Education reform’s central myths

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/01/school_choice_vs_reality/

The education debate rests on two faulty premises: that public schools are failures, and choice is the solution
By Michael Lind

<snip>

The debate about K-12 educational reform in the U.S. is an example of the Overton Window at work. For a generation, almost all of the debate about improving American schools has been limited to minor variations on two themes. First, it is endlessly asserted, American public education is a miserable failure, compared to the educational systems of our major economic rivals in Asia and Europe. Second, the solution to this alleged failure is the privatization and marketization of public education.

<snip>

To begin with, the U.S. public school system is hardly the abysmal failure portrayed in the conventional wisdom. The international comparative data is skewed, by vocational tracking in Europe (all American high school students are sometimes compared to select Gymnasium and Lycee students in Germany and France) or geography (the entire U.S. is compared to the Shanghai metro area, rather than to all of China — the French educational system would look pretty bad, if it were compared in its entirety to Westchester County, New York).

<snip>

Before we abandon our existing, mostly-successful system of public education for an untested theory cooked up by the libertarian ideologues at the University of Chicago Economics Department and the Cato Institute (who, as it happens, have been wrong about almost everything else in the last quarter century), shouldn’t we see if there is any evidence to support their claims?

If the theory that school excellence is the product of school choice, then the most successful school systems abroad should be ones based on Milton Friedman-style voucher systems. Alas for the theory shared by Republican libertarians and Democratic neoliberals, the reverse is the case.

[zazen]

1. however, "education reform" groupthink predated neoliberalism

They seem to have a symbiotic relationship now, but there have been announcements of "crises" since at least Sputnik, if not much earlier.

I think it's that whatever prevailing ideology of the day grabs schools, children, and a female dominated profession as a lab and a propaganda tool for its particular excesses. Or at least that's been the case for 50 years.

The consequences of neoliberalism's hijacking do seem more materially dire, however.

[SheilaT]

2. If American public education is so terrible, then why

is it that schools like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Cal Tech, etc etc etc have many thousands more applicants than they can admit? And not all of those applicants are from private schools or out of the country.


While a lot needs improving, a lot is being done right. We also in this country commit to educating every single person, and we attempt to see that each person graduates high school (which is really a big deal if you stop to think about it) and would like that most people go on to some form of secondary education.

There are many issues at work. No one thing is at fault when students don't do well. It's not simply the teachers' fault. It's not just that the parents aren't involved. It's not just that there are too many distractions. It's not just that the curriculum isn't so great. It's not just that some kids start school ill-prepared. And so on and so forth.

It always made me crazy, as a parent of well-prepared middle-class kids who did pretty well in school, that so much blame was sent out there rather indiscriminately. There needs to be a broad base of support for our schools, and it needs to come from everywhere.

Here's one statistic that I always found impressive. As recently as (and this is recent because I was born only two years earlier) 1950, fewer than half of 18 year olds graduated high school.

I graduated high school in 1965. That was the first year the baby boomers really hit the colleges. All of a sudden a very large percentage of us decided to go to college. I lived in Tucson, and like many of my fellow graduates chose to go to the University of Arizona. If you'd graduated h.s. the year before and went to that university and lived in Tucson, you were expected to live on campus unless there were some compelling reason not to do so. The next year, if you lived in Tucson, you could NOT get dorm housing on campus, unless there were a compelling reason to do so. There were public universities that had to erect tents on campus to accommodate all the incoming freshman. Things changed literally overnight that year.

Ever since then an increasing percentage of high school graduates have gone on to college. Fortunately, the community college system has grown enormously. As someone who has attended a total of six different public colleges or universities. Two of them have been community colleges, and quite frankly I get the best education from them, not the universities.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. !!!

The overall PISA scores of American students are lowered by the poor results for blacks and Latinos, who make up 35 percent of America’s K-12 student population. Asian-American students have an average score of 541, similar to those of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. The non-Hispanic white American student average of 525 is comparable to the averages of Canada (524), New Zealand (521), and Australia (515). In contrast, the average PISA readings score of Latino students is 446 and black students is 441.

[HiPointDem]

4. it's not 'blacks & latinos,' it's that a high % of blacks & latinos live in poverty. and it's not

'asians,' it's that a high percent of asians in the us live in households above median income.

plenty of 'asians' in china that would get abysmal scores -- if they tested them -- which they don't.

these international comparisons are such a fraud.

[Nevernose]

5. Chinese kids don't even go to high school

Unless their families pay for it. Almost entirely private.