SCHOOL REFORM AND THE ATTACK ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

[Hannah Bell]

This speech was delivered as the Keynote Address to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Summer Institute, 1997, by by David G. Stratman. This is an excerpt. The entire speech is well worth reading.


I have two propositions I would like to put to you.

The first is that the official education reform movement in Massachusetts and the nation is part of a decades-long corporate and government attack on public education and on our children. Its goal is:

--not to increase educational attainment but to reduce it;

--not to raise the hopes and expectations of our young people but to narrow them, stifle them, and crush them;

--not to improve public education but to destroy it.

My second proposition is that the education reform movement is part of a wider corporate and government plan to undermine democracy and strengthen corporate domination of our society.

What evidence do I have for these assertions? Let's look first at the long-standing campaign to persuade the American people that public education has failed.

This has been a disinformation campaign based on fraudulent claims, distortions, and outright lies...

The supposed dramatic decline of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores was a fraud. These scores did decline somewhat over the period 1963 to 1977. But the SAT is a voluntary test. It is not representative of anything, and it is useless as a measure of student performance or of the quality of the schools. The scores began to fall modestly when the range of young people going into college dramatically expanded in the mid-sixties.

Did this mean that there was a lowering of student achievement during this period? Absolutely not. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a representative exam, given each year to sample student populations across the country. During the period in question, PSAT scores held absolutely steady.

Even more notable is the fact that scores on the College Board Achievement Tests--which test students not on some vaguely-defined "aptitude," but on what they know of specific subjects-did not fall but rose slightly but consistently over the same period in which for the first time in the history of the United States or any other country, the sons and daughters of black and white working families were entering college in massive numbers...

What explains the aggressive effort by corporate and government leaders to discredit public education? To understand this, I believe we have to look beyond education to developments in the economy and the wider society. In the past decades, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. Millions more have been lost to "restructuring" and "downsizing..." The transformation of work through computers has really just begun. In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin estimates that "In the United States alone, in the years ahead more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines." As Rifkin puts it, "Life as we know it is being altered in fundamental ways."

Now, what does all this have to do with education?

There were two little incidents which happened to me in 1976-77, when I was an Education Policy Fellow working in the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, D.C., which gave me a clue as to how to understand the attack on education. The first was a conversation with a man who was at the time a very highly-placed federal official in education. He put to a few of us this question. He said, "In the coming decade of high unemployment"-referring here to the 1980s-"in the coming decade of high unemployment, which is better? Is it better to have people with a lot of education and more personal flexibility, but with high expectations? Or is it better to have people with less education and less personal flexibility, and with lower expectations?"

A second clue involved a man whom many of you may know. Ron Gister, who was Executive Director of the Connecticut School Boards Association at the time, began a speech in 1977 with this simple question. He said, "Ask yourself, What would happen if the public schools really succeeded?" What if our high schools and universities were graduating millions of young people, all of whom had done well?

The reason that public education is under attack is this: our young people have more talent and intelligence and ability than the corporate system can ever use, and higher dreams and aspirations than it can ever fulfill. To force young people to accept less fulfilling lives in a more unequal, less democratic society, the expectations and self-confidence of millions of them must be crushed. Their expectations must be downsized and their sense of themselves restructured to fit into the new corporate order, in which a relative few reap the rewards of corporate success-defined in terms of huge salaries and incredible stock options-and the many lead diminished lives of poverty and insecurity...

They are also attacking education for a second reason: Blaming public education is a way of blaming ordinary people for the increasing inequality in society. It is a way of blaming ordinary people for the terrible things that are happening to them. The corporate leaders and their politician friends are saying that, if our society is becoming more unequal, if millions don't have adequate work or housing or health care, if we are imprisoning more of our population than any other country on earth, it is not because of our brutal and exploitative economic system and our atomized society and our disenfranchised population. No, they say, it is not our leaders or our system who are at fault. The fault lies with the people themselves, who could not make the grade, could not meet the standards...

Where does the education reform movement fit in this picture?

Like the Tuition Tax Credit Act that started it all, the official education reforms such as school vouchers, charter schools, school choice, school-based management, raising "standards," the increased use of standardized testing, the focus on "School to Work," and other reforms, are calculated to make education more sharply stratified, more intensely competitive, and more unequal, and to lower the educational attainment of the great majority of young people. They are calculated also to fragment communities and undermine the web of social relationships which sustains society, and so to weaken people's political power in every area of life...

It is important to see that the attack on public education does not stem from a "right-wing fringe," as some writers have charged, but from the most powerful corporate and government interests in American society. Business groups at the national level and in most states have led the call for vouchers and charter schools and new standards. President Clinton himself has made Charter Schools the focus of his efforts in K-12 education, and has made tuition tax credits the focus of new aid for higher education.

The assault on public education is part of a wider strategy to strengthen corporate domination of American society...

We are called to a great purpose. We are called to build a movement capable of defending our institutions from corporate attack and capable too of transforming them, to lead them in a more democratic direction. We must build a movement to take back America from the corporate powers and the masters of great wealth, to place our country truly in the hands of the people.

We will not be alone in this battle. The great majority of people in our schools and in our communities share the same fundamental beliefs about what our schools should be like and what our society should be like. We can build upon shared values of commitment to each other and to future generations, and shared belief in democracy.

http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/edspeech.htm