So, I’ve been meaning for a long time to write something about the “No Child Left Behind”(NCLB) program. I’ve been musing a lot about why the most pro-business administration ever would create a new program for our socialized school system. It somewhat clarified when I was reading reviews of Thomas Frank’s “The Wrecking Crew”. He basically argues that contrary to what everyone believes George Bush is just playing stupid, and the Republicans are simply playing at inept. What they’re actually doing is breaking the national government so that it is irreparably broken. If you pass legislation to change things your way, then when the next guys get into power they can reverse everything you’ve done. If you break it completely, there’s nothing they can do about it.
I started thinking about this when the latest test results came back for the elementary schools in my neighborhood. Travis Heights Elementary came back as academically unacceptable. Travis Heights has a reputation for being a great school that does an excellent job teaching students of varying economic backgrounds. But now it is academically unacceptable.
REALTORs must love NCLB. It gives them a great way to point out where the most desirable homes are. Your customers don’t have to take the REALTOR’s word on which neighborhood schools are good and bad. They can just look at statistics from the federal government. Which of course means bad schools are going to stay bad. Concerned, involved parents aren’t going to move into a bad school area, or they’re going to move in and send their kids to private schools.
But that’s not a huge difference from the way things always have been. REALTOR’s opinions have always red-lined neighborhoods. That’s a good part of what you pay for. The expertise of someone who knows all the different parts of town. So while we might see a few more schools fail, we shouldn’t expect the whole sale destruction of the public school system.
Until we get to the issue of failed schools. Failed schools are the linchpin to the system of destroying the public school system. Johnston just failed. As part of that failure 50% of those students must be transfered out. And that’s where the dominoes will start falling. We’re transferring out kids who are known to fail on standardized tests. So they move into another school. That school has a sudden influx of failures that drag down their scores. Concerned parents pull their kids out of that school and put them in private schools. The test scores move lower. The schools failed. Eventually these kids get transferred to the rich predominately white schools where all the best teachers are. This is where proponents of the system say the system will stop failing the kids. But I fail to believe that Bowie’s teachers are currently composed of Morgan Freeman, Sydney Portie, and Michelle Pfeifer. Sure some small percentage of kids who get transferred will thrive under better teachers and the resources that these schools have. But that won’t matter. Because the law of averages will take out that school with all the kids who don’t.
So why are private schools better? It certainly can’t be the instruction. The average private school teacher is not licensed, has less education, and is paid less. The key is exclusivity. Picking and choosing students means, you can pick and choose how good your school is. So existing private schools are a cash cow. Then when you look at private companies taking over public schools you can see why with NCLB they’re drooling. You could siphon off money from the students, and every time it fails you get new students, and new teachers. If they put performance requirements on schools then you would just find schools (like Starbucks) are yet another thing you don’t find in the poor side of town.
I listen to parents a lot and they agree with what I’m saying, but they feel that they have to do what’s best for their kids. Which is very different from the way our grandparents viewed education. In the 1950s and 60s most companies were local. You needed kids who could do arithmetic to man your cash registers. You needed the college students to love their community and want to settle back in it once they completed their degrees for higher level positions in your companies. You needed local engineers and craftspeople. So schools became a priority for the community. You couldn’t just plan on staffing your department store with kids from the next town, or in China, where schools were good.
With globalization we’ve uprooted. We pick towns based upon how they fit our lifestyle, rather than where our roots are. And in much the same way we’re not loyal to our jobs, we’re not loyal to our communities or our schools. We might have to change them, and frequently, so why bother getting involved. It seems quaint to think that there was once a social stigma attached to skipping the neighborhood schools and going private.
So what do we do? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t found a parent yet who was willing to commit with me to sending their kid to public schools. Most are planning to try them out, or are going to use them because they can’t afford a private school, but they’re all clear that if push comes to shove they’re pulling them out.
I can only hope that this is yet another pendulum, and the coming destruction of the public school system will refocus our energy on having top notch schools. That the increases in cost of energy will cause people to think more about nurturing their local communities rather than moving their kids to exclusive enclaves or transporting them to private schools. But our attitudes have changed so much that I don’t know if we can count on it.
2008-08-18T21:10:33.000Z
Bravo, sir! You neglected to mention Homeschooling. That is another thing that parents are doing instead of public school. I don’t get the rhetoric that my school’s preschool and elementary education are going to be the ticket to college. I call B.S. I think as long as my child is going to a safe school that teaches the basics and I am an involved parent, my child will be fine. I also don’t think that just because a certain percentage of kids failed some stupid standardized test doesn’t mean that a school is bad. Of course I am sadly finding out that I am in the minority. Everyone I knows’ liberal rhetoric falls apart when it comes to schools. Suddenly it’s every man for himself. Such a sad state of affairs. Thanks Republicans!
kelli
2008-08-18T23:24:52.000Z
You know, I was a public school teacher under Clinton and things pretty much sucked then too. I don’t agree with No Child Left Behind either, but it’s not like they took something that was working so well and broke it. It’s just a different kind of bad. I know lots of people, Republicans even, who have their kids in public school and are very happy with it. I find it interesting that you don’t- especially since I would guess that most of your friends have the same kind of mindset that you do. I don’t see why you think that public school is the only good way to do it. Yes, I do plan to homeschool, and I know you disagree with that which is fine, but it’s not because I find anything wrong with our local school. I just want to. If I didn’t want to, I’d send her to public school, not private. Then again, I live in an area that I did pick partly for the schools. If I lived in a school zone I didn’t like, I might make a different choice. And I think it’s perfectly okay for me to make that decision for my family. It sounds like you’re saying we all have a duty to live in an area with a failing school and get involved in PTA because then that will fix everything. I don’t feel the need to support something I disagree with just because it’s “covering the basics” though. I don’t have the confidence that my one voice makes a difference like you do. I get that if more people did it, it WOULD make a difference. But you’re right, attitudes have changed and people don’t think that way anymore.
2008-08-19T00:14:10.000Z
I don’t think parental involvement will cure all ills. There are other issues like class size, diet, etc. that make huge differences in the ability to learn. But I think people have to be involved for any of the more difficult changes to happen. You say you moved somewhere where you’re happy with the school district and most of the people you know are. My point is that it’s only a matter of time. The whole goal behind NCLB is to destroy public schools. So one elementary school in your district fails. The kids get scattered to the other elementary schools. Those kids provide just the needed bump to push those schools into failing territory. With elementary schools, just a few additional kids who fail can fail your school. If you’re scattering 50% of the kids from a failing school throughout a school district, the chances of them dragging down other schools is huge. Parents start pulling their kids out of the public schools and pushing them into private schools because of all the failures and eventually the public system fails completely. Austin’s getting to watch this a little bit earlier than many school districts because it has had such a racially/class divided city. Half the schools are fantastic, and half are horrible. The horrible schools are the starting dominoes and they’re going to take down the district with them. It’s probably going to take longer in Dallas since most of the schools districts are either “suburban fantastic” or “urban horrible”. But my guess is that the failures of some of the school districts around you will cause flight into your school district which will start dragging it down. The Texan Republican party is heavily funded by pro-voucher soft money groups. These groups basically wrote the NCLB legislation. They know that the public school system is very popular even among Republicans. So they’ve drafted the perfect way to destroy it and get their vouchers into the public. At least that’s how I see it. I have no clue why a pro-voucher group would be drafting legislation to fix the public school system, otherwise. Home Schooling doesn’t really fit into this issue, since there’s no real money in it, and most parents can’t do it. And I do think this issue is all about money. But, yeah, I do think it’s our moral obligation to think about our country in general. There are kids who are starving for education and rather than try to fix the problems (no matter how insurmountable) we have a small group of people who are trying to make things worse and profit off of it. That’s morally reprehensible. Most of us don’t think children should starve in our country. We use to have that same attitude about education. And we should care for the good of our country. If don’t educate all the children in the United States the country is going to fail. It’s not about us, or our school district, or our state. Texas is dropping out half its kids. Where are they going to work? What happens if those numbers keep going up? The haves are eventually going to collapse trying to support the social net for the have-nots. Or we’ll have massive social unrest, or both. As bizarre as it sounds, good free education is one of the smartest ways to have a powerful capitalist country. By providing your companies with the best labor pool possible you are ensuring that they’ll be able to grow quickly and outperform other countries. This is what the United States did during the 50s and 60s. It’s what we’re not doing today. The brain drain that’s going to happen when the boomers retire is going to be dire because we haven’t trained replacements. Oh, well, this comment has gotten too long, I’ll let things go for now.
Our movie night theme on Sunday was “hunting”. For some reason this got me thinking about Wild Boar, and the way that cooks used to make fake versions of food when the king demanded a beef roast when there were no cows on hand. So I made a fake wild boar.