healthmedicinet

Who can be surprised that school districts cheat? The wish to measure quality is understandable. But the testing regime puts desperately poor school districts in competition with the New York City suburbs for self-esteem and funds. Testing ducks impolite questions about the effects of poverty on kids and the nation’s dishonesty about the working poor. The focus on tests, international rankings, teachers’ unions, and charter schools distracts from the reality. Affluence does Ivy League. Poverty scrubs floors. 

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) tests implicitly defines school as a survival struggle that rewards winners and leaves losers behind for the wolves. But in a contest not everyone can come in first. Someone has to lose. If the losers cheat to keep up, it confirms suspicions in some quarters that the poor are lazy, incompetent, and criminal, like the dark figures the gun lobby imagines breaking into your house tomorrow night. But the temptation to cheat must be strong in an American Idol contest that hosts the winner at the White House. And it should be pretty safe—nobody’s gonna follow home the kids whose tests the officials doctored.

You don’t doctor test scores to get rich. More likely you do it to boost morale for teachers and students. Of course it’s fraud, but I bet it’s accompanied by a Robin Hood grudge of getting even with smug privilege. The US has some 16,000 independent school districts. “Compared to the national median income, the families in the most well-off districts are incredibly wealthy. In the 10 richest school districts, median incomes ranged from $175,766 to $238,000. By comparison, median income in the poorest school districts ranged from $16,607 to $18,980, well below $22,314, the national poverty line for a household of four. In San Perlita Independent School District in Texas, one of the poorest districts in the country, 30% of residents earned less than $10,000 each year.”[1] 

In court tests, rich districts have refused to share their wealth with poorer neighbors. Like the nation as a whole, poor districts strive toward some semblance of respectable conformity, yet financially they’re alone with their poverty, stress, and incoherence.

 Education is a process of acculturation. Privileged students are likely to have educated families and some built-in cultural literacy. The “disadvantaged” are lucky to get a taste of Head Start. If you start from some neighborhoods, learning to pass in the educated mainstream is like studying a foreign language. If your family’s in trouble and if school budgets and professional talent are inadequate, an ordinary school day may not be time enough.

 Management likes to see measurements, incentives, and punishments. while many teachers resent the pressure to “teach to the test” because they feel it enforces factory mentality and stifles creativity. But testing could be used to emphasize creativity. Test only what can be tested, including math and reading. Once students prove they’ve mastered the basics, whatever their age or grade, give them more control over what they want to study. Let them be more self-directed and creative, as John Dewey liked to say.

 To make choice meaningful, it would help to change the emphasis in curriculum.

The test mentality implies that an authority somewhere knows all the answers. That may be true for the multiplication tables. But beyond the basics, curriculum tends to squeeze reality into inoffensive packages of information harmonized to please cranks and bigshots. Publishers work hard to assemble upbeat textbooks stripped of controversy.

Yet especially in an age of spin, students need to be able to face up to, formulate, and wrestle with problems.  Which means being able to find or devise appropriate problem-solving tools and to sort out spin. A school that only presents ideal subject matter is coaching students to be passive consumers. Which is a version of advertising culture.

You come alive when you’re faced by real problems, whether they’re global or local, popular as ecology or forbidding as criminology. Relaxed controls would free—or require—teachers to take more individual initiative. Which would either reveal talents currently muffled or call for better educated teachers. Likewise, some high school students would do well to sample local college courses, or be teamed up with organizations or businesses. You could teach math, science, history, and whatnot in relation to actual home builders, lawyers, medical folks, and others. As it is, students are handicapped in thinking about careers because in American culture, work is more taboo than sex. If you watched TV around the clock, you’d still have no idea how most Americans earn a living, or what bankruptcy means. 

If you wrestle with problems rather than just consuming information, you have a better chance of waking up in the morning with a sense of heroic purpose. If you’re urged to take charge, you’re less likely to feel you’re a captive of a system. Ideally, being more honest about what we know and don’t know would make us more flexible and less anxious. Ideally. In reality, saying anything about public education is quixotic, since the subject is awash in expert advice, crank taboos, greedy “privatization” scams, racial hypocrisy, and the bewildering complexity of US cultures. And it’s especially daunting in the present moment, since the nation is in one of its hysterical fits. Fear sizzles in the air. Teachers’ unions, drones, gun rights, debt, fracking, fructose, climate conspiracy, vaccinations, Obamacare, and [your dread here].

The world is bigger than we are. And stranger than we think. Culture enables us to make the world usable by sorting out the experiments of generations past and passing on what works: what we need to survive and flourish. Most animals are hard-wired and “instinct” tells them what to do next. But in addition to our hard wiring, we have extra-somatic DNA in the fluid, responsive stuff of our cultures. We keep experimenting and teach the kids what we learn. 

Sooner or later school is about the courage to respond to an overwhelming world. The stakes are high, which must be why humans cheat and argue about, as well as devote whole lives to, education.

 

1. http://247wallst.com/2012/06/06/americas-richest-school-districts/

 

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