political, environmental, or purely selfish, in the name of the children, thus racking up double concern points. Triple, if you equate children and the future. Recycling/Jesus + Babies + All Our Tomorrows = Very Important Issue/Person indeed.
For politicians, education is a reliable source of photo ops and flights of rhetoric, as it gives them a valuable opportunity to wax enthusiastic about children and the future – two things they have yet to fuck up. You know the drill: mouth some well-meaning mush about how much math and science and reading rilly, rilly matter in the twenty-first century, tousle some moppet’s hair, feign interest in the classroom tchotchkes, finagle some mom-and-pop votes.
They can also use the state of the schools to go dire and forecast doom. This sort of school panic-speak is a watered-down long-range version of the politics of fear that has prevailed since 9/11. If immediate perils such as terrorists, a rising China, or wussification by Eurosocialism do not destroy North America first, someday all our stupid children will. Our failed schools will render them too stunned and broke to run the machines and dole out the meds we expect to ease us through our dotage. And our children’s children will be utterly barbaric and bereft, wandering some blasted Mad Max hellscape, barely able to recall the recipe for fire, even though everything around them is burning, endlessly burning.
School crisis stories are a manifestation of our worries about the future and our widespread concern about the children. But they are also one of the ways we express our anxiety about our collective intelligence. “Is our children learning?” is another way of asking, “Is us getting dumber?” If we are, what chance do we have of remaining competitive in the global market, keeping up with countries that seem to have better school systems, students, and adult literacy rates than we do? Mediocre to crappy student test scores are one of the signs that we may soon end up the bitches of those diligent high-scoring Asians, Indians, and Scandinavians, unless everyone works harder, faster, better, smarter, more.
Schools are also a staging ground in the culture wars that have waxed and waned since the eighties. But righty and lefty criticisms of the school system are more similar than they initially appear, thanks to their common adherence to some of the anti-nerd notions I discussed in the first chapter. The right claims that schools are socialist indoctrination centres where their lil’ spuds get soaked in government and gaydom. The left claims that the schools are corporate brainwashing facilities that teach kids to be obedient little office drones, stunting their creativity and curiosity, plying them with junk food and ads and pointless busywork. They may blame different causes – well, slightly different, given the tender intimacy betwixt government and business – but they level similar charges, arguing that education is nothing more than propaganda or brainwash.
The propaganda campaign that passes for education is one of the ways those dastardly nerds exert their control over society as a whole, by wrecking kids, setting up camp in their dear little heads when they are young and vulnerable. Schools change tiny minds. The implication on both sides is that they should not. Go far enough to the left or the right or towards some god, and you will find ardent parents’ rights advocates who think – no, know – that they know better than their children’s teachers.
North America’s decentralized school systems are perfect conveyances for passing the smelly blame, ensuring that there will be way more speeches than solutions. Parents can blame lazy teachers. Teachers can blame lazy parents. Teachers can blame administrators. Administrators can blame the school boards. School boards can blame their cheapskate, tax-averse districts or their greedy unionized employees. Or they can pass the blame along to the state and provincial educrats, who then blame the feds for providing insufficient funds. The feds plead poverty and blame everything from Grand Theft Auto to teachers’ unions to bureaucratic waste for the situation, tap dancing as they try not to alienate the voluminous voting blocs of concerned parents and unions.
But are our schools really sucking? This turns out to be one of those issues where people hate the species and the system but approve of the examples they know – a “lawyers are assholes but mine is fine” thing. For forty years Phi Beta Kappa has commissioned a yearly Gallup poll of Americans’ attitudes towards public schools, and they’ve found that “the closer the public gets to its local schools, the more it likes them.”2
Parents consistently give big, broad categories such as “the national schools” and “the schools in my community” middling to bad grades, and they say that schools in Europe and Asia are better. But they also tend to be positive about local schools: the ones their children attend. In 2008, 72 per cent of respondents gave their kid’s school a grade of A or B. This is the most positive rating that public schools have received in fifteen years. To grade the grade, three-quarters represents a C-plus or B-minus, but that result is still much better than the speeches, coverage, and op eds lead us to believe.
The school crisis rhetoric is milder up north, but the grades are comparable. One poll, conducted by the Canadian Education Association in 2007, found that 42 per cent of the respondents gave the schools B’s, and 33 per cent a gentleman’s C.3 A 2008 CBC poll had similar results. Only 8 per cent said that the schools were excellent, but 49 per cent, an overwhelming majority, said they were good, and 28 per cent thought they were adequate. Moreover, the number of parents who gave schools the lowest possible ratings – poor and very poor – decreased substantially from the 1990s, dropping from 25 per cent to 14 per cent.4
Asking parents how much they like their kids’ schools is only one measure of the school system, though. Schools do not merely serve parents, and sometimes parental needs and public needs clash. For example, some parents might gripe about social promotion and every student getting gold stars, only to quickly change their tune when their son or daughter flunks. Easy A’s might look great stuck on the family fridge, but they don’t help create a competent workforce, informed citizenry, or civil society.
Other measures of school performance are less encouraging. Millions of North American high-school graduates are functionally illiterate and innumerate, and woefully ignorant of basic history and science. The collegiate crème de la crème that I see are literate-ish at best. Some can be quite intellectually timid and unwilling to think for themselves.
The passivity, nervousness, and heartbreaking inarticulacy of some of my students is evidence that the school system is not doing a super job teaching kids to read, write, and think. Sometimes I read work by students whose grammar is practically feral – utterly untutored. They claim their teachers never taught them about the niceties of sentence structure; instead they did quizzes and got to watch movies in English class. Students can pass English without the fuss and bother of comprehending its basic concepts, and I have no reason to believe that things are any better in the math, science, or history departments. This suggests that some of the worries about schools may well be justified.
At the same time, though, a lot of the crisis-in-the-schools rhetoric comes from some bad political ideas, ideas that have been setting the tone for public policy and discourse for more than twenty years, ideas that are partly responsible for the mess we’re in now. Decrying the evil socialist gub’mint monopoly on schools is an example of the demonization of all things public. Anti-school rants quickly slide into anti-union ranting, since “unions R bad” is another one of our modern, plutocrat-friendly articles of faith.
This is one of the reasons why charter schools are oft me
ntioned in debates about the state of the schools. Conservatives favour charter schools because they offer an end run around the teachers’ unions, more scope for hiring, firing, and unpaid overtime, and greater curricular freedom. But there are very lefty charter schools too, ones that focus on environmental education, the arts, or social justice. Charters also have powerful allies in the political centre. The Obama administration has promised increased funding for charter schools as part of its $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, one of the education components of the stimulus package.
Charter schools are a relatively new idea. They exist somewhere in between public and private schools, as they are publicly funded but privately run. The first state to pass a law allowing charters was Minnesota, in 1991. By 2009, according to the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter group, 4,578 charter schools were operating in the U.S., schooling approximately 1.4 million K–12 students.5 In Canada, Alberta was the first province to allow charter schools, in 1994, and now has thirteen. No other Canadian province has followed suit yet, though Quebec, British Columbia, and Torontonia have for decades offered partial public funding to independent alternative schools.
Those who support charter schools argue that they provide parents with more choices and that market competition will stimulate somnolent public schools. Allowing all manner of specialized schools, from the strictly religious to the just plain strict to the environmentally pious, further decentralizes the school system and cedes more control to local, parental, and private interests. This is precisely what school-choice advocates seek. To give just one cartoony example, John Stossel, in a 2006 ABC news special called “Stupid in America,” made a strong case for vouchers and charters as market solutions to the corrupt state monopoly on education. He said that a state-run school was as silly as a state-run grocery store. With out the prod of competition, your gub’mint grocer would doubtless peddle overpriced bread and curdled milk. Ditto for the sucky socialist schools, which had made American children stupider than Belgians.
Stossel was pop-eyed with outrage. Belgians were free to choose their schools. Their kids were smarter. Chocolate-confecting, mussel-slurping semi-French Euroweenies were enjoying more choices than the future citizens of the freest, best country on earth? Quelle horreur!
While it is true that Belgians have a voucher system in which the funds follow the students, they also have a national curriculum and national standards, so it isn’t quite a market free-for-all like the riot of chip flavours in the snack aisle. Moreover, Belgians also have other educational policies, such as free early childhood education, that help account for their edge on international tests. The Belgian system, like many European systems, practises streaming, separating the vocationally inclined and the college-bound much earlier than Canadian and American schools do. Can you imagine the howls of indignation from self-proclaimed libertarians like Stossel if American educrats were exerting such sway over children’s career paths?
Streaming and state-subsidized early childhood education are European in the bad way. They represent socialist interventions in family life, encroachments of the nanny state at its nanniest. School choice, conversely, is all about the power of markets. Defenders of school choice praise the market’s ability to satisfy proliferating particular niches. It is also about parent power, the firm conviction that Stossel’s audience – or severely normal Albertans or devout Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents – know what is best for their children.
Don’t get me wrong. I think parents certainly have the right to raise their children as they see fit, and that they love their children more than anyone else. But love does not qualify someone to explain cell division, long division, or the War of 1812. School-choice rhetoric is another case of feelings, such as parental love, trumping the nerdy expertise of the people who actually run the schools and teach the kids. Moreover, parental rights issues get legally murky when parents suckle their kids on beliefs that make them social pariahs, like the White Pride mom in Winnipeg who drew swastikas on her kid before sending her off to school – repeatedly.
Maybe this unpleasantness could have been avoided if only there were a neo-Nazi charter school to meet her child’s unique educational needs. Studying the Second World War in a mainstream history class could be a real blow to the self-esteem of a kid raised as a fake Aryan. At the Stormfront Skool of Traditional Values (home of the Fighting Hitlers), the poor child would be spared the trauma of having her culture and her family’s choices disrespected.
This is, admittedly, an exaggerated example of the school market’s vast potential for diversification. But it does help illustrate that school-choice-speak is often another form of anti-intellectualism, a rejection of the educational establishment and professional nerds. Charter schools are appealing because they suggest that almost anyone can open a school and run it more cheaply and cheerfully than the hidebound old bureaucracies can. They imply that the solutions to problems in the schools are really simple and that educrats suffer from elitist delusions of complexity. Charter schools also appeal to our preference for action, as opposed to thought. They insinuate that education profs who produce studies about charter schools are constructing castles of theory but the entrepreneurs who open charter schools are doing something that makes a difference.
Critics of charter schools contend that the school-choice movement is just a sneaky way of permitting increased privatization and bypassing teachers’ unions. Allowing a market of specialized schools to bloom on the public dime also undermines one of the missions of public schools: the idea that public schools are common schools, social glue, institutions that provide a set of shared reference points and skills, a sense of culture and history, and basic scientific and mathematical knowledge.
Another common argument against charters is that they shred the commonality of the school system in another way, by cherry-picking the best students and most concerned parents from communities and dumping special needs and high-risk kids back into the public system. Some jurisdictions have even made charter schools admit students via lotteries, to prevent them from skimming the student and parental cream from every district. But that doesn’t entirely dispel the selection bias here, as the parents who apply for the lotto are obviously more motivated than the ones who do not.
The jury is still out on whether charter schools perform better than their public counterparts. Advocates claim that they do, but a recent study, released by Stanford University in 2009, found that only 17 per cent of charter schools were performing better than their public counterparts. More than a third – 37 per cent – fared worse than public schools, and 46 per cent did not differ in any significant way, for better or for worse.6
As the Stanford researchers note, one of the problems with rating charter-school performance is that there are many kinds, with different missions, subject to varying state and provincial requirements. And even when they do work as schools, it remains to be seen whether charters can work as businesses. Several charter schools have collapsed because of fiscal mismanagement. A 2009 study conducted in Minnesota found that only 24 of the state’s 145 charter schools had clean books; the other 121 had some fiscal irregularities.7
The most high-profile example of charter schools failing to fulfil their promise of improved efficiency is the chain formerly known as Edison Schools Inc. The Edison chain, much hyped in the 1990s, was the brainchild of businessman and edupreneur Chris Whittle. You can also thank Whittle for Channel One, the network he started in 1989, which loaned schools AV equipment in exchange for broadcasting its infoad-vertainment in classrooms. Whittle sold Channel One in 1994 in the midst of a blaze of bad publicity about his tax and accounting snafus.
Still, the media, particularly right-wing organs such as the Wall Street Journal, hailed Edison Schools as a revolution, a sleek new for-profit model of education. But the company consistently hemorrhaged cash, was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for filing inaccurate financial statements, and had some of its contracts c
ancelled by local boards. The company has since rebranded itself as EdisonLearning Inc., a source of educational software. Edison still manages schools in twenty-four states, but it reverted to private company status in 2003 after the chain’s stock price plummeted. Ironically, its fiscal saviours included the very public school teachers that Edison was competing against – the Florida State Employees Pension Fund bought the company.
The current charter-school media darling is the Knowledge Is Power Program, a.k.a. KIPP schools. Created in 1994 by two alums from the newbie-teacher mission Teach for America, KIPP schools serve poor inner-city communities. The majority of their students are black or Latino, and parents must sign contracts that obligate them to take an active role in their child’s education. KIPP students spend longer hours in the classroom than their public-school counterparts. The school day starts earlier and ends later, and there are Saturday and summer sessions at most schools too.
Some KIPP schools have shown good results, but critics of the program argue that these gains depend on a pool of young, idealistic teachers willing to put in long hours for low pay. KIPP teachers in some New York City schools have even started to unionize, much to the chagrin of the anti-union wing of the charter-school booster club. I don’t condone making teachers work ill- or unpaid overtime, something that many instructors, publicly or privately managed, already do. However, I do like the KIPPSTERS’ extended school hours; the public-school day and year should be longer.
Very few North American children spend their summers helping with the harvest. The current school year is a silly agrarian anachronism, one that leaves working parents scrambling for child-care options. But I suspect I may be in the minority here, and that many taxpayers, teachers’ unions, parents, and kids would object to way more school, for both fiscal and personal reasons.