NCLB and Race to the Top treat public schools as though they were shoe stores.

Diane Ravitch in the Saturday Evening Post: American Schools in Crisis

What the federal efforts of the past decade or more ignore is that the root cause of low academic achievement is poverty, not “bad” teachers. Children who are homeless, in ill health, or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. The most important educators in children’s lives are their families. What families provide in the way of encouragement, experiences, expectations, and security has a decisive effect on a child’s life chances. The most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.

[...]

The promise of Race to the Top is that billions more will be spent on more tests, and districts will reduce the time available for subjects (like the arts and foreign languages) that aren’t tested. Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests of basic skills. That’s not good policy, and it won’t improve education. Twelve years of rewarding children for picking the right answer on multiple-choice tests is bad education. It will penalize the creativity, innovativeness, and imaginativeness that has made this country great.

and

The law treats public schools as though they were shoe stores: Make a profit or else. If you don’t, you might be fired, you might get new management, or you might be closed down.

and the most essential message is the most basic, the most easily overlooked in the jumble:

It is worth remembering that the reason we first established public education was to advance the common good of the community. It began in small towns, where communities agreed that all the children should be educated for the good of all and the sake of the future. Public schools have a civic mission: They are expected to prepare young people to become citizens and to share in the responsibility of maintaining our society. As political forces tear them apart, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and for profit, it diminishes our commonwealth. That is a price we must not pay.

We seem to have no trouble in spending money for the production of organized violence designed to kill people...

The war on the social state is in high gear and is most evident in a range of polices designed to punish unions, abrogate the bargaining rights of workers, cut social protections and disinvest in higher education as a site of critical learning while reorganizing it according to the interests and values of a market-driven culture.

[ ... ]

As the rich and powerful rewrite the script of politics, they are largely assisted by a number of Republican governors are not only breaking the backs of labor unions but are also firing police officers and fire fighters, curtailing benefits for the unemployed, denying poor people access to health services and “cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care or other services needed by low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities or are significantly increasing the cost of these services.” As social problems are privatized and public spaces commodified, there has been an increased emphasis on individual solutions to socially produced problems, while at the same time market relations and the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics and responsibility. How else to explain the lack of massive protests over the recent revelations that mega-corporations such as General Electric and the Bank of America paid no taxes in spite of accruing massive financial profits. The commodification of thought and the depoliticization of everyday life have created both a culture of illiteracy and cruelty in which notions of the public good, community and the obligations of citizenship are replaced by the overburdened demands of individual responsibility and an utterly privatized ideal of freedom.


Henry Giroux. Militarized Conservatism and the End(s) of Higher Education.