This is the first in a series of several articles dealing with our approach to reform in Education and why it has been misguided and only marginally effective despite the tremendous amounts of tax payer dollars and our incessant crusades on topics like Merit Pay, Standards, Accountability, Testing, Educator Dismissal and School Choice through Charters. We will also be looking at why our elected officials in both major parties have lacked the political courage to address the real solutions associated with comprehensive education reform.
We know what the research says we must do. Why, therefore, do we continue to mask the real fixes with the facades of reform previously mentioned here? All of these things have their place in reform but they do not address the real issues facing us. Besides, those things have been in existence and available for many years. Effective schools have long been testing their students in a comprehensive manner. Private schools have been effectively in existence from the very outset of this nation.
Competent Administrators who haven’t been concerned with their own personal popularity and getting the approval of politically motivated board members have been effectively dismissing ineffective teachers forever. Many like the misguided notion of consensus building, everyone would prefer consensus but at what point do you act in the best interest of children over the inertia brought about by a reluctant group of recalcitrants.
You may be asking yourself what possible relationship McCarthyism has to the current educational reform movement. Each began with less than a strong conviction on the part of the key political movers instrumental to them. In the case of McCarthyism its impetus was less grounded in an initial concern for Communists in our government than it was for the need of a political campaign issue. Up until May of 1950 Joe McCarthy had not spoken of the Communist threat in our Government. Lacking a re-election issue and overly concerned with his re-election efforts, McCarthy convened a group of his closest advisors in order to come up with a cause. The country was relatively stable despite the winding down of the Korean War. The economy was rebounding nicely from the post war era and images of Ozzie and Harriet prevailed. What then could be his Issue? To the rescue came a Catholic priest, Father Edmund Walsh, who suggested campaigning on the idea that Communist subversives were working in the Truman Administration. The rest, as they say, became history. Or as Edward R. Murrow put it, “The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. This is not the time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.”
Undoubtedly McCarthy had many followers such as Max Eastman, Whittaker Chambers, Roy Cohn and interestingly enough Joseph Kennedy Senior (father of Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy, who ironically played a key role in the passage of NCLB or more correctly identified as the re-authorization of ESEA which was to be the centerpiece of our current Education Reform.
He also had many harsh critics including two presidents of opposite political parties.
When one now compares that era to the attention given to Education in recent years; it is not difficult to make the connections.
Many of our elected officials came to their respective Education crusade not born of any real commitment to the fair and effective education of our nation’s children, but rather the need for a campaign rallying cry during a period of international peace, economic boom, and high employment coupled with a relatively new middle class prosperity.
So let’s make Public Education the target. When all those teachers and administrators were paid at a pauper’s level, we really didn’t notice or care about them. But they are now effectively unionizing and starting to make pretty decent salaries.
We certainly did have pockets of low performing schools as identified by the Nation at Risk in 1983. The clearly identified Education problems are of an urban, rural and poverty nature so let’s begin our assault on Public Education.
Why does this connection matter at all? If you don’t identify the real problem you cannot possibly arrive at an effective remedy!!
Both the current education reform movement and McCarthyism have elements of truth to them and both were wrong headed and minded in their approach to a solution. Because of that, we as taxpayers were asked to foot a bill for things that could not nor would not fix the root cause of the problem.
The No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001 and signed into law on January 8th 2002 by then President George Bush. One of its key sponsors was Senator Edward Kennedy. Both were hailed as Saviors of the American Education System.
The two men had entirely different perspectives on what the Law’s primary purpose was. For the President the law was about accountability through a single testing activity. For the Senator, on the other hand, Title 1 of the Law gives a clear indication of his intent, “Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged.”
Two very well intentioned men with what appears to be a noble and worthwhile cause, what could possibly be wrong with that!
As Diane Ravitch, one of President Bush’s top level assistants and a strong supporter of choice and accountability thru testing says in her Book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: “I concluded that this NCLB style approach has been a failure.” She also refers to her previously supported position on School Choice as a “Lead Bullet”.
In next week’s edition we will explore her rationale and its’ factual premises and how NCLB’s good intentions were gamed and sacrificed on the altar of choice and a single test.
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