Last week, when pointlessly deciding who to vote for, I explored some of the policy “plans,” “roadmaps,” or “vision quests” of the various politicians running for president. These are generally ideological action plans posted on a Web site amounting to the billion-dollar equivalent of the student council candidate’s plan for “Free Pizza Fridays” – which is to say, well-crafted promises that have no hope of realization in the real world of Congressional approvals, regulations, lobbyist agendas, compromise, hearings and the occasional terrorist attack.
However, I would like to vote for someone with big ideas – especially in three key areas: banking, the environment and education. While national defense is all good and well, the backbone of any free society, in my opinion, is these systems. Without a strong infrastructure there, no army, Star Wars defense system, or brilliant foreign policy will defend the nation from its enemies – be they enemies from within or without.
Education is critical to a nation’s success. Whatever a nation wants to do, good or evil, is going to depend on its “human resources,” the education of its people and their ability to innovate. It’s easy to begrudge our country’s education – recent polls say that more Americans can name the three judges on American Idol than the three branches of government – though we must also remember that America also developed Jazz, the Internet and the atomic bomb, and although our inventions may mean only as much good as evil, we cannot deny their innovative quality. I think it’s not too much of a stretch to extend the dedicated teachers of the public school system a token of gratitude.
The problem begins, however, in the more conservative recent times. It would seem to me there is an effort to improve, diversify and equalize opportunities in public education while minimizing costs of doing so to taxpayers. A series of major regulatory programs has been implemented on the already stretched public school system to theoretically force teachers into working harder with less pay. I call this effort “neo-education,” a made-up term, mind you, that simply means any program implemented since the 1970s that tries to increase educational output without increasing capital input.
I’m talking about programs like standardized testing, multicultural education, teaching rubrics, vouchers, strategic plans and other attempts at educational reform that involve changing the curriculum rather than class sizes and levels of professional respect.
Standardized testing might be the ultimate example of “neo-education.” While relatively cheap to implement (relative to, to say, adding four philosophy teachers to every high school), it demands massive improvement in public school performance, with the hope that by weighing the pig, it will be made fatter. It also has the neo-education tinge of being hopelessly ineffective. It makes American students good at taking tests, as every lesson plan is gradually tailored to the test, allowing memorized regurgitation to take the place of actual learning.
It shows some promise statistically, but it’s hard to say whether that means students are actually becoming more educated citizens, or just better at filling out geometric proofs. It also leaves a lot of people behind. Students well below the standardized “bar” drop out early, discouraged that they will ever meet the test requirements and be able to graduate. Students above it get frustrated with being taught over and over skills they already know and move to a community college-type environment. No Child Left Behind, the Bush Administration’s initiative to “leave no child behind,” requires most states to implement some kind of test-like measure.
Other programs like multicultural education are more complicated to assess. Multicultural education, which means somehow introducing lessons about diversity, communication, and tolerance into the curriculum, seeking to improve students’ cultural competence without putting in the hard money it’s going to take alleviate racial inequalities. Instead of dealing with the vast discrepancies in the quality of public schools between poor neighborhoods and rich ones, which will ultimately require massive changes to the taxing and funding structures of schools, neo-education tries to provide a cheap answer by teaching suburban communities about the urban experience.
The problem with programs like No Child Left Behind and similar initiatives is not their results but their intentions. Curriculums should probably change within schools to adapt to modern times and issues. But it is my contention that no amount of standardized bureaucracy will be able to mimic what would happen in American education if teachers were paid and respected on the level of lawyers, doctors and business professionals (as they should be). There is little I can do to prove this but offer common sense: For as far as I know, such an attempt has never been made in America. But such a goal would be a campaign promise – or “plan,” “vision,” whatever – worth voting for.
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