Issue 3: Education, and the Debate By Proxy

The Overview of my issue series is here.  Issue one on Housing is here.  Issue two on Security is here.

While I'm glad that education is shaping up to be one of the key issues for the upcoming year (and in the 2008 campaign), there's one thing I wish would just go away: the debate over School Choice.

But wishes don't always come true; and in this case, the reality of what we're not talking about when we're talking about education is summed up in debates like school choice.  Because what is really being debated, and has never really been resolved, is just what it is we think school is for.

Public education in the US has become a complex mix of functions: providing basic education, babysitting kids, training kids for the workforce (which is not the same as basic education, necessarily), social laboratory, and moral instructor... just for starters.  These functions conflict with each other, with other societal goals and expectations, and often with the expectations of some parents to fill these roles themselves.

But instead of dealing with the question of what role schools play, or should play, we niggle about  the details -  arguing about words in textbooks, books in the school library, condom distribution and sex ed, school choice, and more recently, testing.  And much of this misses the point.  Further, education is treated as the most local of issues - up until the current Bush Administration, Republicans have pushed to abolish the Department of Education, because the Federal Government is meant to have little or no role in education.

If there's anything I would like to see, it's the opposite - it's increasing the federal presence, and nationalizing our approach to educating kids that will help establish standards and expectations about what we expect schools to do.  This doesn't replace local control or parental involvement, but it is a necessary, and probably painful step.

One thing this would do is help to solve the biggest schools-based issue: funding.  One of the most mischievous effects of the Republicans long-running push against taxes is to tout improvements in the income tax when the most painful, and often most regressive tax people face is property taxes on their homes to fund local education.  And the inequities of this tax system fuel many of the other debates: at the state level, it has created a series of lawsuits about inequitable funding, primarily between cities and their wealthier suburbs.  As well, it has provided the energy behind "school choice" and "magnet school" programs.

The problem with the school choice debate is its utter lack of seriousness: no one who argues for school choice has a good answer for just how such a program helps the kids stuck in "bad" schools except for vague bromides about "rising tides lifting all boats" that sound suspiciously like "trickle down economics" applied to schools.  No Child Left Behind has, perversely, helped illustrate these issues more starkly - showing that there's more to improving test scores than creaming the best kids out of one school and shifting them somewhere else.

What are we losing? Well, one thing is that we've created an exceedingly narrow definition of "best" that is losing kids left and right, kids who could be future leaders, scientists, artists, and thinkers.  As an aside, I personally feel the worst development of my lifetime has been the death of the empowered student; we continue to proscribe solutions for kids without the respect and decency to listen to those who are being affected.  I'd be happiest if we simply asked kids what they thought about the educations they're getting, and used their input to help craft solutions.

Among the realities we need to face in America is that some 90% of kids - still - get their education in a public school.  About 2% are home schooled, and the rest are in private schools.  Voucher programs cannot meaningfully solve public education issues because private schools cannot absorb more than a few bodies out of the public system (not without a radical - and redundant - expansion program).  "School choice" that moves kids from one public school to another merely rearranges deck chairs on a troubled ship.  Home schooling will not grow much more as a viable alternative given the realities of our working lives, that almost all people, men and women, work outside the home.

Rather than perpetuate the painful debates of the past few years, Democrats would be well served reshaping the education debate in this country to one about centralizing funding and initiating a conversation about national standards for schools, both in terms of curricula and teacher training.  This would help take the emphasis off testing, and provide a glimmer of hope for property tax relief down the road, a change with significant economic benefits.

Will this answer some of the painful questions about schools acting in loco parentis, teaching about sex and sexuality, or other moral lessons?  Probably not, but that speaks to the generalized nature of national guidelines that allows specifics to be nailed down at the local level.  The worst solution of all will be for Democrats in congress to continue passing the issues around education back to states and localities without guidance or direction. 

In the largest sense, education is where the idea of "politics of personal responsibility" has been allowed to play out most clearly... and, just as clearly, have not worked except in a handful of isolated cases.  Right now, the smartest, the richest, the pushiest, and the luckiest kids get some of the best educations in the world; and the rest... well, they get warehoused in a building that's as much about biding time as really teaching kids the skills they need for the future. We can do better - just ask the kids.

PS - I am fascinated, in pulling this together, how little there is out there in the way of comprehensive overview on the issues in public education (including something as basic as finding out how many kids are actually in public school) - just a lot of discrete, topic-based conversations, where you have to have some familiarity with the jargon.  I think this may be part of the keys to this issue (and others, like health care) - until we have a broader conversation and tie some threads together, we're getting nowhere on this.

Comments

[Jennifer]

You have articulated beautifully all I have been thinking but didn't realize I was thinking until now.

[Jennifer]

P.S. I'm making my mom (a teacher in private school) read it too-either she or I will post her thoughts (though it takes her longer to read things that even I.

[leigh]

http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=367310

I am reading his book City Limit's right now, but I'd be curious about your thoughts on his http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=367310>education ideas.

[weboy]

I'd be curious to read City Limits when you're through with it (as a poor writer, I no longer buy my own books). :) I looked at the Education Sector site while pulling this together, and they were a prime example to me of people having dozens of small conversations where one larger one would be more helpful. I think it's interesting - and telling - that Peterson's laudatory comments come mainly from his academic disciples (something I'd caution you against finding alluring), and that he offers up that telling anecdote of pulling his own kids to send them to private school... because it suggests he's universalizing off of his own experiences, and that he has no better solution than the rest of us about how to fix schools - just the notion (which I question deeply) that you can take a public system that covers 90% of the kids in the country and somehow turn it into a significantly more private enterprise. We don't, as far as I can tell, have the money or the teachers ready for that. But what astonishes me is that we're supposed to wait, presumably, for years while Peterson plays out his experiments to actually find out what works... because smehow in his all knowing way, he can Make It Right. I'd rather stop waiting and focus what we have, not some idealized dream.