Education Is Not an Add-on

"This Democratic Administration, with Representative Blumenauer's vote, is promoting more high-stakes tests and more standardization," I said in my Candidate's Statement, filed on June 28th with the Oregon Secretary of State.  This week the news validates that assessment.

 If  you treat the process of education as some sort of manipulation of economic inputs, in the manner of corporate experts, then you demean a child to the level of livestock in an agribusiness concern (I postpone discussion of whether we ever are justified in so treating livestock).

In my opinion, there are some issues that are not simply a matter of taking the political pie and slicing it up according to the various interest groups, the way much of conventional politics works.  The Democrats, whose commitment is purely to getting into power, have that attitude -- witness Representative Blumenauer's explanation of his vote against war funding: the bill didn't have enough pork in it.

One issue that demands a principled stance is whether or not we should go to war.

A second is whether we ought to extend health care to everyone.

And a third, which is the subject of this post, is how we treat the children in our educational system.  How could it be, this week, that six civil rights groups condemned the Obama Administration's educational policy?  Well, their view of Black and Brown kids is not that they're some sort of interest group.  Market ideology has never done much for educational equity in this country -- in fact, has historically opposed it for much of the time -- and however much civil rights workers delight in President Obama's origins, they are remote from his faith in the market.

An insightful view is presented by the longtime (and occasionally mistaken) student of educational policy, Diane Ravitch, speaking on Democracy Now.  

I think this week, in the last week of July of 2010, turns out to be a pretty momentous week. First of all, six civil rights groups came together and issued a joint statement that blasted Race to the Top and also the blueprint, the Obama blueprint, because he is building-although he doesn't admit it, he's building his education agenda right on top of the Bush education agenda, which is to test and punish, to close schools, to evaluate teachers in ways that are unfair and unsound from a research point of view, to increase the number of privately managed charter schools. All this is going to be immensely destabilizing, and it's going to hit hardest on minority communities, because most of the schools that will be identified as the lowest-performing schools will be in poor Hispanic and black communities. And there will be massive-excuse me, massive destabilization. This is not good. And the civil rights groups recognize this.

When you vote, pardon the translation inserted, excuse me, when you vote for corporate Democrats, you will get corporate Democratic educational policy.  Private schools that educate selected kids from massively advantaged households produce better-educated graduates than public schools do.  But if you control for the selection, and if you compare the same sort of kids, then private schools are no better, and even in many respects worse, than public schools.  Blumenauer and Obabma are going to bet on private schools, since the very wealthy want them.

Continuing directly with Diane Ravitch's commentary:

There was a second report out that came out this week from a group of community-from an organization of community groups from across the country, echoing the same complaints: we don't want more community schools, we don't want more charter schools, we want better public schools-help our public schools get better, not by more testing, not by more charters, but by sensible approaches like more pre-kindergarten, smaller class size, more support for the people who are teaching in those schools-commonsense approaches, which this administration seems to be avoiding and looking for the quick fix that George Bush pursued and that Mayor Bloomberg pursued, and it didn't work. So I think there are immense implications here.

This demeaning of the children of this country did not start with the present Administration, and it won't end when Messrs Blumenauer, Obama, and (to be impartial) Meo are moldering in their graves.  It is a matter of the privileged elite arranging things so that their own kids will get the best education, and everyone else can go to the bread line.  (To get the metaphorical crumbs, as it were.)  I do not indict Blumenauer personally for the next paragraph of Ravitch's critique of the priorities of the present Administration, but I remind you that Blumenauer votes with the Democratic leadership between 97 and 98 percent of the time.

Ravitch complained next about the response to a request for a transfer of educational funding:

And we also saw in the Congress where Congressman Obey tried to strip money away from Race to the Top, away from merit pay and away from charter schools. And the administration's response was, "Don't take money from Race to the Top. Take it away from food stamps." And Joel Klein said to take it away from Title I. These are all programs that benefit the neediest families in our society, and they were prepared to harm people who are in need of help in order to preserve the President's favorite program.

Ravitch concludes her commentary by saying that these developments, developments in which the Democratic Administration comes in for a considerable degree of criticism for its market-based educational policy, is important, primarily because "up to now, everybody seems to have gone along with the rhetoric of President Obama. . ."  I beg to differ.

So I think that the implications of this week, with the test score explosion, the blowup of the fraud in New York City, and these two grassroots groups saying, "This is not working, and take a more commonsense approach, and stop this destructive test and measurement and punishment approach," this is big, because up 'til now everybody seems to have gone along with the rhetoric of President Obama. But you have to separate his rhetoric, which is always very elegant, from what his administration is actually doing, which is just more Bush, more No Child Left Behind.

The Green Party has not gone along with the Democrats.  We have always regarded market solutions as wrong-headed in education, and we always will.  We are not in the business of electoral politics to win at any cost: we are here to articulate and apply informed, knowledgeable, rational solutions to present problems.

Vote Green.