More Money Than Brains (9 page)

The current charter-school media darling is the Knowledge Is Power Program, a.k.a.
KIPP
schools. Created in 1994 by two alums from the newbie-teacher mission Teach for America,
KIPP
schools serve poor inner-city communities. The majority of their students are black or Latino, and parents must sign contracts that obligate them to take an active role in their child’s education.
KIPP
students spend longer hours in the classroom than their public-school counterparts. The school day starts earlier and ends later, and there are Saturday and summer sessions at most schools too.

Some
KIPP
schools have shown good results, but critics of the program argue that these gains depend on a pool of young, idealistic teachers willing to put in long hours for low pay.
KIPP
teachers in some New York City schools have even started to unionize, much to the chagrin of the anti-union wing of the charter-school booster club. I don’t condone making teachers work ill- or unpaid overtime, something that many instructors, publicly or privately managed, already do. However, I do like the
KIPPSTERS’
extended school hours; the public-school day and year should be longer.

Very few North American children spend their summers helping with the harvest. The current school year is a silly
agrarian anachronism, one that leaves working parents scrambling for child-care options. But I suspect I may be in the minority here, and that many taxpayers, teachers’ unions, parents, and kids would object to way more school, for both fiscal and personal reasons.

The other noteworthy aspect of the
KIPP
program is its focus on getting poor kids into college. Even though most
KIPP
schools are middle schools (junior highs), students are encouraged to think of themselves as college material and bust their butts accordingly. It’s laudable that
KIPP
schools are helping more poor and minority students make it to university, where they are still underrepresented. But broad school reforms cannot take the
KIPP
approach and steer everyone towards university. We need skilled tradespeople and college-trained professionals too. Public schools, particularly those in affluent school districts, already act as if university is for everybody, even though they do a half-assed job of making sure everybody is ready for university.

Despite my commitment to the battered and venerable public education system, I must concede that public schools are not great at preparing kids for college. Colleges and universities in North America offer thousands of remedial classes so their students can acquire the basic math and English skills they really should have learned many grades before. A 2006 survey of high-school teachers and college profs conducted by the
Chronicle of Higher Education
shows a major difference of opinion between high-school teachers and the professoriate with respect to student preparation for college. A full 44 per cent of the profs thought students were
ill-prepared for the rigours of college writing, while 36 per cent of the high-school teachers thought their former charges were well-prepared to write at the college level. A measly 6 per cent of the profs concurred with that rosy assessment of their students’ word power. The same was true for math, with 37 per cent of the high-school teachers thinking that students were well-prepared for college math, but only 2 per cent of profs agreeing.
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I do not buy the catastrophic rhetoric about schools, as so much of it comes from politically suspect sources. But public schools could and should be doing a much better job teaching kids to think, read, and write. I’ve seen the results of both education systems, in classrooms on either side of the border, and some are pretty glum, chum.

I’ve had a couple of students brag that they made it through the school system and into college without ever reading an entire book. Several of my students have wigged out about writing essays, claiming that none of their other teachers ever made such unreasonable demands. Couldn’t I just tell them what the poems and novels meant, and then test them? That’s how they learned to learn in regular school. Their K–12 teachers were kindly mama birds, willing to chew up the worms and spit the goopy food into their eager beaks.

There’s nothing like teaching quasi-adults basic argumentation and the rudiments of grammar to make one wonder what the hell they – and their teachers – have been doing for the past twelve years. Apparently I am not alone. Wondering what and how teachers are doing has become public policy, in the form of increased, and increasingly
important, standardized testing programs. In January 2002 President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the most sweeping federal reform of the education system in years. The principal provision of
NCLB
was yearly high-stakes testing in English and math.

Standardized tests are another manifestation of our obsession with quantifying – reducing everything to metrics and scores and discounting anything that cannot be converted into numbers. The standardized testing industry has grown into a multi-billion-dollar business, thanks to pols and taxpayers spazzing out about accountability and transparency, demanding to know exactly how much brain-bang they’re getting for their tax bucks. Fairtest, an advocacy organization devoted to test reform, estimates that American schools administer a hundred million standardized tests a year.
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The Heritage Foundation, an uber-conservative think tank, has argued that
NCLB
“increased state and local governments’ annual paperwork burden by 6,680,334 hours, at an estimated cost of $141 million.”
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And over on the other side of the aisle, some argue that this tide of paperwork is unreliable at best. A report by the think tank Education Sector, called “The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act,” criticizes the Enronesque digit-juggling that educators use to claim their schools are always improving, just as Voltaire’s Pangloss claimed that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

The report uses the embattled Birmingham, Alabama, school district as its exemplary case, detailing the way state and local officials played with numbers and sample sizes to
produce the illusion of astounding improvements. Other states, such as Missouri, met test goals by lowering standards for proficiency. Then there were loophole-hunting trailblazers such as Tennessee’s educrats, who came up with the following end run around those tough new rules:

This tactic was a big hit; twenty-eight other states got permission from the Department of Education to do their numbers this way too.

Another problem with test-heavy schemes like
NCLB
is that they provide openings for privatization by stealth. In a 2008 interview with
Time
magazine, Susan Neuman, a former Department of Education official, conceded that a number of her ex-colleagues “saw the
NCLB
as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda – a way to expose the failure of public education and ‘blow it up a bit … There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization.’”
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This is in keeping with the market-fundamentalist creed that private industry does everything better than public services, which assumes that profit-making entities and public services exist
for the same reasons and should operate the same way. Do you really want your child’s education to be
efficient?
I seriously doubt that is the first adjective that leaps to mind.

Even if you accept the criterion of efficiency, /files/05/06/24/f050624/public/private educational initiatives often fail by their own standards. Let me give you an example from my own backyard, as a cautionary tale for other school districts. In the 1990s, Nova Scotia needed to build dozens of new schools. The Liberal government entered into /files/05/06/24/f050624/public/private partnerships (“P3s”) in 1994, signing contracts to build fifty-five new schools. The provincial auditor estimated that the P3 schools boondoggle ended up costing $32 million more than building the schools by tender as usual, thanks to cost overruns, construction delays, and expensive arbitration sessions to determine which P was responsible for various costs and liabilities.

Critics alleged that the point of the P3 arrangement was not to save money but to make it look like we were, by keeping school debts off the books. By the year 2000 the program had to be totally scrapped, but Nova Scotia taxpayers are still paying for it, and will be for quite some time, as many of the P3 schools are being leased back to the government for years to come. And the private contractors pulled all sorts of classy moves that tell you a lot about their interest in and commitment to such partnerships, like trying to claw back vending-machine revenue and cash from the sale of chocolate bars by students, and charging usurious fees to school teams and community groups using school spaces.

It’s bad enough that kids have to peddle overpriced candy to pay for their extracurricular activities. But for chisellers to
be standing by, ready to snatch the chump change from their tiny hands lest it be wasted on luxuries such as band and basketball? This Grinchy conduct makes me doubt that privatization is a panacea. Instead it seems to be an invitation for pseudo-capitalist leeches to profiteer at the community’s expense.

The other problem with standardized testing programs like
NCLB
is the idea that learning can be inventoried like cheap Chinese toys in a Wal-Mart warehouse. Speaking at a Washington charter school in 2006, Dubya said:

First, it’s not like we need more tests to show us the glaringly obvious achievement gaps. Innumerable studies demonstrate that students who are poor do worse than middle-class or affluent students. Second, the idea of accountability that Bush peddled presumes that teachers, school boards, and education experts should answer to the tight-fisted taxpayers who pay their salaries, a perfect example of the more-money-than-brains mindset at work.

There is nothing inherently good about measures, as any red-blooded American opponent of the devil’s own metric system can attest. In a speech protesting the U.K.’s batteries of
standardized tests, British teacher Robert Palmer said the following, which I cannot improve upon:

Gradgrindism
is a nice neologism. Palmer is referring to Thomas Gradgrind, the relentlessly utilitarian headmaster from Dickens’s
Hard Times
. Dickens lampooned Gradgrind’s nothing-but-the-facts approach to education, using the headmaster as a symbol of the heartless calculation of the Industrial Revolution – the same calculating mindset that still drives standardized testing policies.

Let me be perfectly clear. I’m not some hippie who thinks that rote learning has no place in education. Hell, no. Students definitely require a body of
who, where, what, when
, and
why
in order to ascend to higher-order thinking. The problem with test-o-centric policies is that they stop where a real education begins, at the level of scattered facts and basic skills.

Maybe the boomers and fogies who pitch these testing policies haven’t taken enough of the damn things to understand how students react to them. Most standardized tests are just multiple-choice fill-in-the-bubble forms. I remember taking the provincial versions as a kid every couple of years. We all knew that they didn’t really affect our grades, so wiseacres
would invariably pencil in the bubbles to form dirty doodles or repeatedly spell AC/DC. We didn’t care, because the tests didn’t count. Now, given that funding and staffing decisions ride on those little graphite-filled bubbles, the tests matter. It is education in the broad sense that does not count anymore, that must be shoved aside so kids can cram for multiple-choice quizzes.

I object to the Gradgrindist bias that determines much of the available research on education. Policy analysts and think tanks could and should write about schools in a more substantive, qualitative way rather than relying on numbers and rankings, treating schools as
Consumer Reports
covers cars. But numbers are the coin of the realm in a more-money-than-brains world, so numbers are what we get. And then opposing camps such as teachers’ unions and corporate lobbyists spin the same stats to declare the same school systems the world’s finest or total failures.

How dire are the North American numbers, relative to the rest of the globe? Let’s start with one test, the Programme for International Student Assessment (
PISA
), the
OECD
‘s triennial survey of the aptitudes of fifteen-year-olds from many lands. In 2006 they tested teens’ science powers. Canadian students placed third, behind Finland and China/Hong Kong. The U.S scored eleven points below the 500-point average, placing twenty-ninth on the
OECD
scale, right between scientific powerhouses Latvia and the Slovak Republic. Its math skills, the main focus of the 2003
PISA
study, were also below average. American students got 474, two points less than Azerbaijan, but seven points more than the next country on
the list, Croatia. Hong Kong and Finland led the pack, with scores in the upper 540s, while Canadian students ranked third, scoring in the 530s.
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