With the election less than a month away and the key to victory lying in voter turnout and those few voters who still have not yet made up their minds, the time has come to focus on those issues the media and the candidates have ignored that will have an impact on the kind of country we will live in for the next four years.

The Neglect of Education

By now there is probably not a voter left who has not heard the candidate’s positions on taxes, health care, the economy and even offshore drilling. Yet there are other issues that for whatever reason neither candidate has chosen to address and the media have ignored. For those undecided voters or for partisan Republicans or Democrats who need motivation to vote, these issues may be part of the reason they are still wavering and could tip the election in favor of one candidate or another.

In The Strange Death of Liberal America, I proposed that the core belief of Liberal America lay in the conviction that a major role of government is to keep the playing field level. That conviction rests on four cornerstones: social and economic justice, educational equity, media fairness and voting rights. So far the candidates have only really addressed the first.

Of the issues receiving little attention education lies right at the top. In his Sunday Meet the Press interview it was one of the first issues Colin Powell raised:

I think the American people and the gentlemen running for president will have to, early on, focus on education more than we have seen in the campaign so far.  America has a terrible educational problem in the sense that we have too many youngsters not finishing school.  A third of our kids don’t finish high school, 50 percent of minorities don’t finish high school. We’ve got to work on this, and my, my wife and I are leading a campaign with this purpose.

Powell isn’t the only one concerned about the lack of attention to education in this campaign. The Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out:

During the course of three 90-minute debates between Barack Obama and John McCain over the past four weeks, the two presidential candidates faced only one question about their approach toward education.

In Education Week David Hoff Writes:

The No Child Left Behind Act has been the subject of intense debate in school board meetings, state legislatures, and Washington policy circles.

Everywhere, it seems, but the presidential campaign.

In a July article in District Administration Zach Miners termed education “the silent issue.” I will bet you know how your candidates stand on Iraq, the budget, tax cuts, health care and other issues, but you do not have a clue about what plans those people have for educating your children. Think about that for a minute: your candidate has told you all about tax cuts but nothing about their plans for your local elementary or secondary school. In fact, education may get the award for the most ignored issue of this campaign by candidates, blogs and the media alike.

The Main Issues

Currently there are several major issues in education that no one seems to want to discuss. The first is the attempt to privatize public education and turn our schools into places of indoctrination that match parents’ views in web pages. Second is what I termed last spring educational apartheid–the issue of education and people of color. Third is how education, like much of the rest of America, is dividing us into haves and have-nots. Fourth is No Child Left Behind.

Together these issues place American public education in perhaps the most difficult time in its history. If you are worried the current economic situation might lead to a depression, you should be doubly worried that education already IS in a depression that threatens to demolish one of the most important assets of American democracy, for without an educated public there is no democracy.

It may well be that next to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, America’s most valuable contribution to civilization is its public school system and the concept of public school teachers as professionals. Yet even as the world has marveled at America’s education system and immigrants continue to stream into this country to take advantage of it, America itself seems more inclined to bury its public education system than to praise it.

Issue One: Privatization and Ayatollah Academies

Nowhere has the Republican Counterrevolution so concentrated its efforts than in its dismantling of public education. Throw in any other issue you wish–tax cuts for the rich, Iraq, environmental degradation–and put them all together and they still pale beside the GOP’s attempts to “privatize” education.

Under the cover of vouchers and the soiled banner of markets and competition, the Republican Party, particularly its allies from the religious right, has sought to replace our public schools with private schools that would become America’s equivalent to the Ayatollah Academies of Iran–that is, schools whose prime mission is to indoctrinate students in a particular religious and political ideology.

Make no mistake about it; a war is taking place in the corridors of America’s public schools. On the one side are those who believe education should be about propagandizing youth in their particular ideology while on the other side are those who still believe in Jefferson’s ideals, particularly the notion that how our schools are run should be a democratic, not a dictatorial process.

Late in his life Jefferson wrote Joseph Cabell:

I now think it would be better for every ward to choose its own resident visitor, whose business it would be to keep a teacher in the ward, to superintend the school, and to call meetings of the ward for all purposes relating to it; their accounts to be settled, and wards laid off by the courts. I think ward elections better for many reasons, one of which is sufficient, that it will keep elementary education out of the hands of fanaticizing preachers, who, in county elections, would be universally chosen, and the predominant sect of the county would possess itself of all its schools.

Jefferson was also firmly against religious instruction in public schools, a position he stated several times. In one letter he advocated:

The want of instruction in the various creeds of religious faith existing among our citizens presents… a chasm in a general institution of the useful sciences. But it was thought that this want, and the entrustment to each society of instruction in its own doctrine, were evils of less danger than a permission to the public authorities to dictate modes or principles of religious instruction, or than opportunities furnished them by giving countenance or ascendancy to any one sect over another.

The attempts to turn American public education into private usually come under the guise of vouchers, but vouchers are not about inner-city kids any more than taxes are about jobs; they are about giving parents from the suburbs subsidies to put their kids in schools where they can be properly indoctrinated in James Dobson’s view of the world.

Attempts to capture public schools come from several directions: there are challenges within the system that seek to change the curriculum to teach right wing values, there are movements to starve public schools to death so they lack the resources to do their jobs causing their performance to drop, and finally there is the movement to essentially end public education.

The choice is obvious: If we allow ideology and not democracy to take over our public education system, there is little doubt that it proves Jefferson’s point in a way that the Sage of Monticello could not have anticipated, for America as we know it will go the way of other failed experiments and our children will grow up under the same climate of absolutes as those in schools once run by the Taliban.

Issue Number Two: Educational Apartheid

In a three-part series last year, I contrasted the situation in an inner city and rich suburban district. I still consider that series one of the more important essays I have written on this blog.

The suburban system had the finest resources their considerable tax base could buy from state-of-the-art athletic facilities that would be the envy of many colleges to the latest technological and curricular innovations to a well-paid teaching force, many of whom hold doctorates. The inner city system has bathrooms that often don’t work, dog-eared textbooks with pages missing and a teaching force with far less training.

The term educational apartheid is not my own, but borrowed from one of America’s best education writers, Jonathan Kozol, who for decades has been trying to make Americans aware of educational inequality, mostly to deaf ears.  In an article and book about educational apartheid Kozol notes:

Black school officials in these situations have sometimes conveyed to me a bitter and clear-sighted recognition that they’re being asked, essentially, to mediate and render functional an uncontested separation between children of their race and children of white people living sometimes in a distant section of their town and sometimes in almost their own immediate communities.

In the series on educational apartheid I proposed that perhaps what America needed was an educational version of Mark Twain’s famous story “The Prince and the Pauper,” in which a waif of the streets and a youth born to the purple change identities. In my version we would switch students from a well-endowed suburban district with those of an inner city school.

The apartheid problem contains two dimensions, both interrelated. First has come what I call the reverse of Brown v Board, in which segregation in education is on the increase.

Gary Orfield of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has charged:

The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades. The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at a level lower than in any year since 1968.

When people write about the Supreme Court as an issue in the election, they usually focus on Roe, but Brown also hangs in the balance.  What I term The Gang of Four now speaks in a unified voice that does not appear to want to directly overturn Brown but would reinterpret it in such a way as to emasculate it. As Justice Breyer noted in his dissent in the Seattle School District Decision, their reasoning would not only impact Brown but virtually every other area of racial discrimination.

As I wrote in 2007, in some of the more startling passages in the decision, the Gang of Four, seem to sound like former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond when they defend the notion that racial imbalance as such is NOT segregation. Interesting it is Justice Thomas who makes this point the most strongly, writing:

Racial imbalance is not segregation, and the mere incantation of terms like resegregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.

Actually the segregationists’ doctrine of separate but equal would be an improvement for most inner city schools, for the second strand of educational apartheid is unequal resources. All you have to do is to visit an inner city school to see the inequality. You don’t even have to attend a class; just walk down the hallways and take in facilities that date back fifty years or more and are in sad need of repair.

Critics of educational apartheid often note that the per pupil expenses of both the inner city and suburban systems are not that different, but what they fail to recognize is that just to bring the inner city school’s resources up to the level of the rich suburban district would require for a city like Chicago or Philadelphia something on the order of a billion dollars.

John McCain tried to make an issue out of the DC school system in the only debate that featured a question on education (kudos to Bob Schieffer for asking this), saying the DC schools are failing and a perfect example of where vouchers can help. McCain had obviously not read the Washington Post series on the DC schools which saw a system that was underfunded and neglected right in the shadows of the Capitol Dome itself.

With article titles like “Stolen Dreams,” “The Breakdown,” and “The Price of Neglect” it detailed a system with buildings beyond repair, administrators charging strip club visits to fundraising accounts, Congressional representatives earmarking money for programs the district did not need or want, teachers who were assaulted and left lying unconscious in the hallways, and students who had given up on themselves and the system. One sentence summed up the series:

[These] stories… illustrate how a struggling urban school system often fails to shepherd its students and set them on a promising path to adulthood

Issue Three: The Gap Between the Rich and the Rest of Us, Higher Education

One of the most insidious developments of what John Edwards termed the “two Americas” is that it is not only impacting this generation but the next one through education. The children of America’s rich go to the best schools and walk out with a clear path to success. If there is anywhere where the idea of the level playing field has been subverted by the Counterrevolution it is education.

The current economic crisis has brought this into even more sharp relief. With the loan system in chaos, all of a sudden students and their parents are finding they cannot find the funds to pay for higher education. Florida A&M officials testified the loan crisis has caused a financial aid crisis:

In board of trustees meetings this week, administrators said nearly 40 percent of FAMU students have seen delays in receiving checks for tuition. The deadline to pay tuition at FAMU was Aug. 29. Students are normally pulled out of class when tuition isn’t paid, but students affected by the slow loan process have been given temporary leeway.

Craig Munier, director of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s office of scholarship and financial aid, says currently federally-based loans are weathering the crisis, but:

Private alternative loans are restricting lender requirements, increasing the worthiness of credit, the debt-to-income ratio and a cosigner. This could mean less money for students, especially for those who have no other way to pay for college.

“Paying Back, Not Giving Back,” notes an alarming trend:

Two-thirds of all four-year college graduates in 2004 left school with student debt, compared with less than one-third in 1993.

The debt crunch obviously proved particularly difficult for low-income students.

Recent graduates, especially those with low and moderate incomes, must spend the vast majority of their salaries on necessities such as rent, health care, and food. For borrowers struggling to cover basic costs, student loan repayment can create a significant and measurable impact on their lives.

The study then went on to examine the impact of this debt on two public sector employment fields–teaching and social work. It found:

Factoring in high debt levels, the congressional fixed 6.8% interest rate for federal student loans, and low starting salaries, we found that 23% of public four-year college students graduate with too much debt to manageably repay their loans as a starting teacher. Thirty-seven percent (37%) of public four-year college graduates have too much debt to manage as a starting social worker.

Private college grads, who have average higher tuition costs face and even greater challenge:

Graduates of private four-year colleges face even more significant debt burdens. Thirty-eight percent (38%) of private four-year college students would face an unmanageable debt burden as a starting teacher. Fifty-five percent (55%) of private college graduates would face serious repayment challenges as a starting social worker.

The inability of poor and middle-class students to obtain a college education without taking on debt that can approach six figures for students who go on to graduate or professional school figures in a little-known, but potentially world-changing statistic noted by the Brookings Institution:

Among adults ages 45 to 54, the United States has a higher rate of post-secondary completion than all but three other OECD countries (Russia, Canada, and Israel). Yet among adults ages 25 to 34, nine OECD countries now have rates of tertiary completion higher than the United States, and projections suggest that more countries will surpass us in educational achievement over the coming decade.

Surpassing us in educational achievement will obviously mean passing us in other areas of achievement from research to production. The above paragraph contains a recipe for America’s downfall as a world power and it will be because we squandered the next generation’s educational opportunity.

Issue Three: The Gap Between the Rich and the Rest of Us, P-12 Education

At the P-12 level inequality is an enormous issue. A 2006 report by the Education Trust, “Teaching Inequality” begins:

Research has shown that when it comes to the distribution of the best teachers, poor and minority students do not get their fair share.

The report goes on to note:

Unfortunately, rather than organizing our educational system to pair these children with our most expert teachers, who can help “catch them up” with their more advantaged peers, we actually do just the opposite. The very children who most need strong teachers are assigned, on average, to teachers with less experience, less education, and less skill than those who teach other children.

Another report on the funding gap by the trust observes:

Despite national imagery full of high-flying concepts like “equal opportunity” and “level playing field,” English-learner, low- income
and minority students do not get the extra school supports they need to catch up to their more advantaged peers; they all too frequently receive less than do other students.

But the situation is not just true for those students it is also hitting middle-income students in what formerly were school districts that were well off.  It its latest issue Education Week finds:

States are struggling—and sometimes failing—to hold the line on education budget cuts and day-to-day disruption in the face of budget deficits, flagging tax revenues, and credit jitters that threaten their cash flow.

The story goes on to detail problems facing various states. Among the worst:

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who is trying to plug a projected $1 billion deficit, said the state may have to weigh reductions in local school aid provided under a formula that gives extra money to areas where the cost of education is high.

And in Hawaii, the state board of education on Oct. 9 approved more than $46 million in cuts from its $2.1 billion K-12 budget on the way toward meeting Republican Gov. Linda Lingle’s instruction that each state agency trim spending by up to 20 percent.

Issue Four: No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind will be on the agenda of Congress and the White House again next year. It will be one of the most important issues a new President must face.

For some inexplicable reason, the prevailing stance on NCLB by the Democrats and major education organizations has avoided calling for its repeal, but instead seeking to seek to modify it. Trying to fix a bad law is like trying to repair a downed power line by grabbing onto it. It creates lots of sparks, but besides doing little to solve the underlying problem, it ends up killing those trying to make the repairs.

With NCLB, the Counterrevolution has largely succeeded in reframing the debate about education funding much as it reframed debates about taxes. Resource poor schools where the toilets work intermittently, the textbooks have pages missing, and teachers must buy their own classroom supplies also tend to have large numbers of students not performing well on the standardized tests at the heart of NCLB. For these schools, the GOP moved the debate from lack of resources to lack of performance in a way that would earn the admiration of the most sophisticated river boat gambler. The problem is that they are gambling with our children’s futures.

Educators have not been silent about the failures of NCLB. the Educator Roundtable is circulating an online petition to repeal NCLB. The petition’s opening paragraph intentionally echoes the opening of the United States Constitution:

We, the educators, parents, and concerned citizens whose names appear below, reject the misnamed No Childresearcher and Left Behind Act and call for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law’s simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.

The petition cites 16 major reasons for repealing NCLB. Among them are:

1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.

13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change, encouraging creativity, or respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.

16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all “failures,” so when they fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress, as all schools eventually will, they can be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or privatization.

As of October 18, the petition had 33,600 signatures, among them are Paul Houston, who is the Executive Director of the American Association of School Administrators, education writer and critic Alfie Kohn, writer and education researcher Gerald Bracey, researcher and education reformer William Spady, and Arizona State University Regents’ Professor in the College of Education David Berliner. To anyone like me who was involved in education reform during these last three decades these names represent some of the most inspiring and innovative thinkers in education. Their work served as the guidepost for those of us working at the grassroots level.

the American public, as usual, is out in front of the politicians on this issue. A Pew Research Center report notes:

Among those who have heard about the law, 34% say the law has made schools better; 26% say it has made schools worse; and 32% say it has had no impact.

In other words, only one-third of the American people believe NCLB has helped to improve schools and a quarter of the nation believes it has actually hurt them. The “report cards” for NCLB issued by various organizations also give it mixed grades. The Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind reports in the Executive Summary of its report on NCLB:

While the law set us on a more productive course and spurred some improvement, it has not been enough. Far too many children are still not achieving to high standards in every state.

Fair Test points out the following weaknesses with NCLB:

NCLB is based on false assumptions-e.g., test scores equal educational quality, and sanctions based on low test scores drive school improvement–and therefore offers false remedies.

Nearly all schools will eventually be rated “In Need of Improvement” (INOI) and sanctioned under NCLB because of the way “Adequate Yearly Progress” statistics are calculated.

“Teaching to the test” narrows the curriculum and forces teachers and students to concentrate on memorizing isolated facts.

The law’s remedies for “failing” schools do not work.

In short, NCLB does not need to be modified, it needs to be completely scrapped. With NCLB, the Counterrevolution has largely succeeded in reframing the debate about education funding much as it reframed debates about taxes. Resource poor schools where the toilets work intermittently, the textbooks have pages missing, and teachers must buy their own classroom supplies also tend to have large numbers of students not performing well on the standardized tests at the heart of NCLB. For these schools, the GOP moved the debate from lack of resources to lack of performance in a way that would earn the admiration of the most sophisticated river boat gambler. The problem is that they are gambling with our children’s futures.

The Consequences

For those few of you who are still undecided about voting for President, I would suggest that you already know more than you have wanted hear about their ideas for the economy, Iraq, and health care, but I doubt you know much about their policies for education. While clearly this country’s first priority needs to be to clean up the economic mess and its second to deal with Iraq, in the long run the educational mess will have immense consequences for your children and this nation.  You owe it to yourselves to see what candidate proposes to do about an education crisis every bit as serious as the economic crisis.

The so-called American Century that we now are already starting to look back on with nostalgia was largely built on one policy: universal public education. We had the most educated population in the world, one which contributed to life-saving and important advances in medicine, science and technology along with fostering a work force whose productivity was the envy of the world.

But education contributed to the American Century in far more important ways. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the importance of public education in a passage many educators can recite from memory:

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

The American Century was not an accident, but rather occurred because this country created a level playing field that promised all Americans could become contributing citizens of a democratic society. If we lose the educational equity that made that possible then we lose the American Dream.

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