I support public education, to the extent that it remains a public utility. Nowadays, it seems that "Public Education" has become "public" in name only.
The community enjoys very little oversight in how the state allocates funds or how school boards and administrators spend the money. Many teachers I have met and worked with are either new or they are "dead wood" hanging on for a few more years before they retire with a decent pension. Parents have little say in the courses that their children take or the values that they learn. Parents are forced to contend with an unresponsive bureaucracy, one in which students do not feel safe or secure.
I am a fan of Diana Ravitch. Her attack on standardized testing is a welcome assault in a country were statistics and standards are lowering the expectations of our youth. I was talking with one teacher, who complained that he has lost a significant amount of instruction time to standardized tests. I have proctored a number of these sessions, during which some students simply refused to take the exams. I appreciate her change of heart regarding the pretended efficacy of "No Child Left Behind." I am amazed, however, that it has taken her and many of her peers in the political class to realize that NCLB has been leaving many students behind.
Education is a humanistic calling, as Ms. Ravitch asserted, but even the grand notion of "making a career of humanity" simply ignores the more powerful, diverse, and challenging truth: education is about broadening the truth and scope of an individual, not preparing the way for one class of people to make the most of a sterile world. A system without values is a system without value; and public education, which has pushed students to value diversity, multiculturalism, personal ethics, and social justice, has not taught them the basic skills in order to evaluate the very non-values they are pressed to learn and regurgitate for a standardized test at the end of the school year.
I do not agree with Ravitch's conflation of corporate America with the free market model of education that invites charter schools and private firms to manage failing schools. The best accountability for a public school is not testing, not government reforms, but choice. I do not share the elite view of many in the political class that parents and students, no matter what their socio-economic background, are incapable of choosing the best place for their children to learn. I also do not accept the view that teachers' unions are a part of the solution for protecting the needs of our teachers and meeting the needs of students. From the exposure of sexual perversion in public schools in Los Angeles Unified, to cramming forty or more students into a classroom, where students can cheat and bluff their way to a passing grade, schools and district officials have demonstrated a greater allegiance to political pandering and quiescence as opposed to the long-term well-being of our future -- and unions have been central to this pervasive problem.
If public education is under attack, it is not from "right-wing" ideologues who want to "privatize and profit" from everything through free market forces. Nothing could be further from the truth when liberal ideologues assert that private companies want to divest public schools of their public character and create factories in which students become "products".
On the contrary, it is the statist status quo of liberal elites in universities, coupled with left-leaning teachers' unions who care only about their political hegemony, that are undermining public education. Unions and liberal elites oppose vouchers, they oppose charter schools, they oppose financial accountability in schools and to the parents. Parents who do not like one school should have every right to seek an education for their students at another school. Why should parents have to compel a majority of voters in once community to change the distant leadership of a school board in order to effect any kind of meaningful change? Why are parents all over Southern California, from Lynwood to Arleta to Compton, up in arms attempting to wrest control of their schools from state unions who are protecting their corporate bottom line?
The public schools are failing our public, and the public, or "the 99%" if you prefer, are doing something about it. Their chief rivals, however, are not Wall Street executives, but state officials and collective bargaining units who refuse to cede their power back to the people, to the ones whom they are presumably supposed to be educating and training for the future.
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