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| Placebos (tax credits, vouchers, Common Core) won't cure educational cancer. |
St. Louis is abuzz with the recent decision from the Missouri Supreme Court regarding educational delivery to students in unaccredited districts. From stlbeacon.org and Missouri guidelines for student transfers discusses the possibility of limiting numbers:
Ruling last week in the long-running lawsuit now known as the Breitenfeld case, the court overturned a ruling by a St. Louis County circuit judge and said a law allowing students in unaccredited districts to transfer is constitutional. It rejected arguments that the law violates the Hancock amendment to the state constitution as well as contentions from accredited districts that they could not handle the expected influx of students.Citizens from the receiving districts are concerned about financial reimbursement, class sizes and asking what authority school boards possess as even establishing residency requirements for district attendance is superseded by the state legislature. Is this a viable option for failing schools? Or are tax credits and vouchers the answer?
Some education reformers who support tax credits and vouchers label themselves as conservative. But are these reforms actually conservative and is privatization the answer? How do conservatives support tax credits and vouchers when they will be subject to Common Core mandates that create national standards?
The privatization/tax credit question was considered by Van Harvey who writes at Blogodidact.com. The following is reprinted with permission by Van (look for it in the future at his blog). It's a thoughtful discussion on what ails education today, the current reform measures (common core, charter/vouchers/tax credits) and begs the question if teaching what is "good and right and true" is the basis of education delivery or if it is the desire for standardization and preparation for the workforce.
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Privatizing Education cannot be our final goal, not if your goal is an America which understands what America means.
Yes,
vouchers are better than taxation alone, and tax credits better than
vouchers, and local control is better than state control... as stage 3
cancer is better than stage 4, stage 2 is better than stage 3, etc, but
as long as what you are aiming at is cancer rather than health... you
truly have no recovery in sight.
Yes it is
important to reduce the cancer, but don't imagine that that is the same
as eradicating it. Privatizing Education, while continuing to accept the
same ideas of what an education is, if anything, will result in a more
efficient and thorough spread of that cancer which is eating us alive
today.
I'll try to be brief... but it is a strain to (as this series of posts
will attest)... if you think I can rattle on about the constitution,
that's nothing to the forests of HTML I can mow down in discussing
Education - after all, the current state of our constitution followed
from the 'progress' of our systematization of our method of education.
Nearly
universally accepted, Left & Right, is the idea that what our
schools are for is to provide our kids with the skills they need to earn
a living "and to compete with the Chinese!", and that lesson is the single greatest and most revolutionary success the ProRegressives have achieved,
and it has delivered us to the world we have today. That understanding
of what the purpose of an education is, is what led to Standardized
Testing in the first place, along with the system of school districts,
under school boards, under superintendents, embedded within
bureaucracies producing textbooks which further them, which we have
today.
One of my 'favorite' horror quotes is
by one of the driving forces behind all of that, as well as the
textbooks they are taught from, he's even more significant to our world
today than even Dewey, a fellow named Ellwood P. Cubberly , and back in
1909, he enthused that:
“Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent.”
He
knew what he was talking about; when the purpose of getting an
education is to acquire useful skills, for the greater good, the
inevitable result will be a state which the people belong to, and are
shaped by.
The meaning of "Get an Education so
you can earn a good living!" is not saying "Get an Education so you can
live a life worth living!", but simply get the skills needed to earn a
good living, and education is done when they've got those skills that
give them more of what they want - and more of what they want is all
they want, and 'forget about all that "high falutin'" stuff'.
This
view wasn't new in 1909, or 1864, it was the reason why Sam Adams had
to struggle for twenty years to get to the point of being able to become
the father of the American Revolution, because he first had to wake up
the populace that was being overcome by just that sense, that gathering
skills and wealth was more important and pleasurable than liberty and
virtue. The same sense which our 'Progressive' leaders, of the Left and
Right, have for more than a century been proposing as being 'pro
Education!', highlighting the fact that 'progressives' are Pro-Regress,
and that conception of an 'education' is fundamentally anti-American.
If
"American" can be said to have a meaning, it is at least in part the
expectation of being secure in your property and able to live your own
life, to seek 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', without
fearing the actions of your neighbor, no matter how strange, because
they too respect the laws which make that possible.
That
view, that understanding, is not the result of acquiring skills to earn
a living, but from understanding what makes life worth living, and then
acquiring the skills which further it.
The Education our Founders era received (if you can find this book, buy it),
was one whose purpose was to introduce students to, and help them
reason their way through (teach), the most valuable materials a person
needed to know in order to become a virtuous, self-governing person,
capable of living in liberty with their fellows in society. Those
materials consisted in a small selection of the very best that had been
written in literature (secular and religious), history, art &
science.
It was understood that a person who
possessed that basis for an ever continuing Education, could easily
master any skills necessary to live a life worth living, and that life
was made even more worth living the more deeply you pursued your
education, and a person so educated could achieve a worthwhile life and
dazzling successes, because they first understood what was of worthwhile
to a good life - the likes of Jefferson & Madison did not spring
from nowhere, they can from that idea.
The
achievement and culmination of Western Civilization, was the
understanding that when what is Good and Right and True is what drives
you, then Power is harnessed (though never mastered) and made to enrich
the lives of all, and the result of that was America.
The
ProRegressive seeks to short cut that quest, best summed up in the well
intentioned efforts of some of our Founders themselves, such as Dr.
Benjamin Rush & Noah Webster, who, impatient and dazzled with the
effects of Science, sought to more easily grasp its fruits by chopping
down the height of the tree which grew it,
"Another defect in our schools, which, since the revolution, is become inexcuseable, is the want of proper books. The collections which are now used consist of essays that respect foreign and ancient nations. The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rome or to Great Britain; boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliment. These are excellent specimens of good sense, polished stile and perfect oratory; but they are not interesting to children."
What
Webster proposed was that what produced his own education, be traded
for "...A selection of essays...", a synopsis of facts, soon to become
factoids, that sought to pluck out the fruits of the West without the
need to grow the trees they grew upon, which was the basis for that
dazzlingly interesting feature of every child's 'education' today (and
Cubberly's specialty) - the Textbook.
When was the last time you saw a child willingly lugging one of these grey condensations of pap to the beach to read?
What 'education' can follow from what no one, not even the teachers, have an interest in reading?
Put it this way, John Adams spoke of that moment when James Otis rose "like a flame of fire!" and thundered against the Writs of Assistance,
"Then and there the child Independence was born", and it was born through what Adams described as Otis's
"promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eye into futurity, and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away every thing before him"
That
child was only able to be born, let alone conceived, because those
classical allusions and dates were not simply recognized by those in
attendance as trivia to be pursued, but matters which they understood
and understood to be vital to the lives of each and every one there, and
to their children as well.
Without that
understanding, America won't even be stillborn into future generations,
having been aborted in ours or possibly the next.
So
yes, seeking to do what is practical now is important, and with
subsidiarity in mind, the principle that political matters ought to be
handled by the smallest, lowest and least centralized competent
authority possible (that being, IMHO, neighborhood parents, and at that
level, kept at that level, their being in government is not a problem
(though always a danger)) moving towards vouchers and tax credits with
as few strings attached as possible is as desirable and necessary
as moving from stage 4 to stage 3 cancer. And moving from state run
schools to charters and fully privatized schools will be just as useful
as moving from stage 2 to stage 1 cancer.
But
don't be fooled into thinking that stage 1 cancer is what we should be
seeking, if you want America back, that requires at the very least, an
Education that imparts the materials and lessons that were necessary for
its conception and birth in the first place.
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If what Van writes is true, then why are "conservative" lawmakers, pundits and lobbyists embracing privatization and Common Core mandates? These reforms (legislated by the State Legislature) are not created by the smallest, lowest and least centralized competent
authority possible. Once again, a larger and centralized authority is dictating to the local districts on how they can/should operate and the school board's power is usurped.
Do "conservatives" such as Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee think they are fooling the citizens into thinking education delivered via vouchers, tax credits and charters are not under Common Core mandates? These mandates are not individualized and state/locally driven. They were not created by the smallest, lowest and least centralized competent
authority possible.
Don't be fooled into thinking privatization, tax credits and vouchers are the answer for educational ills. The issue may not be so much where a child attends school but rather, what the child learns, how the child learns and who controls those educational developmental/directional theories. When a system is riddled with cancer (loss of local districts structuring educational practice best for its unique community), the system needs to be radically altered vs treating it with placebos.
