http://www.salon.com/2013/06/03/instead_of_a_war_on_teachers_how_about_one_on_poverty/
SALON / Monday, Jun 3, 2013 09:30 AM PST
New data shows school “reformers” are full of it
Poor schools underperform largely because of economic forces, not
because teachers have it too easy
By David Sirota
In the great American debate over education, the education and
technology corporations, bankrolled politicians and
activist-profiteers who collectively comprise the so-called “reform”
movement base their arguments on one central premise: that America
should expect public schools to produce world-class academic
achievement regardless of the negative forces bearing down on a
school’s particular students. In recent days, though, the faults in
that premise are being exposed by unavoidable reality.
Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale:
As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this
weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher
“accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly
writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy
persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality
is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves
myriad political interests.
For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall
Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to
argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then
argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled
away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers,
training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private
sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools
with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative
politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by
these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a
way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor,
all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied
interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that many “reformers’” policies have
spectacularly failed, prompted massive scandals and/or offered no
actual proof of success, an elite media that typically amplifies —
rather than challenges — power and money loyally casts “reformers’”
systematic pillaging of public education as laudable courage (the most
recent example of this is Time magazine’s cover cheering on wildly
unpopular Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel after he cited budget austerity
to justify the largest mass school closing in American history — all
while he is also proposing to spend $100 million of taxpayer dollars
on a new private sports stadium).
In other words, elite media organizations (which, in many cases, have
their own vested financial interest in education “reform”) go out of
their way to portray the anti-public-education movement as heroic
rather than what it really is: just another get-rich-quick scheme
shrouded in the veneer of altruism.
That gets to the news that exposes “reformers’” schemes — and all the
illusions that surround them. According to a new U.S. Department of
Education study, “about one in five public schools was considered high
poverty in 2011 … up from about to one in eight in 2000.” This
followed an earlier study from the department finding that “many
high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and
local funding … leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer
resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers.”
Those data sets powerfully raise the question that “reformers” are so
desperate to avoid: Are we really expected to believe that it’s just a
coincidence that the public education and poverty crises are happening
at the same time? Put another way: Are we really expected to believe
that everything other than poverty is what’s causing problems in
failing public schools?
Because of who comprises it and how it is financed, the education
“reform” movement has a clear self-interest in continuing to say yes,
we should believe such fact-free pabulum. And you can bet that
movement will keep saying “yes” — and that the corporate media will
continue to cheer them as heroes for saying “yes” — as long as public
education money keeps being diverted into corporate coffers.
But we’ve now reached the point where the economics-omitting “reform”
propaganda has jumped the shark, going from deceptively alluring to
embarrassingly transparent. That’s because the latest Department of
Education study isn’t being released in a vacuum; it caps off an
overwhelming wave of evidence showing that our education crisis has
far less to do with public schools or bad teachers than it does with
the taboo subject of crushing poverty.
In 2011, for instance, Stanford University’s Sean Reardon released a
comprehensive study documenting the new “income achievement gap.” The
report proved that family income is now, by far, the biggest
determining and predictive factor in a student’s educational
achievement.
A few months later, Joanne Barkan published a groundbreaking magazine
report surveying decades worth of social science research. Her
conclusions, again, came back to non-school factors like family
economics and poverty:
Out-of-school factors—family characteristics such as income and
parents’ education, neighborhood environment, health care, housing
stability, and so on—count for twice as much as all in-school factors.
In 1966, a groundbreaking government study—the “Coleman Report”—first
identified a “one-third in-school factors, two-thirds family
characteristics” ratio to explain variations in student achievement.
Since then researchers have endlessly tried to refine or refute the
findings. Education scholar Richard Rothstein described their results:
“No analyst has been able to attribute less than two-thirds of the
variation in achievement among schools to the family characteristics
of their students.”
Then, just a few months ago, Reardon chimed in again to contextualize
all of this. In a follow-up New York Times article, he noted that it
is no coincidence that these out-of-school factors — and in particular
economic conditions — have created the “income achievement gap” at the
very moment economic inequality and poverty have exploded in America.
Taken together with the new Department of Education numbers, we see
that for all the elite media’s slobbering profiles of public school
bashers like Mayors Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg, for all of the
media’s hagiographic worship of scandal-plagued activist-profiteers
like Michelle Rhee, and for all the “reform” movement’s claims that
the traditional public school system and teachers unions are to blame
for America’s education problems, poverty and economic inequality are
the root of the problem.
One way to appreciate this reality in stark relief is to just remember
that, as Barkan shows, for all the claims that the traditional public
school system is flawed, America’s wealthiest traditional public
schools happen to be among the world’s highest-achieving schools. Most
of those high-performing wealthy public schools also happen to be
unionized. If, as “reformers” suggest, the public school system or the
presence of organized labor was really the key factor in harming
American education, then those wealthy schools would be in serious
crisis — and wouldn’t be at the top of the international charts.
Instead, the fact that they aren’t in crisis and are so high-achieving
suggests neither the system itself nor unions are the big factor
causing high-poverty schools to lag behind. It suggests that the “high
poverty” part is the problem.
That, of course, shouldn’t be a controversial notion; it is so
painfully obvious it’s amazing anyone would even try to deny it. But
that gets back to motive: The “reform” movement (and its loyal media
outlets) cast a discussion of poverty as taboo because poverty and
inequality are byproducts of the same economic policies that serve
that movement’s funders.
To understand this pernicious bait and switch that writes economics
out of the education story, simply think through the motives.
Think first about how the dominant policy paradigms in America — tax
cuts for the rich, deregulation and budget cuts to social services —
exacerbate inequality and poverty, but also benefit the major
corporations that fund the “reform” movement. Then think about how it
isn’t a coincidence that the “reform” movement’s goal is to divert the
education policy conversation away from anything having to do with
poverty and economic inequality.
You can tell that’s not a coincidence because unlike other issues, the
topics of poverty and economic inequality will inevitably prompt a
conversation about changing the underlying economic policies
(regressive taxes, deregulation, etc.) that create crushing poverty
and inequality. For corporations served by the existing economic
paradigm and for the politicians and activists those corporations
underwrite, such a conversation is simply unacceptable because
changing the policies that create poverty and inequality potentially
threatens their existing financial power and privilege. Thus, those
corporations, politicians and activists in the “reform” movement do
whatever they can — bash teachers, scream strong-but-meaningless words
like “accountability,” criticize public school structures, etc. — to
shift the education conversation away from poverty and inequality.
Reality, though, is finally catching up with the “reform” movement’s
propaganda. With poverty and inequality intensifying, a conversation
about the real problem is finally starting to happen. And the more
education “reformers” try to distract from it, the more they will
expose the fact that they aren’t driven by concern for kids but by the
ugliest kind of greed — the kind that feigns concerns for kids in
order to pad the corporate bottom line.
David Sirota
David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine
journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile
Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at
[email protected], follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his
website at www.davidsirota.com.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your
own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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