I guess we’ve been told for so long now that education is the way out of poverty that a lot of Americans have bought this story as applicable for all children everywhere. I’m not going to deconstruct it here–it’s too tedious and obvious. But it became a commonplace, and still is, that the schools are the problem, and newspaper editorialists across the nation for the last decade and more have ardently supported the “reformers”–the Michelle Rhees, Wendy Kopps, Arne Duncans, Joel Kleins, Bill Gateses, Eli Broads, etc. who have been behind this idea of closing failing schools and replacing them with charters, of blaming teachers and insisting on tying their evaluations to student progress, and of promoting high-stakes standardized testing as a way of improving academic standards.
None of these wants to look at the root cause, which is poverty. All of them are promoting ideas that are driving the good teachers out of teaching because they don’t understand the intrinsic motivations that drive all good teachers. They don’t understand how they are making things worse–or if they do, they don’t care because they have other fish to fry.
And so the idea that our schools are failing is a commonplace, especially among the rich liberal democrats who fund the politicians who make education policy –the kind who hang out at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival. Some them are naively sincere. Others clearly are opportunists. As David Sirotapointed out the other day:
You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”
The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics.
Our ‘education crisis’
