It's Saturday morning in downtown Modesto, California, and for a city with 200,000 residents, not much is happening. The streets are mostly empty, and the outdoor tables at Starbucks are unoccupied. Outside the Modesto Convention Center, though, a steady wave of soccer moms (and a smattering of soccer dads) are pushing strollers and lugging plastic shopping bags as they enter and exit the center's 12,000-square-foot exhibition hall. Inside, representatives from dozens of educational publishers and related concerns pitch their wares to the attendees of the Valley Home Educators 11th Annual Home Education Convention.
Valley Home Educators is faith-based, and so are many of the exhibitors and seminar speakers. Among the mainstream basic skills primers and educational toys on display, there are titles like The Christian Teaching of Mathematics and Biblical Economics in Comics—along with items that could send secular public school dissidents fleeing to the comfort of their local PTA meeting. One vendor is distributing a pamphlet whose cover displays a terrified tot; the title is The Urgency of Enforcing Parental Discipline. Elsewhere Robert E. Lee: Gallant Christian Soldier is available, and there are workshops on "Biblical Principles for Government" and "Preparing Sons to Provide for a Single-Income Family."
But what's at least as striking as the event's religious component is how enthusiastic everyone is. The aisles buzz with the energy characteristic of all large gatherings where hitherto unlinked individuals are thrilled to discover that, yes, there are others—lots of them!—who dress up like giant plush toys, or consort with medically invasive aliens, or teach their kids at home. And it's not just the parents who are excited. Young teens are leafing through math instruction systems, skimming adventure novels, and generally displaying the well-mannered exuberance of trained dolphins.
A semi-exclusive door policy is in effect: Children under the age of 12 are out of luck, unless they happen to be "nursing infants whose parents are considerate of others." Presumably, this means that everyone else is welcome—including, say, grant makers, former CEOs with a penchant for pedagogical re-engineering, and pretty much anyone else from the world of mainstream education reform. No one like that has shown up, however. Despite homeschooling's increasing popularity—a recent report from the U.S. Department of Education estimates that approximately 1.1 million students are now being homeschooled in the United States—neither corporate altruists nor philanthropic foundations have shown much interest in it.
Instead, would-be reformers continue to give generously to a public school system they routinely condemn as inefficient, dysfunctional, and hopelessly obsolete. To fix such a system, they say, it will take fresh thinking, radical change, a completely new approach. So instead of dumping billions each year into the public school system, as the federal government does, today's private-sector benefactors forge an entirely different path, dumping only hundreds of millions each year into the public school system. They promote charter schools (which boast a nationwide enrollment of around 500,000). They champion school vouchers (which are currently used by fewer than 20,000 students nationwide).
The Business of Reform
In doing so, they overlook people like Joyce and Eric Burges, who are at the Valley Home Educators convention promoting their organization, the National Black Home Educators Resource Association. The Burgeses produce an annual symposium for African-American families in their home state of Louisiana, and Joyce Burges dreams of opening up a series of private learning centers where homeschooling parents can combine resources and offer instruction in a central location. In pursuit of this goal, Burges has reached out to local businesses and foundations, but few have responded so far. "We're an upstart, grassroots organization," she says, "so I'm asking businesses for anything that can help us get the word out that parental involvement in education is a viable way of ensuring that children do exceptionally well....A lot of them say, 'Yes, we sense your passion, but we can't really do anything.'"
According to the American Society for Training and Development, a workplace-learning trade group based in Alexandria, Virginia, a survey of Fortune 500 companies found that teaching employees "basic skills" accounted for 17 percent of their training costs in 2002. Similarly, in a 2001 survey conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers, 32 percent of the companies responding reported that their workers had poor reading and writing skills; 26.2 percent said their workers' math skills were inadequate. By 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor predicts, America will face a shortage of 12 million qualified workers in the job market's fastest-growing sectors.
While public school reform has existed for almost as long as public schools have, the business world has made it a major preoccupation over the last two decades. In April 1983, a federal report titled A Nation at Risk helped kick off the modern era of Whither Our Schools? malaise. "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war," the report declared. "If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all—old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the 'information age' we are entering."
There was plenty of evidence to support such pessimism. In 1982, for example, Time reported that half of the employees at Ford who'd been selected to learn new statistical process control techniques couldn't understand the training materials due to poor reading and math skills. Similarly, when a G.M. plant issued a questionnaire asking employees what kind of basic training they needed, many couldn't understand the questionnaire well enough to complete it.
As part of his 1991 proposal to overhaul the nation's education system, President George H.W. Bush invited big business to take part in the fun. "The architects of the New American School should break the mold," he advised. "Build for the next century....Start from scratch and reinvent the American school....There's a special place in inventing the New American School for the corporate community, for business and labor." Instead of starting from scratch, though, pedagogical turnaround artists sought out the familiar. Public schools had market share. They were semi-desperate for cash and thus fairly compliant. In the software world, Microsoft is known for "embracing and extending" popular standards developed elsewhere. In the realm of education, virtually every corporate philanthropist employs this strategy, and thus the money flows to public schools.
A few months after Bush's 1991 address, a group of CEOs created the New American Schools Development Corporation. Furnished with $130 million in contributions, they aimed to shake up "the nation's stagnating education system with the entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector." In 1993 billionaire publisher Walter Annenberg upped the ante with a $500 million pledge for public schools. A year later, IBM introduced its Reinventing Education initiative; during the next decade, it invested $70 million in the program. Since its 2000 inception, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has distributed more than $600 million to 1,457 high schools and committed more than a $1 billion to the Gates Millennium Scholars program, a college scholarship program for low-income minority students. Hewlett-Packard has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and cash to schools and universities. Wal-Mart donated $40 million to education-related causes in 2003. According to the Foundation Center, a nonprofit organization that compiles information on U.S. philanthropy, elementary and secondary schools received $1,176,520,000 in grants during 2002, or roughly 7.4 percent of all distributions that year.
In a public school system where expenditures for 2003–2004 totaled a whopping $501 billion, though, $1.1 billion takes you only so far—especially since some of that money was actually donated to private institutions. In 1992 the "status dropout rate," which represents the percentage of 16-to-24-year-olds who aren't enrolled in school and haven't earned a high school credential, was 11 percent. A decade later, in 2001, it was 10.7 percent. SAT scores are less stagnant. In 1991 the average score was 999 (adjusted to account for subsequent changes in the scoring scale). In 2004 it rose to 1026. Even so, both colleges and employers continue to report that many high school graduates are unprepared for higher education or the workplace. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 28 percent of incoming college freshman took at least one remedial course in 2000.
Learning Factories
Against such stats, another set of numbers looms: The public school system is 90,000 schools strong, 3 million teachers wide, 47 million students deep. So while it's easy enough to demand euthanasia, it's another thing entirely to actually kill the beast.
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