No, the inspiration for this piece isn’t release of the latest Jackass film, in 3D no less. Nor is it GOP/Tea Party Congressional candidate, David Harmer, running in California’s 11th district, who simply thinks public education is socialism and shouldn’t be a government function; back in 2000, he wrote an Op-Ed piece for the San Francisco Chronicle saying: “To attain quantum leaps in educational quality and opportunity, however, we need to separate school and state entirely. Government should exit the business of running and funding schools.” Harmer’s run for this office three times, but now polls put him in front of his Democratic opponent.
No, the inspiration comes from a feeling deep inside of me that if we don’t fix our schools now, not only will the young people being under-educated in schools with collapsing performance results have no ability to generate an economically viable and competitive “United States of the Future,” but the hard dollar cost of increased social welfare nets, an overwhelmed judicial system processing our failures and the sheer cost of incarcerating the dropouts and unskilled malingerers will impair the earning capacities of the few able to a make solid living. Nothing could polarize our country more than uneducated masses clamoring for economic relief from their unskilled poverty.
As school districts contract in this [insert word that means “horrible recession that never ends” which doesn’t contradict the really “dumb” economists who tell us the “recession” has been technically over since 2009], as federal programs infuse vast too little, vastly too late into the public school system, and as public (and private) colleges and universities lay off faculty, cancel classes and downgrade obsolete science labs, we are all staring down the double-barreled shotgun of national failure at a level no American alive today can genuinely contemplate… and by the time the flying “bodily waste product” hits the fan with results even more obvious than school ratings and record trade imbalances, it will be too late.
But in my lambast against our true stupidity at killing our own future by failing to educate, I also know that rays of hope must shine through. And the October 15th Washington Post might just have suggested one difficult but obvious solution. In most of our programs, we are trying to fix schools that simply underperform, improving teachers and holding them accountable. We aren’t really able to deal with social environments where education is neither treasured nor rewarded, where the local role models are not boasting their success based on education, where gang affiliation or athletic prowess trump intellectual achievement and where geeky invites brutality.
Brown vs. Board of Education (Supreme Court, 1954) held that separate is not equal when it comes to public education, fostering a massive “bussing” move integrating all black schools with outlying white campuses (the above photo was taken in Little Rock, Ark. in 1957). Folks hated bussing, but education and racial relations sort of got better. But a recent study, noted in the Post, of a neighboring Maryland county pilot program suggests that “economic integration” may be another path to covering those intangible “outside forces” that often destroy education efforts in the bleak sections of the inner city: “Low-income students in Montgomery County performed better when they attended affluent elementary schools instead of ones with higher concentrations of poverty, according to a new study that suggests economic integration is a powerful but neglected school-reform tool.” Note that this program starts “early,” letting students know from the inception – those moments when the building blocks for the rest of their schooling are set – what the overall educational expectations might be, across all levels of social class, providing peer models and pressures that go a long way to undo the negativity of a bad environment.
“The study tracked the performance of 858 elementary students in public housing scattered across Montgomery from 2001 to 2007. About half the students ended up in schools where less than 20 percent of students qualified for subsidized meals. Most others went to schools where up to 60 percent of the students were poor and where the county had poured in extra money… After seven years, the children in the lower-poverty schools performed 8 percentage points higher on standardized math tests than their peers attending the higher-poverty schools - even though the county had targeted them with extra resources. Students in these schools scored modestly higher on reading tests, but those results were not statistically significant.” The Post.
The notion of leaving the best schools in tact because they work and focus on those that do not may no longer be a tolerable luxury, and I can hear the parents in the better schools screaming. But this program probably won’t work unless it is started in the earliest years, and it would take years to phase in. Likewise, this strategy cannot be the “only fix,” because we cannot abandon those older students in dilapidated schools and impaired learning environments; it is one more choice we need to make. “‘Today, 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make high-poverty schools work,’ said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in New York that published the report. ‘This research suggests there is a much more effective way to help close the achievement gap. And that is to give low-income students a chance to attend middle-class schools.’” The Post. Think about it.
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