In the growing struggle of educational reform in the United States and other parts of the world, children are the ones that are damaged. While we sit in our classrooms, and listen to our lectures, public schools are struggling everywhere. Educator Ken Robinson point out the reason education has failed us, in his lecture Changing Education Paradigms. Robinson has many good points, and delivers them in an interesting way. However, another viewpoint on the educational crisis comes from John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, his article Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital: the US case, presents information about how the schools are in a crisis as far as government funding is concerned. Each of the professionals takes a different approach to presenting the truth about American education, and the growing strain that is felt by everyone that is involved.
Let us begin with Ken Robinson’s view on why the schools are currently failing to meet the educational expectations of many of their students. Robinson talks about the struggle to find places for our children in an economy that cannot be predicted. How can someone place children in the economy if we are unsure as to what our economy will look like when they reach adulthood? We cannot, because for all we know, the economy as we know it could bottom out by the time our children reach adulthood thus driving the ever-growing poverty level to astronomical proportions. Foster, agrees, and goes one-step further with his assertion that schools are being used as means to generate revenue for big corporations that have their hands in the proverbial “pockets” of education. Foster focuses on the capitalism of education.
Another viewpoint Robinson has is the “production line models of schools” meaning schools have a factory like quality about them, essentially producing students as the man product with teachers as the workers who shape said product. Foster agrees in this assertion, “Schooling, therefore, is meant to service production, and replicates the hierarchical division of labor of the productive system. 7 Hence, both the dominant purpose of elementary and secondary schooling in capitalist society—the formation of workers or labor power for production—and the labor process internal to schooling itself, as carried out by education workers, are fundamentally conditioned by the relations of production in the larger economy.” So if schools are “factory like” and educators are “factory workers”, then is there any wonder that public education is suffering?
Both men agree that the current educational system fosters inequality among pupils. Robinson talks about the difference between the two norms of people, “academic” and “not academic”, he explores the fact that while non-academic people are just as smart as others, they are made to feel inferior because they are forced to take menial jobs. Foster approaches this as follows, “Working-class students and those destined for working-class occupations are taught rule-following behavior, while those arising from the upper middle class and/or destined for the professional-managerial stratum are taught to internalize the values of the society.” With that taken into account, why are millions of children being forced into subservience by school systems because of their backgrounds, and or income? That is at best wrong, and unjust, why should anyone be denied a proficient education based on trivial status issues? Foster goes onto explain that elite private schools provide higher education to those that can afford it, while public education is subpar at best. That has to enlighten us to the differences of class in the American society.
Furthermore, both agree that standardized testing is wrong. Robinson feels that standardized testing is a blame for the failing of education, and the increase of medications prescribed for ADHD among adolescents today. Foster, on the other hand, asserts that standardized testing is a means for the government to gain more control over public schools. He uses George W. Bush’s NCLB (No Child Left Behind) as a means to explain his point. While NCLB was designed to help under educated children meet goals, the real truth is that school are penalized by low scores, which could support the fact that standardized testing is at fault as Robinson said. Here is look at what schools face if they fall below the “educational standard” set forth by NCLB.
(1) All states were to develop their own tests and three performance levels (basic, proficient, and advanced), with proficiency determined separately by each state. (2) In order to receive federal education funds, states were required to test students in grades three to eight annually for proficiency in reading and math, and to disaggregate the scores in terms of low-income status, race, ethnicity, disability status, and limited English proficiency. (3) Each state was to provide a timeline showing how 100 percent of their students would reach proficiency by 2014. (4) All schools and school districts were ordered to demonstrate adequate yearly progress (AYP) for every disaggregated subgroup toward the goal of 100 percent proficiency in 2014. (5) A school that did not achieve AYP for all subgroups would be subject to onerous penalties increasing in each successive year. In the fourth year, the school would be subject to “corrective action,” requiring curriculum changes, staff changes, or a longer school year. In the fifth year, a school still not making AYP would be ordered to “restructure.” (6) A school that was ordered to restructure was allowed five “options,” all amounting to essentially the same thing: (a) change to a charter school; (b) lay off the principal and staff and replace them with others; (c) hand over control of the school to private management; (d) relinquish control of the school to the state; or (e) “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.”
Those are some extreme consequences, if schools are punished by the government for the disinterest of students, then what hope do those of us that are interested in education have. Robinson explains that the disinterest is because “we live in the most stimulating era of all time”. We are distracted because of the vast world of media that we have at a mere touch of a button. If we have some much going on in our outside world, then why would we want to pay attention to an old fart bag telling us about 1776 England? Robinson also attributes this to the “fictitious epidemic” that ADHD is.
Finally, the question is this: What does the future of American education look like? Will we continue to foster class differences among our students, or will we finally cut the divide. Will schools continue to be modeled after factories, or will we finally shatter that age-old comparison and reform the way education is approached? Will millions of college students ever get out of the hole that is debt? Why can’t the American government follow the European countries that have provided free education to everyone? I think that the answer to all these questions is not NCLB, but NCIWE (No Corporate Interference with Education). If a true reform is to take place, then we have to shatter the entire foundation of learning in the United States. There is an old saying: You cannot polish a turd. America’s turd is the current Educational system, which to be reformed needs to be brought to its knees, and rethought from the ground up.
Works Cited
Foster, John Bellamy. “Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital: The U.S. Case” Monthly Review 2011, Volume 63, Issue 03 (July-August) Web. Accessed 30 August 2011
Robinson, Ken. “Changing Education Paradigms,” lecture. RsAnimate.org Web. Accessed 30 August 2011.
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