MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
| DON'T READ ME FIRST! | THE PREVIOUS EVENT | COMING ATTRACTIONS | THE WRITERS/GUIDELINES | |
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Everyone acknowledges today that in two short decades the citizens of the United States went from being considered "the Best and the Brightest" to being seen as the stupidest in the industrialized world. Interestingly, we know that this is the result of our own political decisions.
Beginning with our knee-jerk reaction to the social upheaval of the 1960s, America --- under the direction of the Republican Party --- began its turn to the right and rabid anti-intellectualism. With the election of Richard Nixon we committed ourselves to Law and Order and accepted the slogans of soon-to-be-indicted former Maryland governor and Vice President Spiro Agnew as our new mantra. We condemned the "nattering nabobs of negativism" as represented by the Rockefeller wing of the Republican party, the Kennedys and the Eastern Intellectual Elite and embraced the Archie Bunker, hard-hat view of our history.
Being an "egg-head" was out. Being "salt of the earth, Joe Sixpack" was in.
It is no accident that crypto-Anti-Semite Patrick Buchanan, now a perennial Presidential candidate in the United States, came into his ascendancy during this era.
Nobody speaks these awful truths as Americans rich and poor lament the ignorance of our populace and cringe at the ridicule of our commercial trading partners, but we all know what happened.
Johnny can't read and Janey is about to become a crack whore. We brought this situation upon ourselves. So education is now a Hot Button issue in America.
In this first installment of our G21 White Papers, AGENDA, we will examine educational policy in this country, analyze the possible solutions, and provide agenda items and talking points for your further consideration.
It was not unusual to compete for pre-schools in the 1980s, making sure that your child would get into the creme de la creme of private grammar schools. Two year olds were given advanced math training tools.
And Americans got dumb and dumber.
The last (relatively) educated generation of Americans graduated from our universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, because they opted not to have children until late in life, that "Me Generation," as TIME magazine dubbed them, have set our national agenda in education. Bill and Hillary Clinton are part of that Baby Boom elite.
Because the "Me Generation" were not having children in the late '70s and early '80s, they bought into the Reagan agenda of Hell-take-the-Hindmost and wondered why their tax dollars should be invested in schools (for children they did not have) instead of prisons (to get the urban underclass under control) so that they could feel safer in their shallow Yuppie aspirations.
Why should they, after all, have to pay to educate the children of the lumpen masses? (The lumpen masses from which they had come --- it was left unspoken --- and off of whom they now aspired to BMWs and a 401K Plan.)
Build more jails!
And education became a privilege in America.
It would not become a great leap then, in the late 1980s, to consider abandoning the system of universal education which had been the sine qua non of educational policy in the United States and decide that *some children* DESERVED a quality education and others did not.
No one wanted to say so, but there was a racial subtext to this political decision, as there is a racial subtext to most political decisions in the United States. The Supreme Court had foisted Brown v. Board of Education on an unwilling nation. Busing had torn neighborhoods apart. As supposedly law-abiding citizens, Americans could not separate their white children from those of other races by law anymore. But a solution could be found in either abolishing or reorganizing the educational system.
In typical utilitarian fashion, Americans decided that the children whose parents could *afford* a quality education therefore deserved same. The other children, by dint of being poor and underclass, did not.
And that's when Americans also decided that a voucher system for certain families would solve the educational dilemma.
This notion of governmental-supported vouchers spread throughout the states, beginning in the late '80s, drawing significant opposition from the teachers' unions and public education advocates, but it has not gone away.
Privatising education, as we have been hectored toward privatising most public services, has significant propaganda momentum in the United States thanks to the loud repetition of right-wing thinking. (There is no valid arena in the mainstream media for left-wing thinking in the United States anymore, so let's not pretend.)
After all, if we can force posting the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments in the remaining public schools (before they are abandoned) and follow the lead of the State of Kansas Board of Education and pretend that evolution never happened, why not drive the final nail in the coffin and make Fundamentalist education of every ilk an acceptable alternative to critical thinking?
The Post-Modern, Post-Industrial Revolution model plus one. Let's make United States education a means of creating global consumers. Welcome to Edison Schools.
From Wichita, Kansas, to San Francisco, California, Edison Schools are replacing community-supported initiatives because they have influential corporate backing. It does not matter that the American Federation of Teachers has problems with the decidedly mixed results in achievement these schools have produced.
What matters is that major corporations want our children to believe that corporatism is benign and essential to their existences.
From the American Federation of Teachers report on Edison Schools:
"* The effectiveness of Success for All has been threatened by the company's failure to carry out the program as developed by SFA researchers. Though reading tutors are central to SFA's success, Edison has yet to provide the number of tutors that SFA calls for in high-poverty schools, and it spreads reading tutors over all grade levels, from kindergarten through grade five, instead of concentrating them in kindergarten through grade two where, SFA researchers have found, they are most effective. (That may account for the lackluster performance of the Dade County school in 1996-97 in comparison with that of the Edison school in Wichita, where SFA was fully implemented.)
Also, except for Dade County, beginning in 1997, Edison does not employ the full-time SFA coordinator in each school, even though the program insists this is necessary in order to ensure quality control.
"* Edison relies heavily on relatively inexperienced teachers. Typically, half of the teaching force has fewer than five years of experience, in comparison with the national average of 16 years.
"* Teacher turnover rates in Edison schools are high. The company admits to a 23 percent turnover rate, which is twice the national average for urban public schools. At some of the Edison schools, turnover is 25 to 40 percent in a single year, as much as triple the public-school average nationwide.[Emphasis G21's--Ed.]
"* Class size also tends to be high. With the exception of the small reading groups required by Success for All, the average is in the neighborhood of 28 students per class. In some of the Edison schools, this is no higher than the school-district average. However, the national norm is 24 students, and most experts now agree that elementary school students, particularly poor children, benefit from a class size of 15 to 17.
"3. Edison's Primary Reading Studies. Edison commissioned Robert Mislevy, a
distinguished researcher, to do reading achievement studies of students in
grades K-3. The design of these studies was modeled on the standard
evaluation used with Success for All programs. Mislevy carried out his study
in Edison elementary schools in Wichita, Kansas; Mt. Clemens, Michigan;
Sherman, Texas; and Colorado Springs, Colorado. (He also conducted a reading
study at Edison's Boston charter elementary school. However, it had no
control group and so is not included in our analysis.)
"On the whole, Edison results were mediocre. Kindergarten students were the
most successful in comparison with control-group students. However, this is
not surprising given the fact that Edison runs full-day kindergartens with
an academic program and the schools attended by control-group schools did
not.
"Edison first graders did much less well. Students at Wichita performed
somewhat better than students in the control groups--the effect size was
small to moderate. In Mt. Clemens, the differences were generally not
statistically significant. Furthermore, since no initial achievement data
were collected, it is not possible to compare Edison students with control
group students, so test results are inconclusive anyway. At Sherman, the
Edison Program showed no effect--that is, there was no difference in test
results between Edison students and students in the control group. At
Colorado Springs, results were not good but should probably be considered
inconclusive because of insufficient data and problems in matching control
group students with children attending the Edison school.
"Edison shows no signs of continuing the Primary Reading Studies at either
Sherman or Colorado Springs, so we are unlikely to find out if the students
in these schools would have gone on to match the achievement levels of
youngsters at Wichita and Mt. Clemens..."
Maybe there's another way. We think so at The World's Magazine.
Discover the MOIA Discussion List
One thing is certain if you accept the thesis of The Big Test, whether we as a nation are willing to admit as much or not, we do have a national standard for who is acceptable to become college/university educated, and thus part of our national economic elite.
The unwritten and unspoken standard is that we pretend that these rules don't apply. You can get into Harvard because your father and grandfather did, no matter how brainless you are. But you can be a top-flight mind and have to settle for a community college. That's how The System is skewed today.
If you're Black, Red or Brown, of course, most of your teachers will assume that you don't have a top-flight mind. It's genetics, don't you know? Asian students work hard and are smart. White students deserve to go college, if they want to.
It is on the basis of these abiding myths, and our reliance on the SATs, that America has produced the dumbest population in the industrialized world.
We cannot continue to complain about the lack of a qualified work-force and an informed, involved citizenry while continuing to invest in a Gulag instead of an Academy.
That's The Clue.
Which leads to the AGENDA items that G21: The World's Magazine would recommend for reforming educational policy in the United States:
Good policy begins with historical-critical thinking. This is our first shot across your bow.
Once Jimmy Carter lamented the "malaise" of our national polity, it was an easy propaganda move to promulgate the Feel Good jingosim and Know-Nothing celebratory stance of Reaganism. Let's abolish the Department of Education, why don't we? This was a *serious* initiative of the Reagan Administration. They didn't accomplish that, but they succeeded in dumbing down America.
Education As a Privilege
Somewhere along the way, as we stopped investing in our educational system and decided it was more cost-effective to invest in prisons (despite every evidence to the contrary, but because it was out of vogue to be a "bleeding-heart Liberal,") we Americans also decided that a quality education was not a right for all our people but a privilege to afforded the well-heeled few. If you could afford to take your child out of the public education loop, more power to you. And the best way to achieve this goal was to deprive our children of their childhood and begin force-feeding them the trendiest learning system straight from the cradle.
Consumerist Learning
There is another way to be considered. We could sign on to Chris Whittle's (Remember Channel One broadcasts of commercials in your children's schools?) view of preparing our children to be staunch participants in the commercial society. That's what Edison Schools --- privately financed schools working on the Charter School system, but supported by corporations like The Gap --- is all about.
"2. Potential shortcomings of the Edison program
Meritocracy & Race: Anatomy of Educational Failure
Among certain thinkers, Atlantic Monthly National Reporter Nicholas Lemann is akin to the Devil. A distinquished commentator on racial issues in the United States, and their linkage to our educational system, Mr. Lemann has been outspoken in his views about why the meritocracy our educational testing (vetting) system as exemplarized by the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has been a failure.
Bringing over two decades of research and investigation into the original intent of the SATs and how our colleges and universities vet potential students to bear in his book The Big Test, Lemann has a number of damning things to say about how America lost its way in educational policy.
The World's Magazine: generator21.net
Event # 191: Miserable Destiny
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If we mean to turn this around, rather than abolishing our Department of Education, why not establish national educational standards?
Why not admit that if our institutions of higher learning depend upon these standardized tests to vet our children, rather than create pre-test classes for those who can afford them why not gear our educational system to make every student possible prepared for a quality education instead of a prison cell or the prospect of flipping hamburgers?
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