I recently read two different online pieces about public school education, here and here. I found them interesting because they make two facets of the same argument: schools underperform primarily when they are filled with under-performing students, period. Tinkering around with public education using teacher-bashing moves, which assumes that the primary problem is a proliferation of bad teachers, or by funneling public dollars into privately-run charter schools, will always fail to address adequately the problem of under-performing schools and students, because they fundamentally misunderstand the reasons for the problem. Unsurprisingly, of course, under-performing students are disproportionately poor. But for some reason, politicians don't seem to want to think of poverty as the main problem.
The jumping-off point for making this argument in the first piece is vouchers for charter schools. I don't know that everyone will find it interesting reading, honestly--it features some "inside baseball" liberal-on-liberal sniping and it's kind of wonkish and snotty at the same time. But the main argument is that we don't advance education overall in this society by doling out vouchers for poor people, especially for them to attend charter schools which are largely not proven to be any more effective than other public schools.
I would, however, really recommend reading the second piece, because I think most people *would* find that interesting. It's a personal essay, and an easy and thought-provoking read. The author had the unusual experience of having attended two public high schools--one ranked in the bottom 100 in the entire country, and the other ranked in the top 50. The author's experience? The supposedly excellent one really wasn't any better than the supposedly horrible one in terms of either teacher quality or curriculum. It had better resources, which was a nice perk. It featured more arts-related courses, undoubtedly because it had the resources to do so. But its main advantage, in terms of test scores and graduation rates--which, again, is all that lawmakers seem to care about--was simply that it was filled with better students. The author expresses real frustration that the "bottom" school is going to continue to be punished for problems it didn't create and which it is not equipped to fix.
And that seems to me to get at the fundamental question of what's wrong with how we approach public education in this country anymore. First of all, we've just somehow decided that our measure of what constitutes a good school system is how many of its students graduate and how well they perform on standardized tests. That's an attractive way to differentiate a "good" school from a "bad" one because those are objectively quantifiable things. And I certainly don't have an issue with making graduation a priority. I'm absolutely in favor of everybody in this society having at the very least a high school or equivalency diploma, and either some post-high school education or targeted job training. But the problem, at least in my opinion, is that graduation rate/test scores criteria do an excellent job of, for the most part, telling you whether or not a substantial percentage of your student population comes from wealthy or at least professional-class families, and also whether or not a substantial percentage of them comes from poverty. The more your students come from the latter category and the less from the former, the more likely you are to under-perform. That is simply a fact. And while I don't necessarily think that standardized tests are inherently evil (though I know and respect some pretty smart people who do), relying on them to determine whether or not you have a "good" school or school district unquestionably is. It's beyond detrimental to our system of public education; it's evil.
Are rich kids smarter than poor kids? Absolutely not, at least not in the sense that money makes you smart. Money doesn't make you smart any more than it makes you a good citizen or a good person. But the fact is that if you happen to be born into poverty in this country, you simply start the race of life about five lengths behind someone who isn't. It's of course possible to pull ahead under those circumstances, but you have to have been blessed with extraordinary speed (and some luck) in order for that to happen, and most people aren't. The poor in our society face educational barriers that other people do not, and I fear that that will simply get worse over the next generation or two as income disparity in this country widens precipitously. Think about some of those barriers: environmental toxins, which sometimes contribute to birth defects and other health problems that interfere with brain development; parental incarceration; unreliable and/or unsafe transportation to and from school; lack of adequate nutrition and health care; lack of affordable educational supports like computers; ever-increasing cuts to educational resources like libraries and after-school programs on which they rely to supplement classroom education. On and on. You may not be any smarter than someone facing these barriers, but if you don't have to deal with them, you're far more likely to be in a position to do reasonably well in school.
I also read recently that the Ohio legislature is looking to add yet another metric to school performance measures: numerically ranking schools from best to worst statewide. I just have to throw my arms up in the air and ask, WHY? What on earth do they hope to accomplish? Giving real estate agents yet another lazy-man's method of determining where to steer prospective home-buyers? Finding more and more justifications to privatize public education, as though that's going to accomplish anything other than enriching the companies that profit from such moves? Seriously, what? It's certainly not designed, at least not by anyone with two working brain cells, to improve public education. A cynic might think that in fact Ohio lawmakers don't actually care to improve public education.
But, of course, I'm not a cynic.
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