The Charade Masquerading as Piety

Bill Moyers has an opinion piece that Alternet.org picked up.  I will leave most of the writing to Mr. Moyers, but will add that I continue to remain perplexed by the animosity those born into privilege and good fortune have toward those born into poverty and ill fortune (or who find themselves there despite working hard and trying to get out of poverty).  Here are a couple of memorable quotes:

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty...  It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-moyers-we-are-close-losing-our-democracy-mercenary-class?page=0%2C1

 [T]his is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-moyers-we-are-close-losing-our-democracy-mercenary-class?page=0%2C3

Welcome to the Third World

 Alternet has a good piece on how, despite jingoistic sloganeering to the contrary, America is not number one in most categories that matter.  As the author points out:

 Three decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of labor protection has resulted in 50 million Americans living in abject poverty, while 400 individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth. As the four Walmart heirs enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada.

 What is frightening is the degree to which we have essentially cannibalized ourselves into lowering wages and, hence, lowering our standard of living.

The destruction of labor has been so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their jobs to the U.S. In other words, we’ve become the new India. Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have the non-unionized South to thank for that... 

 IKEA has set up a factory in Virginia. Volkswagen has set up in Tennessee, and the likes of Hyundai, KIA, BMW, Honda, and Toyota have all set up in the South to take advantage of the world’s latest cheap labor source. 

This has resulted in an America that does not have any cities among the top 10 cities in the world, that ranks behind 30 countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, and ranks first in such distinguished categories as incarcerated citizens per capita and adult onset diabetes.  Despite the ascendancy of and the abject failure over the last three decades of Reagonomics and other supply-side economic fantasies, we have a Congress that thinks the answer is to shrink the government further, privatize public goods to unparalleled extents, and cut the few benefits those hit hardest by their policies rely on to put food on the table.  Perhaps most frightening is the fact that a near majority of persons in the United States thinks Congress is right.  

For anyone interested in the incarceration issue, WUWM is doing a series on the rate at which Wisconsin incarcerates black males.  We're number one in this category also.

More Reasons Not to Believe the Hype About International Test Scores

Diane Ravitch has a great piece on the OECD PISA scores at commondreams.org.  Of note, Ravitch points out the common misconception that U.S. students scored well on these tests in some halcyon past.  The fact is that U.S. students have never scored particularly well on these tests.  It is also true that the U.S. student performance on PISA tests has had no relationship to the economic success of the nation.  Ravitch summarizes and quotes Keith Baker who has written extensively on this issue:

Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be "a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success." What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain "spirit," which he defines as "ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores."

Unfortunately for school age children, their teachers, and anyone else who has firsthand knowledge of the education process, the education reform movement (or, as Ravitch dubs it, "The Bad News Industry") seems to lack the very spirit of ambition, inquisitiveness, and independence that matters most for our economic, cultural, and technological success. 

For a nation that has risen to be the world's leading economic, military, and cultural power, one would think that those with an interest in education would be asking themselves, "how can we ensure that we continue to get it right?"  Of course this would mean that we would have to address the profound negative impact that growing income disparity has on education, the profound negative impact poverty without adequate social safety nets has on education, and the profound negative impact diverting resources away from public education has on education.  (The fact that I had to write that last clause both shocks and nauseates.)  I am not betting that the corporate interests that pervade the Bad News Industry has any interest in tackling these problems.  It is much easier to bemoan our students' performance on a meaningless international examination than to actually do something that would make education better and stronger.

I will leave the last word to Ravitch:

Let others have the higher test scores. I prefer to bet on the creative, can-do spirit of the American people, on its character, persistence, ambition, hard work, and big dreams, none of which are ever measured or can be measured by standardized tests like PISA.

Public Education Is Not a Job Training Program

There is a piece at theconversation.com on the uselessness of using comparative PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores to assess the state of any individual nation's education system.  In a brilliant summary of the problems with looking to PISA results to justify particular educational reform, education lecturer Graham Birrell points out:

The results released by the OECD would be more useful if they helped us to identify how to improve, but the countries ahead of us have such radically different approaches that anybody can pick and choose almost any educational approach and say there is “evidence from PISA” that it would work.

 Birrell is referring to Britain, but he could be making the same statement about the United States.  It is amusing to think about the vicissitudes of education reform in this country when considering Birrell's next statement:

Do you favour long hours and rote-learning? Well apparently they work, since countries in the Far East do very well in PISA. Perhaps you prefer shorter hours, very highly qualified teachers and light-touch accountability. Well PISA tells us they work too, as can be seen in the success of Finland, which, despite a dip in the 2012 results, has historically always been at or near the top. The data you cherry pick from the PISA results is likely to tell you far more about your own political inclinations than something meaningful about educational answers for the UK.

Certainly one could substitute 'USA' for 'UK' and the statement would apply equally well.

What is particularly interesting about Birrell's piece is the revelation that the PISA examinations are not what everyone assumes them to be.  In short,  

Children in each country only take a small sample of each of the three tests, with their total score being estimated using a mathematical model that David Spiegelharter, Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University, has declared “demonstrably inadequate”.

Of course this aspect of the PISA methodology is rarely reported when (typically) conservative alarmists tout the results as reason to commodify and privatize public education.

Birrell does note that PISA scores can be useful to evaluate education within a nation.  For example, in Britain the results demonstrated that "state schools did much better than private schools" when socioeconomic status was controlled for.  Not surprisingly the tests also showed that economically challenged areas serve disproportionately high percentage of "disadvantaged students."  However, Birrell accurately notes:

However, this more useful side to the results does not justify the central flaw with the whole PISA approach, which is the fact that the scores are used as a tool to reconfigure education according to economic goals.

Much like the UK, we too have abandoned the notion that education has "intrinsic self-worth" and instead consider it little more than an instrumentality to "prepare children for the world of work and the 'global race.'" I for one loathe the idea of public education as job training, which, it must said, ought to be the responsibility of the private sector and not the public schools.  Not only is this wholly instrumental approach to education depressing in an existential way, it also functions in a perverse manner as justification to devalue education.  Rather than focusing on the right to a decent public education, which would entail a broad-based approach to learning with concomitant expenditure of resources, education reformers in this country want to focus solely on whether students leave school ready to find a job.  When this is the focus, education suffers because so much of what we have historically considered valuable in education (the arts, music, physical education, competence in a wide range of subjects) becomes so many useless expenditures to be cut (at least for public schools - if you can pay for an elite private education then you can have all the arts and useless humanities that you want).