The ugly truth about “school choice”
The Koch brothers want you to think the movement’s about racial justice and empowering parents. They’re lying
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/the_ugly_truth_about_school_choice/singleton/
I have an early post on the educational industrial complex that was converted from my early email ‘posts’ before I started this blog. Education is an important topic to me (see here for more) and I have been trying for a long time to come up with some sort of generic method to produce not just a more highly educated population, but one that actually has critical thinking abilities (in other words, pretty much the exact opposite of the sheeple our current system produces today). I am not sure I have any really good ideas on how that could be done, though I favor the idea of having cohorts of students with wide ranges in education be responsible for teaching each other under the guidance of an instructor (one-room school house paradigm) and recently I tried to interest a friend in the teaching ‘biz to try to interest investors in the idea of a ‘flip school’ based on on-line teaching (something I might aggressively pursue myself if I didn’t already have a half dozen other projects I am really interested in (or already am) pursuing) that I think has a lot of potential. However, I have come to believe that the current push towards charter schools, vouchers, etc. are just attempts (that appear so far to be quite successful) to move education from the public sector into the private sector so rich people can siphon off even more tax dollars to get even richer. Perhaps there are some rich people that actually think they are doing the right thing, but it seems to me they do not have the greatest good for the greatest number in mind when they are making their plans and racism and/or elitism is really the driving force.
I have no love for bloated government, but in my experience when private enterprise takes over it does so via the oligarchical favoritism that leads to worse performance at a worse cost. As such, I am now favoring keeping the government in control over such things as the social safety net (social security, Medicare/Medicaid (which I think should be default available for everyone), unemployment, etc.) despite its inherent inefficiencies. Perhaps if we were to block the oligarchical gimme of tax dollars to the already wealthy somehow while privatizing these sorts of things (I imagine going the way of non-profit co-ops would be a good approach, but only if they also remain regulated so executives can’t get million dollar salaries) then I could see shrinking the government’s involvement in things like education, social security (see http://sol-biotech.com/wordpress/2012/01/18/retirement-insurance-or-what-social-security-ought-to-be/), etc. Until then, I strongly object to these efforts to extract tax dollars to further enrich the wealthy.
There are a number of things wrong with the reasoning process on both side of the question.
I note that the article maintains that “school choice is an unsuitable one-size-fits-all solution.” That is correct. Nevertheless, when I was going to school that was the approach taken by public schools, also.
Presume (incorrectly) for a moment that no cultural or economic inequalities exist. That leaves, at a minimum, three groups of students that must be educated with differing methods: those well above the norm, those well below the norm, and the rest. That makes it impossible to judge either students or teachers with a one-size-fits-all battery of tests/evaluations.
Adding in the (real) culturally and economically deprived merely skews the numbers and distorts the curve.
When I was going through school the three groups, being taught by one method and judged by one measure, fell into three categories: those who were promoted early by learning rapidly (due mainly to their own and their parent’s efforts), those in the typical group, and those who dropped out early. The latter group, regardless of their parent’s personal circumstances, would generally go on to swell the future ranks of the economically deprived.
When my children went to school the three groups tended to separate (somewhat) into those in magnet schools or accelerated programs, the typical group in regular school, and those in “special education.”
There will always be three groups. Properly educating the upper and lower groups will generally cost more than educating the typical group. Given the economic reality, the upper group will tend to be favored and the lower group will tend to be under-served and deprived.
This tendency will move the norm in the “wrong” direction because the norm is not merely based on innate intelligence but is greatly affected by the educational process, which sways to the forces of economic and cultural inequality.
Frankly, I don’t know what the solution is. I might, if I thought about it more (which I’m not likely to do) and if I had tons of effective support and influence (which I don’t).
It’s obvious that our current methodology is far from maximal. Charter schools merely exacerbate the effects by tossing more money to the upper and upper-typical groups at the expense of the lower and lower-typical groups. At the same time, is it really wrong to subsidize our future leaders? They’re generally going to come from the upper group, anyway. It may be worth it to boost their performance in advance.
To make it fair, we need to subsidize the lower group to the same extent. Doing so would ameliorate somewhat the distortion effects of inescapable inequality, thereby increasing the effectiveness and productivity of the populace, as a whole.
It doesn’t help that a very large number of our teachers are teaching because they can’t do anything else. That innate incompetence carries over into the classroom and leads to side efforts to entrench them in their positions regardless of the negative consequences for the education process.
Occasionally some individuals can rise above their circumstances without assistance (though I expect in those cases, they still got lots of support from friends or family), but I expect that in general your lot in life is predicated by your parent’s lot in life. Any sort of vertical mobility is going to need some assistance and to me it is clear that equal opportunities in education is a critical first step (of course, I mean equal opportunities for success, not equal opportunities for mediocre teachers in underfunded school systems punished by policy determined to make them fail, just like we have today). Of course, vertical mobility goes both ways and that is what I see in these efforts by the elite to exacerbate our already polarized educational system: ensure that their children will never have a life any _worse_ than they have. When the system is rigged (as it is today), then I don’t see any chance for the next Einstein to blossom and it is well documented that children of intelligent people are no more intelligent than average, so I see this class divide as shortchanging our future by robbing us of the intelligent sparks needed to advance our science, engineering and society.
Not a problem with any easy solutions, but to me all the proposed solutions produce problems even greater than we have currently.
Flying strictly by the seat of my pants, I would say that 60% (I’m tempted to say 75%) of the people I went to school with were more successful than their parents.
Perhaps paradoxically, the economically favored tended to merely replace their parents. A goodly number of them, and their children, will piss away the goods, to the detriment of their descendants.
My children and their schoolmates seemed to split up/same/down pretty much around the middle.
I can’t speak for my grandchildren, since I have only one and he is 4 sigma above the mean.
Note that this is a very small sample and almost certainly not statistically significant over a wider area.
Higher level academics are definitely rigged in favor of the economically advantaged and the culturally disadvantaged (affirmative action).
The mass in the middle have merely been sent to the playroom and will eventually emerge with no skills and a worthless piece of paper.
From my perspective (perhaps a half generation behind you) I believe I am seeing the same thing you describe.
Clearly expectations are key and if your parents/teachers/peers don’t expect much from you it is quite easy to deliver and I see evidence that if you want to stand out from your parents/teachers/peers you run the risk of being persecuted.
For a while I thought that perhaps because we no longer have any real frontiers is why we are stagnating, but our frontiers have been gone for several generations (much longer on the East Coast) so I don’t think that is the issue. Certainly class has always ‘been amongst us’ and somehow I figure that class differences were more pronounced in our country’s history, but my gut tells me that this era is different. Perhaps I just want to feel special 😉