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You Can't Become Rich In Your Pocket Until You Become Rich In Your Mind | ||||
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Contrary to the free market agenda, there is little reason to believe that concentration on the bottom line is the answer to mediocrity in educationTransferring problem-solving skills into a new discipline, in which one has to figure out what are the problems and to which one may be able to transfer paradigms from a previous discipline, encourages greater originality. It is no coincidence that many contributors to intellectual progress initially specialized in fields different from the ones in which they made their major contributions. Nor is it coincidence that the most vibrant fields of study lie at the interstices of previously well-defined disciplines: art and music therapy, artificial intelligence, biochemistry, biophysics, forensic pathology, geochemistry, geophysics, genetic engineering, information technology, molecular biology, psychopharmacology, social network analysis. By sacrificing breadth to training, we have retarded the growth of interstitial disciplines and the development of new insight they provide. Have we been compensated for such a sacrifice by the development of a cadre of competent technicians, be they in art, history or engineering? Have we at least built a foundation that will enable students to grow into capable musicians, scientists or teachers? Not at the primary or secondary level. Despite the importance of technology, we have lagged even in this arena. For many it was Sputnik and the fear of being leapfrogged in critical military applications that first illuminated the flaws in the training provided by our system. But despite a brief well-publicized flurry to improve the quality of science and mathematics in our primary and secondary schools, progress has been minimal. The echoes of the Sputnik reveille faded quickly. While our educational achievement was stagnating, other countries perceived the vital importance of this basic R&D, despite its failure to contribute immediately to the bottom line. They invested heavily in this sector and set high standards. As a result of their progress, they have surpassed us. We have declined relatively, if not absolutely. Our decline in educational standards may be only relative, but it has disturbing implications. We have been surpassed not only by our trading partners but also by our societal needs. Our technology-based economy requires higher levels of linguistic and mathematical literacy than those of just a few generations ago, when the work force was predominantly blue collar. Recently, New York Telephone had to test 57,000 applicants to find just 2,100 people qualified to fill entry-level jobs. We cannot afford this. In a trans-national economy, where multinational corporations can purchase skilled labor anywhere in the world at the lowest costs, our educational institutions may be the most important long-term investment we can make. But because there is no immediate economic impact and because it is difficult to measure the longer-term economic benefit, our commitment to this area has been neither massive nor focused. Consider the competition. Those countries that have surpassed us in education have all adopted policies of strict central control, high national standards, and relatively high pay and prestige for teachers. Decision-making rests with the central government and teachers, as opposed to parents and communities. Such an approach is typical for important crash programs in any society. It is how we structured our space program. But we have not done this in education. Having been surpassed by our trading partners, we have sought to catch up by running in the opposite direction. How odd! Imagine the efficacy of our space program had we designed it along comparable lines — belittling scientists and calling for community control. Yet this is what we have done in education. Influenced by laissez faire, politicians and some business leaders have argued that alternatives based on the discipline imposed by the free market must be an improvement over our faltering public schools. They claim that a network of competing private schools, partly supported by government vouchers but chosen by independent “consumers” of education, would provide a better education for our children. Competition would force the poorer schools out of business, for no one would send their children to those schools. The most successful schools would be those that provide the best education. Quality would be reflected in the bottom line. Such a conclusion is strange. For one thing, it is generally easier to compete on the basis of price than on the basis of quality. Especially in service industries, from day care to HMOs, from nursing homes to airline transportation to municipal water management, competition has done little to improve quality. Rather, it has fostered cost cutting even at the expense of quality. What reason is there to believe education would be different? Why not minimize expenses in the name of maximizing efficiency and profitability? Independently, perceptions of quality, which can be influenced by advertising, are more important than actual quality. It is often less expensive and more effective to mount an advertising campaign than to improve quality. Quality itself does not serve the bottom line. So why should we expect the primacy of the bottom line to serve quality? In addition, there is no reason to expect education to be immune to the trend of other industries toward oligopoly. In other sectors oligopolies restrain competition and limit innovation. Why should education be different? Finally, television programming makes clear the priority of anything that sells — often sex or violence — over quality, taste, or propriety. This priority provides for better economic returns. Why should education be different? Why should substantive quality prevail over the lowest common denominator? In fact, the conclusion that education should be privatized may be unrelated to considerations of quality of education. Michael Lind [Up From Conservativism, p. 161 f.] argues that advocates of privatization are driven by an ulterior motive — the avoidance of court-ordered integration. Aside from Lind’s contention, the annual tuition in most non-religious private schools exceeds $10,000. Even with the small stipend ($2,500 or less) proposed in privatization programs, these schools would remain out of the economic reach of most middle class families, especially those with more than one child. Disproportionately, it would be the wealthy families, many of whom are already sending their children to private schools, who would use the vouchers to defray the cost of such schools. It is the wealthy who would benefit from the vouchers provided in the context of privatization. Privatizing education would redistribute income from the poor and middle class to the rich. Contrary to the free market agenda, there is little reason to believe that concentration on the bottom line is the answer to mediocrity in education. Nor has modeling education on free market principles improved quality of education. Rather, our economic paradigm has led to the replacement of traditional curricula by alternatives based on student appeal. In the spirit of laissez faire, we regard students as consumers of education. We market education to provide them with the product they want. Unfortunately, we give less thought to what they need. What is the “take” on student preferences? That students want courses that lead to high-paying employment — hence the proliferation of business administration programs. That students do not want to work too hard at their courses but want a feeling of accomplishment — hence the dumbing-down of courses and grade inflation. That students want to celebrate the importance of their own sub-culture — hence the proliferation of degree programs in popular sub-cultures. That alumni as well as students want to be proud of their school in terms easily understandable to others — hence the significance attached to sports, especially football. This is most serious at the college level, where there are many electives and an often-undisguised economic competition among academic departments, and also colleges, for students. A department’s funding is determined by the number of students in its courses. If its courses are too hard or its grades too low, fewer students take those courses. The department then loses funding and faculty positions; so the courses are made easier and the grades higher. None of this improves quality of education. Yet critics motivated by the free market paradigm still insist that our problem with education is a lack of attention to the bottom line. How would we test this claim? Profitability is easy to measure. But how can we measure quality of education, taking into account the diversity of students’ backgrounds and aptitudes and also the limitations of machine-graded tests? Especially at the primary and secondary levels, it is implausible that the bottom line would reflect quality of education, as opposed to the socio-economic status of the community. In fact, standardized tests show a strong correlation between scholastic performance and socio-economic status. Even students from poor families perform better in schools that are predominantly upper-middle class. Moreover, excessive reliance on such tests can compromise quality of education. Attaching economic incentives to performance on such tests encourages “teaching to the test” at the expense of more important educational objectives. There are other problems with education driven by bottom line considerations. Consider the hypothetical Ayatollah Khomeini School, teaching that authors like Salman Rushdie should be exterminated, or the Klan School, teaching that African-Americans are a genetically inferior race whose breeding should be strictly controlled and limited. Such schools are likely to find devoted clients, independent of academic standards. They could become the most profitable schools in the country despite — and because of — their promulgation of doctrines that are offensive and dangerous. Do free market considerations apply to such schools? Why not? (One area in which the bottom line has entered public education is the propensity of even wealthy school districts to solicit funds from industry. These funds typically come at a price. There is no free lunch, not even free Coke. “A top official in District 11 [Colorado Springs] has sent administrators a letter urging them to boost Coca Cola sales in their schools.… Bushey’s letter instructed principals to allow students virtually unlimited access to Coke machines and to move them to ‘where they are accessible to the students all day’.… Bushey also recommended that teachers consider allowing students to drink Coke products while in the classrooms.…” (The Denver Post, November 22, 1998.) All across the country, in-school television bombards impressionable students with sophisticated advertising for junk. It is amazing what one can buy for 30 pieces of silver.) In view of these considerations it is unlikely that privatizing education will provide an acceptable solution to our chronic mediocrity, that it will enable us to gain ground against those education systems — all public — that have surpassed us. Independently, our education system has been charged with helping maintain the social mobility associated with the meritocracy we claim to have. Bright and motivated, if poor, students who do well in secondary school can gain scholarships to colleges and can then find good jobs. This has been an important function of public education. Even our most right-wing spokesmen profess an allegiance to equality of opportunity, in part because it justifies any degree of economic inequality. If you haven’t made it to the top, you have only yourself to blame, because you had the same opportunity as anyone else. Equality of opportunity sounds pretty. But what does it mean? If it means only that we all have the same opportunity to be born into rich and powerful families, even the most rigid class-bound society provides equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity, to be meaningful, must insure that those born into poor uneducated families have opportunity to succeed comparable to the opportunity of those born into rich families. Public education has played a vital role in this. Privatized education could too easily magnify inequalities, restricting social mobility. Excessive differences between the quality of education received in well-funded primary and secondary schools and that received in poorlyfunded schools would overwhelm motivation and native intelligence. With our economic, political and judicial systems increasingly reflecting the views and priorities of an elite minority, our society has a natural tendency to create a large hereditary underclass. An education system that affords roughly the same opportunity to all is one of our most important defenses against such a danger. Privatization would undermine this defense. This is not intended to minimize the endemic flaws in our present system of education. Some of these stem from our low regard for the field. Our teachers are undereducated, underpaid and undervalued. After all, they teach because they cannot do. As a result, there is little incentive to go into teaching. Too many potentially gifted teachers choose other occupations, leaving teaching mostly to those who are less likely to succeed in other areas and who are willing to settle for low pay and prestige. We exacerbate the problem by treating teachers as civil servants, demanding hours of meaningless paperwork to assure compliance with specific techniques and substance and to minimize creativity and flexibility. Mediocrity intensifies beyond the classroom. It is remarkable how often students planning to enter education administration have achieved the very lowest scores on the Graduate Record Examinations. Coupling marginal competence with a desire to wield power has hardly been a boon to the education establishment. Unfortunately, we are ill equipped to deal with such problems. Our propensity to focus on the short term conditions us to look for the quick fix. It is unlikely, however, after generations of mediocrity, that a quick fix of our chronic debility in education is possible. It will require greater investment to attract outstanding teachers necessary to upgrade the perceived quality of public education. But in order to make such an investment, we will need to convince the public that improving public education is important and also feasible. Yet without highly competent and motivated teachers, it will be hard to satisfy a skeptical public. We are caught in a vicious circle. Even if we do succeed in attracting outstanding talent, our present system has developed both the hierarchical seniority structure and the “by the book” mentality of civil service. It has amassed a numbing inertia over decades. Powerful vested interests, ranging from unions to teachers’ colleges, are well positioned to thwart reform. It will be difficult to effect meaningful change without the support of entrenched faculties and administrations, who are likely to feel threatened — justifiably — by such change. As critics of public education justly complain, public schools have long been a protected monopoly prone to the defects characteristic of monopolies: inefficiency, rigidity, mediocrity, lack of concern. Our challenge is to break the monopoly and encourage meaningful competition and experimentation while retaining broad control over substance and standards and limiting inequality between education for the rich and education for the poor. However difficult this challenge, it will be necessary to try different approaches to break our present educational stalemate if we hope to thrive economically and survive as a democracy. There is no guarantee that functional democracy can survive in the modern world — or, for that matter, that it has survived. |
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