How A Crackpot Theory of Education Reform Became National Policy
Future historians are likely to tell the following story: some time during the early twenty-first century, a cross-section of the American elite began to panic. They looked at the growing chasm between the rich and poor, the huge size of the nation’s prison population, and the growing racial and socieconomic gulf in education, and decided something dramatic had to be done to remedy these problems.
But instead of critically examining how these trends reflected twenty years of regressive taxation, a futile “war on drugs,” the deregulation of the financial industry, the breaking of unions and the movement of American companies abroad, America’s leaders decided the primary source of economic inequality could be found in failing schools, bad teachers, and powerful teachers unions.
No serious scholar, looking at the economic and social trends of the previous twenty years or the major innovations in social policy that have unleashed the power of big capital, gives the slightest credence to this analysis of the sources of inequality, but the idea that educational failure is the prime source of all other social deficits has taken hold with the force of a religious conversion. Corporate leaders, heads of major foundations, civil rights leaders, and politicians in both major parties have bought this explanation hook line and sinker, and so thus we have one of the strangest social movements in modern American history—the demonization of America’s teachers and the development of strategies to radically transform education by taking power away from them.
The consequence of this leap of faith is the idea that there has to be a centralized effort to monitor educational progress though quantifiable measures, coupled with accountability strategies that call for the removal of teachers and the closing of schools if they don’t meet their criteria. Through policies developed at the federal level, but implemented locally so that they affect every school district in the nation, scrutinizing teacher effectiveness has become a national mission with as much fanfare as was America’s efforts to put a rocket in space during the 1950s and 60s.
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