Race to the Top?
President Obama touted his education policies today in a speech at the 100th anniversary convention of the National Urban League. His much-hyped “Race to the Top” still sounds to me more like a TV reality program than a program that will advance education. It invests heavily in funding charter schools, which offer no more than mixed results while at the same time furthering the demise of inner-city Catholic schools.
In his speech, Obama continued the push for teacher accountability, which is all well and good until one considers that accountability is defined by improved scores on standardized tests. The fallacy of this approach is underscored by stories in New York newspapers today. The state’s education department acknowledged that improving test scores were illusory because the tests had been getting easier. The state is a little late with this – Mayor Michael Bloomberg trumpeted the improved scores in his re-election campaign.
Such number games are a problem across the country, fostered by the No Child Left Behind Act, which set a strict requirement for states to improve reading and math scores but left it to each state to set its standard.
Nonetheless, Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are charging forward with their reform agenda – basically a continuation of the Bush administration’s business-centric approach.
Bruce Fuller wrote about “Race to the Top” and charter schools for our education issue this spring: “A Gamble.”
Having the federal government involved with local schools is not a good idea.
The feds have never done a good job with schools, and I doubt if they ever will or if they can. It is not the fault of the feds; it is just that the federal government is too far from the local schools to have a reasonable understanding of what is needed. I firmly hold that the federal government should focus on doing that which it does best, and meddling with local high schools in the 50 states is not one of those things. The only local school system the federal government should control and supervise is the local Washington DC school system. When they manage to get that system running like a top, perhaps other states would follow their lead.
In keeping with the notions of subsidiarity, local schools should funded entirely by and should be entirely under the supervision and control of the individual states.
We managed to win WW2, build the interstate highway system and one of the strongest economies in the world, pass the Civil Rights Act, and put a man on the Moon without federal government involvement in local schools.
- Americans helped win the war in the 1940′s
- Americans built the interstate highways and the strong economy in the 1950′s and 1960′s
- We went to the Moon in the late 1960′s
- The federal government began involving itself in local elementary and high schools in the 1970′s
Hmm – Are schools better off and kids better educated now that they were before the 1970′s?
No.
Oops – Meant to type:
“- We passed Civil Rights Act in the early 1960′s and went to the Moon in the late 1960’s”
Thank you for posting this today. I was listening to the President’s speech while I was getting my 4th grade classroom ready. All the President and Arnie Duncan have done is pit the states against one another hoping competition will bring along education. The one thing the Feds can do is insist on all states going to standardized testing instruments such as the SAT 9 or Stanford tests. This would insure that all states are singing from the same song sheet in terms of standardized curriculum. Then the states can bring the curriculum along as they see fit. George Bush took us away from those standardized tests and that is when states started making their own tests, dumbing them down to get funding.
Charter schools aren’t the answer in most places, and they are very expensive. We need parental involvement and an upgrade in society’s moral standards and priorities to turn the hearts of the young toward the important things in life, like a good education. And like everything else, this is modeled first at home, and secondly mirrored in all society. That’s what happened in the 40′s, 50′s 60′s etc. and we can’t pretend it’s happening now. Lend the teacher’s a hand by “raising your kids right”. That’s the major piece that is missing, and the the one that is talked about the least.
Education is the opium of liberals. “Race to the Top” and “No Child Left Behind” exemplify the inordinate faith in education displayed by liberals — of both the welfare-state variety and the classical (now called “conservative”) variety. All people needed to succeed in a meritocratic market society, so the myth went, was the acquisition of an ever-more escalating and changing level of “skills.” Set aside what all this meant for the very definition of education as the accumulation of “skills,” reflective of its subservience to the needs of business. Education has never been a substitute for social movements like labor, civil rights, or feminism in bringing formerly subaltern or marginalized people into the economy. “Education” is a panacea, a way to avoid political struggle.
So you’re a drug dealer, Prof. Mccarraher? ;)
That must be why no liberals ever call for building and protecting a minimum social safety net. If only people did well enough in school, those kinds of things wouldn’t be necessary.
Yes, I get it that there are many people who seem to operate under the principle that you can do anything as long as you do well enough in school, and that if only everyone were educated they would have good jobs, etc. Like many delusions it causes us to pursue suboptimal policies, so it should be corrected. But it’s still a long way from education is all to education is meaningless. In any event, surely it’s worthwhile to pursue policies that improve education even if education isn’t the be all and end all of a civilized society.
And to say that education serves business — I guess at some level people think this is the case, but in reality, at least in K-12, there is virtually no relationship between what students learn and what employers demand. Indeed, there are many people who think just the opposite, that vocational education has been sacrificed on the misguided altar of college for all.
“reflective of its subservience to the needs of business”
It would be far truer, if less comfortable for certain folks, to point out that education is far more subservient to the needs of people like Mr. McCarraher himself. McCarraher (and those like him) need to have a population that is literate in certain ways, that thinks of teachers as repositories of valuable knowledge, etc. A vo-tech kind of education would be much better for “business” but it wouldn’t put as much emphasis on churning out graduates who would be able to read McCarraher’s writing.
Barbara: Liberals have, in fact, been very derelict over the last three decades in “calling for builiding and protecting a minimum safety net.” Time and again, they’ve acceded to people like Bill Clinton, who delivered the coup de grace to federal welfare guarantees in 1996. That’s why Obama has been able to shunt aside welfare-state liberals on health care and financial reform, all the while crooning his trademark sonorous banalities.
As for education serving business, I’m not talking about vo-tech. I’m talking about why students enter college with the idea that education is about teaching them how to make the largest possible pile of money. They don’t just get that idea from their parents. They get it, for example, from “counsellors” who “counsel” them to look at colleges and universities in overtly, grossly professional terms. They get it from the aggressive commercialization of public school spaces, from the sides of buses to the cafeterias. They — and their teachers — get it from the introduction of “accountability” measurements and standards straight out of corporate management venues. They get it from people such as Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education, who established myriad connections with Chicago’s business elite in the 2000s. Duncan was one of the geniuses behind the “Renaissance 2010″ plan, made up by the Commerical Club of Chicago, who hired a corporate consulting firm, A. T. Kearney, to write the plan, which called for closing over 100 public schools, opening charter and “contract” schools (the latter designed to circumvent state requirements) and “performance” schools.
Add to that the whole ideological notion — apparently endorsed by Obama — that improving education is about fostering the “competitiveness” of American capitalism.
William: Those days are well behind me.
As long as all natives are citizens and all citizens may vote, our democratic system will require certain minimum intellectual skills, such as reading and math, and enough understanding of logic and rhetoric to understand how we can all be manipulated by clever politicians. The latter two areas, of course, are rarely understood to be necessary.
. I’m talking about why students enter college with the idea that education is about teaching them how to make the largest possible pile of money.
But who benefits the most from that belief? Not business. You do. Not very many people want to fork over tuition money and spend 4-5 years of their lives just to study the liberal arts out of a high-minded pursuit of knowledge. But lots and lots of people are willing to fork over tuition money and spend 4-5 years at a university if they think that’s the only way they’re going to get a good job. The belief that education leads to good jobs couldn’t be more perfectly designed if the sole intent was to enrich the professorial class at the expense of everyone else.
Oh, come on! Everyone needs an education to survive in the world with enough intelligence to serve themselves well enough and hopefully serve society. But education will not slove all of are ills; however the lack of it could surely make things far worse than they are presently.
Studebaker: “Who benefits the most from that belief? Not business. You do.” Do you know something about my remuneration that I don’t? And by the way, folks like me with tenure — one of the last remaining (and precious) non-corporate institutions in higher education — will become more scarce over the next few decades. Following “best practice” of major corporations (what a vacuous term, like so much else in the vulgate of business rhetoric), more and more colleges and universities are turning to non-tenured and adjunct faculty, the helots of contemporary academe. Tell them that they “benefit” from the tuition paid to the bursar’s office.
And business does indeed benefit. By offloading the cost of training its professionals, technicians, managers, etc., onto universities — which is very much what the history of higher education in the U.S. has been since the 1890s — it spares business the time, effort, and cost of doing it. One of the leading celebrants of the postwar university, Berkeley’s Clark Kerr, wrote gushingly of the “multiversity” in the early 1960s.
I’m well aware that most people aren’t eager to pursue the liberal arts — and more’s the pity. What most students receive in college these days is largely technical training, not a real liberal arts education. And even then, by and large, they don’t get good jobs — if they can find them. What we’re witnessing right now — in fact, have been for the last two decades — is the proletarianization of the professional and managerial classes. In the 70s and 80s, it was the blue-collar industrial working class that was on the chopping block. Now, it’s the folks who laid them off. We’re increasingly a two-class, enormously bifurcated society, with the largest increase in employment taking place in the low-wage, low-benefit category. No amount of sonorous banality about “education” is going to fix that. Social and political movements will.
I’m also a bit alarmed that everyone here seems to think I’m dissing education. Folks, get serious. Pointing to the ideological uses of emphasizing “education” (please note the quotation marks) is far from saying that education is unnecessary. If anything, it’s a call to transform what we mean by education, which is also a call to transform the society that perverts it. So please stop giving me the civics lesson that Education is Important in a Free Society.
Do you know something about my remuneration that I don’t?
I don’t really mean you personally, but professors in general. The professoriate would be much smaller in number absent the widespread belief among college students and their parents that it’s worth paying (or borrowing) tens of thousands of dollars a year to buy an “education” from those professors. It’s professors as a class who benefit most magnificently from inculcating the widespread belief that their services will somehow lead to greater economic success for the buyers. For example, if the University of Phoenix [or anywhere else] advertises that its degrees will get you a better job, they are obviously being motivated by their own self-interest, not by altruism for some mysterious class of employers.
And business does indeed benefit. By offloading the cost of training its professionals, technicians, managers, etc., onto universities — which is very much what the history of higher education in the U.S. has been since the 1890s — it spares business the time, effort, and cost of doing it.
It’s a commonplace observation among just about anyone who has ever worked or known anyone who has worked that little of what you learn in college is actually relevant to your job. College is not serving, on any widespread basis, the function of teaching people what they will actually need to know on the job, which in turn implies that businesses are hardly expecting colleges to serve that function as a benefit to them (they look at college degrees mostly as a screening device).
Next, you assume with no basis that absent the college system, “business” would somehow bear the “time, effort, and cost” of doing . . . something or other. Not true: while many businesses do include on-the-job training — which they will always tend to do when it actually makes sense — they never have and never will bear the entire cost of educating workers, nor is there any conceivable reason that they should. Workers themselves are the primary beneficiaries of whatever knowledge and skills they gain and they can (and do) switch jobs. Why should a given business fund some random person to get a 4-year education when he can just switch to a competitor or leave the field altogether?
“It’s a commonplace observation among just about anyone who has ever worked or known anyone who has worked that little of what you learn in college is actually relevant to your job. ”
True if you’re a scientist? A lawyer? Doctor? Accountant? Manager? . . .
I was an English major. Even in those days people asked me what I was going to do with it. I’d say “Speak it”. I should have added “Read it’. I got a civil service rating of Librarian II by reading some books and taking a test. Didnt’ have to take any courses. I knew how to read :-)
Studebaker: I don’t know of professors (other than those in the business or other professional schools) who trumpet their ability to get students better jobs. Certainly they do at the U of Phoenix, which is not, in my view, a bona fide university.
I actually agree with you that most of what you learn in college isn’t relevant to your job. I also think that many students would do better if they didn’t go to college or university. (In my ideal educational system, a lot of the liberal arts education now provided at the college level would be offered at the primary and secondary levels, or in what’s now called “adult” or “continuing” education.) It’s a commonplace that most of what business students learn will be irrelevant in 5 years.
I disagreee, though, about business and educating workers. “Business” used to bear the time and effort of training — it was called the apprentice system. (Avowed socialist that I am, I actually have a certain fondness for the guild system. If there were some way to avoid its medieval injustices, I think we should revisit it.) The uncertainty you mention in your final question would be rendered moot if industries were controlled by workers (or modern guilds, so to speak).
Whether individual professors make that claim isn’t the point. The point is that when the average 18-year-old thinks that he or she needs to borrow $10,000 a year to attend college — any college at all — so as to get a degree in it-doesn’t-matter-what so that he or she can then get a job someday . . . that belief is obviously to the benefit of the professors and everyone within the college system, and much less obviously to the benefit of anyone else (including the businesses that are supposedly “offloading” to the university the task of making sure that a secretary has a degree in anthropology).
It is troubling to me that 18 year olds start out with student loans especially in degree programs that will be hard to obtain employment. This again is a troubling sign of our economy and also a lack of parental counseling as well as counseling from high schools and colleges for these vulnerable kids. Community colleges are playing more of a role for undecided students and are a good way for these kids to get the general two years behind them for little cost compared to going on campus. I think more kids are going this route at least until they can make a more informed decision. And they should be encouraged to turn their back on peer pressure to make the best economic choice for themselves. Another HS counselor should be hired to steer these kids who may be eligible into scholarships and grants because the average kid and parent needs help in obtaining funding for themselves or their child.
Well certainly not all kids need to go to college or university. In fact universities of late have been getting fatter and cost prohibitive. Technical schools and the trades are a very good option for some.
In any case, our college and universities are in good shape and the article was about elementary and high schools.
I really do not see where the federal government adds anything productive to the discussion of how to best set up and operate elementary and high schools.
Ken — Colleges and universities may be in OK financial shape — though most took quite a hit in the last few years — but in terms of their intellectual and pedagogical direction, they’re drifting toward an increasingly technocratic orientation.
Studebaker: I don’t think we need to belabor this point, but my concern is that, yes, the entire professoriat is at risk of proletarianization. The problem isn’t simply “individual professors” — that personalizes and indeed trivializes a much larger trend. That’s why it makes increasingly little sense, in my view, to write of professors “benefitting” from those heaps of tuition money.
How come those very professors who benefit from those high tuition struggle to send their own children to college? Isn’t there something wrong when they cannot – or can barely, with help – afford the very thing that they sell, education?
Yes.
The last 30 years have witnessed a shameful lack of corporate responsibility. Shareholders ranks supreme and the employee be damned. In this present second depression many companies are making record profits. Education should be centered on ways to make corporations more responsible. With so many people unemployed and under employed, attention has to center on not buying the products of those who make greed a science. The best education cannot succeed in a corporate world of greed.
“As Professor Sum studied the data coming in from the recession, he realized that the carnage that occurred in the workplace was out of proportion to the economic hit that corporations were taking. While no one questions the severity of the downturn — the worst of the entire post-World War II period — the economic data show that workers to a great extent were shamefully exploited. ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/opinion/31herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
In another thread, we’re witnessing New Yorkers struggling to discern the right answer to the question, “Should Muslims be allowed to have a community center a couple of blocks from Ground Zero?”. I submit that, while the attorney can report what the municipal code requires, and the business manager can do a financial analysis of the impact on profits of locating a community center on that block, it requires some *education* to understand the history and the principles that explain *why* Muslims should be accorded freedom of religion.
I have a great fear that the technocratization of American education that Professor McCarraher is describing is causing our society to lose its collective ability to discern answers to these difficult issues in a way that is consonant with the best of American principles and values. The foundation is eroding, and surely that is an educational failure.