Jay Lemke wrote:
> It's refreshing to return to xmca and find in progress some passionate
> argument about the future of public education.
>
> 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.
>
> ---------------------------
> 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>
> ---------------------------