WHY ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS UNDER ATTACK?
The official education reform movement is part of a corporate and government attack on public education. Its goal is not to raise the expect-tions of our young people but to narrow, stifle, and crush them.
The Myth of School Failure
The campaign to justify the reforms is based on fraud. Take the "disastrous" decline of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. These scores did decline somewhat from 1963 to 1977. But the SAT is a voluntary test, useless as a measure of school quality
The scores began to fall when the range of young people going to college dramatically expanded. But was there a lowering of student achievement during this period? Absolutely not. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a representative exam, given each year to sample student populations across the country. PSAT scores held steady during this period in which the children of black and white working families first entered college in large numbers.
Other positive accomplishments go largely ignored: From 1973 to 1995 SAT scores of black students rose 55 points. In 1995 for the first time the proportion of white and black young people ages 24 to 29 who had completed high school was the same: 87%.
The alleged shortage of skilled personnel is also fraudulent. U.S. schools graduate the highest proportion of scientists and engineers in the world. In spite of the booming economy, these highly-skilled scientific workers are experiencing double-digit unemployment. (Boston Globe, March 17, 1997)
The Character of the Reforms
To understand the nature of the corporate attack, look at some typical reforms:
·Charter schools, school vouchers, and school choice attack the idea of a public good. They undermine the power of ordinary people by replacing supportive community relationships with isolated individuals competing to get their children into the "right" schools.
·Sharply raising standards while not equalizing resources at dramatically higher levels sets many young people up to fail. Establishing "high stakes" tests for high school graduation legitimizes their failure.
·Increased reliance on standardized tests, even "open-ended" tests, narrows the curriculum and encourages rote learning. Increased focus on class "rank" attacks solidarity among students and reduces education to a game of winners and losers.
·"School to Work" programs substitute training for education and aim to shape every child to meet the needs of the corporations-for a docile workforce.
Corporate and government leaders couch education reform in terms of one great national purpose: business competition. They hold up corporate success as the source of moral authority and corporate profit as the measure of human achievement.
What Is Behind This Assault?
In the past two decades, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. Skilled manufacturing jobs have been replaced by low skill service jobs-flipping hamburgers and cleaning offices. Huge numbers of white collar jobs have been "restructured" out of existence.
The lack of skilled jobs is likely to worsen as automation advances. Computerization has greatly reduced the skills required in many jobs, and has wiped out many others. This, after all, is the appeal of computerization to corporations.
Our young people have greater talent than the corporate system can use, and greater dreams than it can fulfill. The purpose of the attack on public education is to crush the self-confidence of millions of young people, so that if they have less fulfilling jobs and less rewarding lives in an increasingly unequal and undemocratic society, they will blame themselves instead of the economic system.
Teachers are under attack not because they have failed but because they have succeeded-in raising expectations which the corporate system dare not fulfill.
Attacking public education is also a way of blaming ordinary people for the increasing inequality in society. Corporate and political leaders are saying, if millions don't have adequate work or housing or much of a future, the fault lies with the people themselves, who could not meet the standards.
The attack on public education is part of a broader strategy to strengthen corporate domination of society. The 1960s and '70s witnessed a worldwide "revolution of rising expectations." Beginning around 1972, capitalist and communist elites undertook a counterrevolution to lower expectations and tighten their control. This counteroffensive has taken many forms, all of them designed to undermine the economic and psychological security of ordinary people. The export of jobs, the restructuring of corporations, the dismantling of social programs are policies intended to make people more frightened and controllable.
Education for Democracy
What changes are needed in public education? The proposed reforms exacerbate the worst thing about the schools: their tendency to reinforce the inequality of society. Real reforms would move in the opposite direction.
If we want to change the schools, we must first ask, "What are we educating our students for?" The choices come down to two. We can either prepare our young people for unrewarding jobs in an unequal and undemocratic society, or we can prepare them to understand their world and to change it. The first is education to meet the needs of the corporate economy. The second is education for democracy.
The goal of real change in the schools must be education for democracy. With this goal we would encourage high expectations, cooperation, and equality rather than competition and inequality, and real commitment to our children rather than fake reforms.
The Larger Question
The conflict over the shape and direction of education is part of a larger struggle over the direction of our society.
On one side of this struggle are arrayed the masters of great wealth and power, for whom schooling is a means of social control and for whom the full development of the talent and abilities of our young people represents a dangerous threat. This powerful elite will use any means at its command to strengthen its domination of society, no matter what the human cost. On the other side of the conflict stand most people, including parents and teachers and children, who wish to see young people's abilities developed to the fullest. There are few conflicts in society that illustrate so plainly the need for revolution.
For most of the twentieth century, the people of the world have been trapped between capitalism and communism. Our task as we approach the end of the twentieth century is to create human society anew on a truly democratic basis, in which human beings are not reshaped and restructured to fit the needs of the economy, but rather economic and social structures are reshaped to allow our fulfillment as human beings.
Dave Stratman is Editor of New Democracy, the author of "We CAN Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life" (New Democracy Books, 1991), and the formerWashington Director of the National PTA.
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