So much politicking and money grubbing … it’s our children who suffer. Always, they are the constituency with no one looking out for their special interests. I cannot begin to fathom why not; I know no one with children who does not arise every morning for the soul purpose of devoting themselves to their children’s welfare. And yet politically, it never seems to translate. Adults back-bite and undermine and sue and scrabble while children’s needs are back-burnered.
Nowhere is this more evident than in “Education Reform”. It’s not about education. Say this with me again, it astonishes me still: Education Reform is not about education. It’s about reforming a public institution, schools, so that they are better positioned for funneling public monies into private pockets.
That’s it.
The proof? Well, if it were about education, would private corporate funds be available to set-aside charter schools exclusively? Why can’t all that purported interest in improving classroom resources be given to public district schools? Why only among insulated, private fiefdoms? A: Better control over the kickbacks. If children were the focus of interest, then children would be receiving the money, not private school entities. Nothing is stopping Broad or the Waltons or Gates or Jobs’ family or Bloomberg or any of the rest of these information-age tycoons from supporting education by investing in our classrooms. Except that this has never been their intention. Their support is a quid pro quo with public monies kicking back to them for testing contracts and computer contracts and information-data contracts. Mining information from, and selling to, your kids, the next generation of consumers, is the point.
3 Comments
May 27, 2013 at 6:59 am
I mostly agree with your point, but I think even the less ideological foundations found that districts were so big and so fickle — in part because the NEXT foundation would come along and push them in a different direction — huge sums of money were just disappearing with no visible impact whatsoever. So in addition to ideology, they just needed to create smaller, private institutions to give money to that they had more control over. It is an artifact of being a private benefactor. Adding, charters leverage contributions much better than fully private schools.
May 27, 2013 at 9:32 am
Very good points, that a large size institution is hard to affect and philanthropists – well, all of us of course – need that affect to be effective.
This issue of size is very, very difficult. I, too, feel in some knee-jerk fashion that small must be beautiful. A lot of ‘bad’ gets swallowed up behind ‘big’. But difficult though it is to control, education, it seems to me, is one arena in which size is an advantage — on all scales, even. Given, the administration scales up in difficulty probably more quickly than the increase in size alone (like surface:volume ratio) — there are interactions to deal with as well as individual effects, if you want to model it all mathematically.
One of my children was choosing between a swooned-after charter and a storied local public school. What settled the matter for me was listening to the frankly sad, anemic stragglers of a dozen children trying to have an “orchestra”. Far more troubling than the pathetic music that resulted was everyone’s insistence that it was all so wonderful … it was not. Meanwhile back at the feared, way-too-big public school, there was an orchestra of one hundred kids, most of whom had played their instrument for one year only, making truly impressive music. The teacher is tremendous, a veteran of a gazillion years, filtered for excellence through the system, the kids feed off one another and what results is so much better than the individual components; in short, an orchestra (another entity virtuous for size).
This was a true eye-opener to me. There are so very many good things that accrue to a large school system: playing fields, orchestras, art studios, libraries, mental and physical health services … these are shared resources that spill over *after* an institution completes the 3R’s necessities. They are a function of Big.
May 27, 2013 at 4:37 am
It is about priorities, too. And there is enough blame to go around. A former Reagan appointee was a graduate of our local high school. He gave a lot of money to build a new stadium. Meanwhile, our elementary schools are antiquated and the public will not pass a bond to improve them, but they did pass a bond that included lots of upgrades to the middle school and high school including new locker rooms for visiting football teams.
As for reform, there are political irons in the fire from all over the place. People are punching and jabbing and the rhetoric is flying back and for like a Medieval confrontation.
I am homeschooling now. Let me know when you all get it figured out. Parents are well aware that their opinions count for nothing from either side.