What I Did Over Christmas Break

I gathered with my school-age children around the dinner table. The conversation drifted naturally to assignments over Christmas break. I expected at least a short reading list, appropriate to the different grades. No such luck. Apparently merely reading literature for pleasure serves no place in testing well under the Bush education regime.

The fetishization of standardized testing must serve some goal. A goal consistent with Bush’s ideology. Bush essentially embraces a Christian Republican world view. His education goals seem to be 1. Demonstrate the inadequacy of inner-city schools, 2. promote government patronage of parochial education, 3. intrude the “private sector” into those failing schools, and 4. rid the system of unions to cut costs.

I have listened to educators and those who study education declaim against the system. Especially troubling to me the obvious re-segregation of American schools. Inner-city children are not prepared for school. The forces at work against this are insurmountable by this government. They are undernourished, both in body and mind. Their caretakers are absent at low paying jobs, often spending hours traveling from one to another. Their homes are not filled with enriching books, or magazines, or newspapers; nor do they see others using these media. There may be a television, but commercial television only complicates the problem. Their school are old, decrepit. They smell. These children learn to take bubble tests. They may begin at kindergarten. Any program or curricula that does not move towards this goal is discarded. Recess may even fall victim to more practice time.

If these children manage to learn to pass these tests their schools do not go on the endangered list. They do not lose funding. But they also do not get the new plant and resources they so desperately need. They do not got the empowerment of their families in their education. If these children fail these tests, schools lose funding, or close, or are taken over by corporations to run. The children may end up in parochial schools.

The parochial school serves various ends. First, consistency with Bush Christian values. Also, they are generally cheaper t operate. These schools do no operate with union labor, in the class, the halls, or the furnace room. Also, the door opens for federal funding of other religious institutions. There already stands a west wing office promoting faith based initiatives.

In suburban, and more affluent schools, the testing continues to occupy more teaching time. We lose foreign languages, music and drama, athletics, and many other activities once a part of every student’s experience. Now these programs, if available at all, come through a fee-based “community education” program.

We have lost so much and I do not understand how. Were we seduced by our liberalism away from traditional western methods epitomized in “great books” and Socratic methods. Did we yearn for a business model, to save costs, which allowed us to “measure success’ in some more concrete way? Did the costs of education become so overwhelming that anything would do.

I propose that we return to a decentralized approach. Allow the states to experiment with providing education without the straightjacket of No Child Left Behind. As we compete internationally for scarce resources, America must have children prepared with rigorous education in the sciences, math, technology, but also enriched by exposure to culture in art, music, and athletics.

Let the children read.