Good News, Bad News

As long as I've been paying attention to politics, people have tended to like their own elected representatives, while holding Congress overall in very low esteem. For instance, my own legislator, Jim McDermott, receives 80 percent of Washington's 7th congressional district vote election after election. As long as he runs, he will win, while nationwide he is consistently one of the most reviled of congress critters.

I mention this because a similar phenomenon seems to apply when it comes to our public schools. In a recent Gallup poll conducted for Phi Delta Kappa, when asked to grade their own local schools, 51 percent of us give them a grade of A or B. If you throw in the C grades, 88 percent of us give our public schools a passing grade. Man, that's awesome! Ah, but when we were asked to grade public schools in the nation as a whole, only 17 percent of us give up that A or B, with only 1 percent of us going for the highest mark. Holy cow, that's horrible!

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on. When we have first-hand knowledge of what our own schools and teachers are actually doing, we're impressed. But since we have to rely on second-hand knowledge when it comes to other schools, typically delivered to us through the media, we're clearly being fed spin and lies, or at least only a very narrow slice of the story. Nearly 70 percent of us give our local public school teacher an A or a B, yet all we hear from the national press are stories about how teachers are lazy, how teachers are failing, how teachers are letting our children down. 

Phi Delta Kappa has been conducting this survey since at least 1984, and when it comes to our own schools, we've never been more satisfied, despite the anti-school hype. (There's a lot more interesting, uplifting, and eye-opening data in there: a large majority of us want teachers to have flexibility to teach rather than be required to follow a set curriculum, we are overwhelmingly opposed to high-stakes standardized testing, and we would want our own children to become public school teachers, among other things.) 

So if it is true that we are largely satisfied, it begs the question: where is all the negativity coming from? And why? These are important questions, because the answers to them will reveal who is attempting subvert our public schools for their own benefit.

David Sirota, one of the last real journalists standing, lays out a convincing case in his recent must-read Salon piece entitled, The Bait and Switch of School "Reform". It's not an accident, of course, that most of the champions of corporate "reform" are Wall Street types. And while they seek to paint themselves in the pastel colors of concerned philanthropists, they are really only concerned with the black ink of pure profit. There is a ton of money to be made in diverting school funds away from traditional things like hiring teachers, buying textbooks, and maintaining school buildings, and into such profitable enterprises as standardized testing, untried technology, and private charter schools. Demonizing schools and teachers is just part of the business plan to fundamentally change public schools, and not in a way that will serve children.

Sirota:

The bottom line is clear: In attempting to change the mission of public education from one focused on educating kids to one focused on generating private profit, corporate leaders in the "reform" movement are pursuing a shrewd investment strategy. Millions of dollars go into campaign contributions and propaganda outfits that push "reform," and, if successful, those "reforms" guarantee Wall Street and their investment vehicles much bigger returns for the long haul.

And as if it isn't bad enough that they would do this to our schools for a greasy buck, Sirota asserts that there's more than profit behind their "reform" zeal. For instance, we keep hearing that our schools are falling behind the rest of the world, yet the research shows that this is a function of increasing poverty, not declining schools. If we count only the US schools with a poverty rate less than 10 percent, we outperform every other nation on earth. This, of course, is bad news for Wall Street, which really doesn't want the American people to catch on to the fact that they have been meticulously redistributing our middle class wealth into their own pockets over the past 30 or so years. If enough of us knew the truth, we just might realize that Wall Street is the cause of this increase in poverty and then do something about it. No, they instead are spending millions to convince us that the problem is with our schools, it's not poverty, it's inequality. If only we would throw out this archaic, outmoded educational system and replace it with their test and technology machine, the new and improved education it manufactures will make poverty a thing of the past.

In the bait-and-switch of the "Great Education Myth," then, the corporate "reformers" get to pretend that they care about poor people and brag that they are benevolently leading "the civil rights issue of this era," when what they are really doing is making sure America doesn't talk about the macroeconomic policies that make Wall Streeters so much money, and impoverish so many others in the process.

He also points out a Wall Street motivation that has everything to do with one of the pet projects of big monied interests: unions busting. If it hasn't been obvious to you over the past couple years in places like Wisconsin, Idaho, and Michigan, the knives are out for the teachers unions in the name of "reform." While Sirota stipulates that both sides are motivated by self-interest, he also points out big differences in what those competing self-interests mean to children:

Teachers unions' self-interest means advocating for better teacher salaries and job security -- an agenda item that would, among other things, allow the teaching profession (as in other nations) to financially compete for society's "best and brightest" and in the process help kids. The unions' self-interest also means advocating for decent workplace facilities, which undeniably benefits not only the teacher, but also students. And it means pressing for curricular latitude that doesn't force educators to teach to a standardized test, a notion that would help actually educate students to think critically, rather than train them to be test-taking robots . . . Neither side's self-interest is perfectly aligned with the goal of bettering our education system. But one side is clearly far more aligned with that goal that the other.

In other words, the goals of teachers unions line up quite well with the opinions of the rest of Americans according to the Phi Delta Kappa poll.

So click on through to the Gallup poll results: I think they'll make you feel pretty good. Then click on through to the Sirota piece: I think it'll make your blood boil. 

The silver lining, so far at least, is that it doesn't appear that the "reformers" smear efforts are really taking hold, not when most of us see, first-hand, daily refutations of their lies about our local public schools. We might believe that "those other" schools need "reform," but not our own, and that's what I hope will save our schools.

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