World News Korner

The troubling history of school vouchers, and why our public schools are NOT failing.

Courtesy of Yes Magazine:

To truly understand how we came to believe our educational system is broken, we need a history lesson. Rewind to 1980—when Milton Friedman, the high priest of laissez-faire economics, partnered with PBS to produce a ten-part television series called Free to Choose. He devoted one episode to the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones.

You could make a strong argument that the current campaign against public schools started with that single TV episode. To make the case for vouchers, free-market conservatives, corporate strategists, and opportunistic politicians looked for any way to build a myth that public schools were failing, that teachers (and of course their unions) were at fault, and that the cure was vouchers and privatization.

Jonathan Kozol, the author and tireless advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.”

Armed with Friedman’s ideas, President Reagan began calling for vouchers. In 1983, his National Commission on Excellence in Education issued “A Nation At Risk,” a report that declared, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

It also said, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

For a document that’s had such lasting impact, “A Nation At Risk” is remarkably free of facts and solid data. Not so the Sandia Report, a little-known follow-up study commissioned by Admiral James Watkins, Reagan’s secretary of energy; it discovered that the falling test scores which caused such an uproar were really a matter of an expansion in the number of students taking the tests. In truth, standardized-test scores were going up for every economic and ethnic segment of students—it’s just that, as more and more students began taking these tests over the 20-year period of the study, this more representative sample of America’s youth better reflected the true national average. It wasn’t a teacher problem. It was a statistical misread.

The government never officially released the Sandia Report. It languished in peer-review purgatory until the Journal of Educational Research published it in 1993. Despite its hyperbole (or perhaps because of it), “A Nation At Risk” became a timely cudgel for the larger privatization movement. With Reagan and Friedman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist, preaching that salvation would come once most government services were turned over to private entrepreneurs, the privatizers began proselytizing to get government out of everything from the post office to the public schools.

Corporations recognized privatization as a euphemism for profits. “Our schools are failing” became the slogan for those who wanted public-treasury vouchers to move money into private schools. These cries continue today.

There is very little that angers me as much as listening to people bad mouth teachers.

When I was struggling in school with behavioral problems and lack of motivation, the intervention of teachers saved my life. That is a debt I will spend a life time repaying.

In my day teachers were on par with firefighters in public trust and admiration, and today they are vilified at every turn by those who want to undermine our education system, destroy teacher's unions, and sabotage secular education.

By the way it is no surprise that all of this happened on Regan's watch. In fact it appears likely it was all part of his plan to return America back to its "Christian roots." Even if those did not really exist in the first place.

This from Salon:

(Frank) Schaeffer himself developed the theme in his most influential call to action, “A Christian Manifesto,” a 1981 book that (Jerry) Falwell described as “probably the most important piece of literature in America today.” As in his other recent works, Schaeffer stressed the inevitability of an authoritarian takeover if Bible-believing Christians remained indifferent to politics and failed to take a stand. He believed that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 might represent a window of opportunity to reassert Christian values. But he also warned that the power of relativistic secular humanism was so strong in the government, in the courts, and in the schools that it soon might be necessary for Christians to resist through civil disobedience—and even with violence—much as the United States had resisted British tyranny at the time of the American Revolution. Christianity and secular humanism, he emphasized, were opposites. “These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other,” he declared. “It is not too strong to say that we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in the struggle.”

It is no secret that many of the applications for charter schools are submitted by religious groups hoping to insert Christianity into the daily lesson plans of their students. (We have already seen that on display in Texas charter schools.)

The scariest thing in the world for a group that relies on ignorance and reliance on faith, is a fully funded public education system that teaches critical thinking skills and confidence in logic.

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