Let a Thousand Choices Bloom

Debating the future of education reform.

From the December 2005 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

The second thing would be to break the guaranteed revenue of any school, though clearly what we're talking about here are the orthodox government schools. A guaranteed stream of revenue leads to all sorts of hanky-panky. I taught at a middle school in Manhattan, where every single teacher faked the attendance reports in order to get the revenue, which is some particular sum per head in attendance. In one school, Intermediate School 44 on West 77th Street in the middle of the gold coast of Manhattan, for a period in the early '70s, there was a particular room set aside to fake the lunch application forms, because they were the key to Title I funds. That room was in the hands of the administration and a few teachers who were cronies of the administration. I don't think they were particularly culpable; they were just following a general pattern. Most people don't know that if you vote down a school budget--in New York it's three times, but this is true all over--and finally a new budget can't be passed, the old budget plus some percentage takes effect. The public has been stripped of the ability to discipline its schools.

What vouchers will produce, very quickly, is a much deeper and broader reach of official pedagogy into every home and every small secular or religious group that puts together schools. They won't be allowed to run free: They will have to be monitored in their progress by standardized tests. And you can't very easily get an education and do well on standardized tests. They don't correlate with anything except what your score is going to be on the next standardized test you take.

Biggest obstacle: The biggest obstacle is that the correct questions aren't asked. You won't get anywhere if you accept that all the children should be drained out of the community and placed in the hands of so-called experts for a period of 12 years. The assumption isn't just flawed, it's rotten to the core. People don't learn anything the way schools teach except reflexive obedience, so their behavior can be predicted by statistical tools.

This was built into the original design. The idea was that we had to convert a nation where 75 percent of the population had independent livelihoods--and this was their dream in childhood--in order to serve a highly concentrated corporate economy in which only a few people could call the shots for everyone else. You can't have a mass-production corporate economy unless people consume around the clock with everything they have--their dreams are material dreams, so they can measure their success in life by how many toys they have or don't have. We didn't have a country like that, and anyone with the slightest familiarity with American history--which these days must be one person out of every 100,000--would see that we were well on our way to being the most dynamically inventive nation in the history of the planet. We had 90 percent of the patents in the world. That changed because in order to have westward expansion, we needed genuinely massive investment. There was only one place that investment could come from: Great Britain, which was an intensely class-based society, sent the senior sons of the people with the money over to make sure that our economy was slowly but systematically regulated the same way the British economy was regulated through class.

The whole school reform movement is a misdirection, so people talk about items that have little or no importance. Then they line up in some oppositional way, and after some spasm of a few years, everything is brought back in exactly the same form. But if you started with the premise that human genius is so widely distributed and so easy to access that it costs the taxpayers not a goddamn cent to do it, you would unthread the social and economic structure of this country.���