I hope that few of us really doubt that public schools in the US and many
other countries have done a great deal of good ... or that they have also
done a great deal of harm. Most of the good seema to me to be at the level
of basics: enlarging the literate and numerate population, exposing more
students to Others of more diverse social origins than they might have had
sustained contact with otherwise, enabling more students and more diverse
students to get into universities. There are also a lot of things we
expected public education to do that it has not done: promote scientific
sophistication, engender critical thinking and impart the resources to
support it, inculcate habits of engaged and informed citizenship. And there
are some things it has not even really tried to do: teach people about
economics, finance, politics, law, culture, philosophy, human health and
disease.
On the side of harm, U.S. public schools have by and large, consciously or
simply in fact, discouraged radically creative thinking about the topics in
the curriculum, coerced students to learn what the curriculum designated as
important knowledge, ignored individual and cultural differences in what
and when students wanted or needed to learn, and by and large delivered
vastly inferior opportunities for learning to students whose schools were
located in poorer or nonwhite communities.
The largest numbers of parents (and perhaps students, does anyone ask
them?) who would like to see an end to the local public schools' monopoly
of education (and public education does suffer from most of the predictable
ill-effects of monopolies, except for over-charging) include: Catholics and
other members of religious cultural minorities who would like schools to
propagate their cultures; ditto members of ethnic and linguistic
minorities; and those whose children are trapped in substandard public
schools (readers outside the US might be appalled at just how bad some
schools in major US cities actually are).
The recipes in the US for a solution: school reform to make all schools
reasonably good; tuition vouchers to use tax money to pay for private
school enrollment; charter schools to increase diversity and sensitivity to
local needs.
School reform is the mainstream and liberal view. The principal obstacle to
it is simply SCALE. The US educational system is the largest institution in
our society, larger by far than government itself. There exist no other
institutions of comparable scale which could have much of an impact on it
except locally and probably temporarily; not universities, not local or
state or national government. In fact, corporate business, taken
collectively, is the ONLY comparable or larger scale institution which
could alter the educational system significantly as an outside force. I
believe that one way or another it will do so. Reformers believe the
educational system can reform itself from within. I do not believe this is
so, because (a) there are no resources being added to support this, (b)
there are not enough people available to carry out the changed models, (c)
those currently in the system do not have sufficient motivation to change,
(d) many of the educational problems of schools are built into the
structural conditions of their existence (funding, teacher-student ratios,
standardized curricula, governance, etc.).
The second obstacle derives from the first. Given the limits on what kinds
of change are possible, school reform is drifting inevitably toward greater
bureaucratization and standardization. National curricula, national
examinations, national teacher training standards ... all are inevitable in
the current logic and practice of reform. Reform is NOT a grass-roots or
ground-up model. It will fail because the scale of what is to be
standardized, and its diversity, will resist all efforts, given the level
of resources available for reform. But even to the extent that reform may
succeed, it will NOT address the basic failures of public education
outlined above. It will at most (not very likely in my view) set some
minimum floor under the delivery of a standard curriculum. I suspect it
will do this where it is least needed, i.e. where resources are already
more plentiful, and NOT where it is most neeed (i.e. where resources are
starved). It will reduce, not increase diversity; it will increase
pressures toward conformity; it will not serve the interests of democracy,
except, in the least likely case, and in the most minimal way of repairing
the most terrible substandard schools.
The second proposal, vouchers, seem to me most likely to lead to a
three-system educational model: public schools (good ones for the middle
class, less good ones still for the poor), for-profit schools, and
sectarian schools. Sectarian schools at least add to net diversity, whether
they preach what we like or not. They do not however lead to more critical
stances toward home cultures, though they might lead to shallow critique of
the dominant culture. For-profit schools are what most voucher critics
worry about. I believe that they would be the narrowest in curriculum,
totally oriented to examination results, perhaps at best they would
introduce some new curricular emphases related to marketable skills, but I
doubt it. They would be mainly market-driven, by the lowest common
denominator of performance evaluation criteria. There is a small
possibility that in also aiming to reduce costs they would finally
demonstrate conclusively to what extent new technologies can effectively
replace teachers without lowering examination scores. If anyone wants to know.
Finally, charter schools. These differ from sectarian and for-profit
schools only in being still nominally subject to public oversight of
curriculum and staffing. In some jurisdictions, they are also required to
introduce curricular innovation of some kind. To the extent that they are
caught in the net of standardized curricula and examinations they will
scarcely have much room to innovate. Only if they also acquire substantial
additional funding beyond per pupil state funds is innovation likely. More
probable is that they would shift the curriculum in subtle ways similar to
the sectarian schools, toward local cultural values. Those values might
range from ethnic or racial pride agendas, to supportiveness of minority
sexual orientations, to emphasizing the arts, ... to subtle forms of racism
or religious intolerance or dominant culture xenophobia. So far as I can
see this proposal's main function is to offer a political alternative to
voucher plans, rather than to provide a real solution to the failures of
public education. Charter schools could offer possibilities for progressive
change, the odds are just against it.
So, is our only choice to save a narrow one-curriculum-fits-all,
exam-preparatory, frills-only-for-the-middle-class public school system
(Tweedledee) from the dangers of a sectarian or partially privatized
competition which has exactly the same agenda, a few trivial variations,
and less public accountability (Tweedledum)?
So far as I can see the only way under present conditions that the US will
reduce the frequency of substandard schools is by reducing variability in
the system as a whole, sacrificing diversity and innovation to universal
minimum standards. Regression towards the mean.
The genuinely progressive alternative? more, smaller schools with greater
curricular freedom; more options for students to guide their own educations
in directions of their own choosing; minimum curricular standards that are
genuinely minimal (occupying no more than 65% of learning time) but also
universally enforced by a powerful independent on-site schools evaluation
bureaucracy with the power to re-allocate a significant percentage of state
funding from over-funded to under-funded schools as well as to dictate
curricular and instructional changes to low-performing schools; incentives
for radical curricular and instructional experimentation; evaluation
systems that balance standardized testing with expensive evaluation of
student project work; much better pay and working conditions for new
teachers, long probationary periods and very high standards for teacher
tenure, much higher salary levels for small numbers of independently
evaluated master teachers who would also have special resources to support
innovation; large-scale experimentation with new technologies aiming to
reduce the total number of teachers needed and identify where their skills
are most irreplaceable.
What would create the conditions necessary for such changes? the only
realistic scenario I can imagine would involve large-scale entry of the
private sector into providing educational services, IF coupled to stringent
public evaluation and oversight and demonstration of not only acceptable
examination scores but also credible evidence of greater student
satisfaction, greater curricular or instructional diversity, and useful
educational innovations. I identify the private sector not because I
attribute any special powers or motives to it, nor because I distrust
ossified public bureaucracies (though I do), but only because in U.S.
society there is no other available force for change on the necessary scale.
What do I think WILL happen? the private sector is already making inroads
into higher education; the line between higher education and secondary
education will certainly blur in the next decade; it is possible to provide
education no worse than today's for less money and with fewer teachers; the
only significant educational innovation will occur outside the structure of
standardized curricula and schools oriented to them, and on any signficant
scale, mainly through private sector initiatives. But nowhere in the social
system is there any systematic incentive to improve the _intellectual_
quality of education or to more fully meet the self-perceived needs of
students ... except from the students themselves. The kind of educational
changes most of us want will never be more than insignificantly small and
temporary changes here and there ... until citizens of school age acquire
substantially more economic, political, and legal power than they now have.
It is the disempowerment of the young, more than anything else, that
prevents radical educational change. And that is just the way adults want
it to be.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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