When I wrote The Death and Life of the Great American School System, I thought that two very different reform movements just happened to converge in some sort of unanticipated and unfortunate accident. There was the testing and accountability movement, which started in the 1980s and officially became federal policy in 2002 as part of the No Child Left Behind law. Then there was the choice movement, which had been simmering on the back burner of education politics for half a century, not making much headway. Though it had been a cherished belief of the far-right wing of the Republican Party for decades, it had never achieved a popular base. Some supporters of testing and accountability were not supporters of school choice; some supporters of school choice were not supporters of testing and accountability. Each thought its own approach was the cure-all for public education.
NCLB breathed new life into the choice movement by decreeing that schools persistently unable to meet its impossible goal of 100 percent proficiency be handed over to private management, undergo drastic staff firings, or be closed. For the first time in history, federal law decreed that privatization was a viable remedy to improve low-performing public schools.
Now the two movements are no longer separate. They have merged and are acting in concert. Many of the original sponsors of NCLB might not have intended to encourage the privatization of the nation’s public schools, but that has been its outcome. Supporters and critics of the law may argue about whether it has produced higher scores and whether the scores represent anything other than intense test preparation and rote learning. But no one thinks that the law was a success other than the handful of people who designed it. Even supporters of the law recognize that it is so unpopular that it should be “rebranded.” The fact that the nation remains gripped by increasingly shrill and increasingly radical demands for “reform” indicates how little NCLB accomplished.
With the distance of nearly a dozen years, we can see the damage done by NCLB to the nation’s educational system. Race to the Top actually doubled down on the wrongheaded assumptions of NCLB and further promoted its demoralizing and punitive policies. The practice of closing schools because of low test scores has become routine, barely getting notice in the media; before the year 2000, it was a rare occurrence. In the past, those in charge of school systems were expected to fix troubled schools, not shut them down.
NCLB centralized control of public education in Washington to an extent that was unimaginable when the U.S. Department of Education was established in 1979. When Congress debated whether to create a cabinet-level department of education, opponents warned that the mere fact of having a department would lead to federal control of education, but its proponents insisted this would never happen and federalism—a calibrated balance among federal, state, and local governments—would always prevail. Today, however, thanks to the philosophical and political alignment of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, federalism has been all but abandoned. The Department of Education now routinely imposes its preferred reforms on states and districts, using the bait of billions of federal dollars to win supposedly “voluntary” assent to its decrees.
The Common Core State Standards are an example of the Department of Education’s muscular use of federal funds to push a policy on the states that may or may not be wise. Nonfederal organizations led the effort to develop the standards over an eighteen-month period, although it was well understood by all concerned that these groups (the National Governors Association and Achieve) had the strong support of the U.S. Department of Education and heavy funding from the Gates Foundation. When the Obama administration put forward the criteria for Race to the Top grants, one of the primary requirements was that the state adopt a common set of high-quality standards, in collaboration with other states, that were internationally benchmarked and led to “college and career readiness.”1 These were widely understood to be the Common Core standards. In short order, almost every state agreed to adopt them, even states with clearly superior standards like Massachusetts and Indiana, despite the fact that these new standards had never been field-tested anywhere. No one can say with certainty whether the Common Core standards will improve education, whether they will reduce or increase the achievement gaps among different groups, or how much it will cost to implement them. Some scholars believe they will make no difference, and some critics say they will cost billions to implement; others say they will lead to more testing. But the pressure by the federal government to adopt these standards was intense, and many states adopted the standards even though they won no Race to the Top money. The states wanted to be eligible for the money that was on offer, not recognizing that the federal funds could be used only for the purposes approved by the federal government, not to plug holes in the state budget.
NCLB created the unrealistic expectation that all students should be proficient, as judged by state tests, and Race to the Top built on that assumption—while encouraging a shift to “value-added” measures to rate schools and teachers. Secretary Arne Duncan allowed states to get waivers from the goal that all students should be proficient but replaced it with an equally unrealistic measure: that students must improve their test scores every year. If they don’t, then someone must be “held accountable.” Someone must be blamed and punished. Heads must roll. No consideration would be given to the possibility that test scores may not go up every year, often for reasons beyond teachers’ control. Some students will not be proficient on the standardized tests no matter how hard they try, no matter how talented their teachers or how dedicated their principal. Some students will be distracted by crises in their lives; some will lack motivation or interest; some will inevitably land in the bottom half of the bell curve because the bell curve always has a bottom half. There is no way that schools and their staffs can control for all the external factors that contribute to test results.
NCLB created—and Race to the Top sustained—the unwarranted belief that standardized tests are an accurate, scientific gauge of educational achievement. They are not. They provide information about whether students on one particular day answered particular questions in the way the test makers decided was correct, which may or may not be useful to the teacher in assessing what students know and can do, let alone provide help in addressing deficiencies. Often the test results arrive too late to be helpful to the teacher in addressing the needs of students. Different tests in the same subject, or even the same test on different days, often yield different results. The test scores provide a way to rank children, but the labeling in and of itself serves no valid educational purpose. The tests do not measure the many dimensions of intelligence, judgment, creativity, and character that may be even more consequential for the student’s future than his or her test score.
NCLB validated the patently false narrative that American education was failing. Year after year, the number of “failing schools” increased in every state as more and more schools failed to meet the unreachable goal of 100 percent proficiency that NCLB demanded. Race to the Top and the Obama administration’s associated School Improvement Grants program imposed harsh penalties on schools that may indeed be struggling, due to serving at-risk students in overcrowded conditions with scarce resources, by sentencing them to additional chaos, disruption, and, in some cases, closure.
Together, these federal programs have fueled and accelerated the privatization movement. The constant barrage of bad news, based on unrealistic goals, was used to justify hostile takeovers, profiteering, mass layoffs, and a death sentence for too many schools, in an effort to convince the public that this was the only way to address low achievement. The stories of escalating failure acted as a sort of “shock doctrine” that made almost any remedy seem palatable. The promoters of privatization promised miracles that would shame snake-oil salesmen. Their remedies, they claimed, would produce a dramatic increase in test scores and graduation rates. The media, always suckers for “miracle” claims, retailed stories of charter schools or so-called turnaround schools where everyone succeeded, without bothering to examine even the most obvious evidence suggesting exclusionary policies, expulsions, or attrition rates.
The charter movement paved the way for the resurgence of the voucher movement, as its advocates insisted that “choice” was far more important than investing in public education. This was precisely what the far-right wing of the Republican Party had been saying for decades, without winning public support. When the evidence for the superiority of charter schools or voucher schools was scant, shaky, or even nonexistent, the champions of the free market insisted that choice itself was an important value. They held that as long as parents chose to send their children to schools that taught creationism or that global warming was a hoax, their choices should be respected, over the time-honored value of public responsibility for a well-run system of public education.
The free-market reform movement had more than federal mandates on its side. It had big money. The billions dangled before cash-hungry states by Obama’s Race to the Top made states compete to accept market-based, test-driven policies. The nation’s largest foundations—Walton, Broad, Gates, and dozens of others—used their billions as well to reinforce the free-market agenda, subsidizing the operations of schools and districts that implemented privatization and high-stakes testing, hired their favored administrators, and put in place the policies they favored. They funded think tanks in Washington, D.C., to put out reports and host conferences, spinning the benefits of such programs, despite the lack of any solid research evidence. The privateers produced slick movies to disseminate their message and found willing supporters in the mass media, such as NBC’s annual “Education Nation” program.
Though the partisans of choice and privatization may have political power and money, their cause lacks one crucial ingredient: it does not have a popular base. Its proponents, most of them extremely wealthy, number in the thousands, yet they aim to control the fate of a national school system with many millions of students, parents, and teachers. To overcome this significant handicap, the corporate reform movement has used the vast wealth of its members to contribute to political campaigns to elect its allies to state and local offices and to pass referenda on behalf of privatization. A small number of billionaires have poured millions of dollars into political campaigns across the nation, using the positive rhetoric of “reform” and images of happy children in neat uniforms to advance their agenda. And always, the reformers speak of “putting children first,” “students first,” “kids come first,” as though the teachers and principals were only concerned with their own selfish interests, and only the reformers really care about the children. Such rhetoric is divisive and hollow, because parents know that most teachers work hard every day and do their best to help their children learn. The horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 dented that absurd image, at least temporarily, and reminded the public that educators are willing to die for their students, as several did on that terrible day.
Across the nation, in state after state, and in city after city, parents and community leaders are beginning to realize that education policy has been hijacked. They are starting to organize against high-stakes testing and privatization. Parent organizations, educators, students, and local school boards are rebelling against the amount of time given over to prepare children for the tests and the resulting loss of time for the arts and other programs. As more of the public understands that charter schools do not produce miracles, their luster will fade; one hopes that only those that are truly devoted to the local community will survive. As more stories appear about corruption and self-dealing by charter operators, the public will realize the risks of deregulation. As more journalists ask questions about attrition rates and low numbers of students with special needs and English-language learners, their mystique will dissolve. The public is beginning to understand, to see the pattern on the rug, and to realize that they are being fooled into giving up what belongs to them.
In the fall of 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took action against the agenda of the privatization movement. More than 90 percent of the union’s members voted to strike a school system run by the Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who had served as President Obama’s chief of staff. The union was striking not for more money but for improvements in the schools for their students. The city’s public schools had been a playground for corporate reform for nearly twenty years, accomplishing little. The reformers placed their bets on closing schools and opening schools but paid little attention to deteriorating conditions within the schools, intense segregation within the school system, and gang violence that took the lives of many adolescents. Many public schools had no libraries, no art or music teachers, no social workers, and overcrowded classes. The CTU decided enough is enough. The union won some concessions from the mayor, and it shone a bright light on the essentially elitist indifference of the mayor, his school board, and by implication the Obama administration. But the CTU’s main victory was the example of unity and militancy that it offered to dispirited educators across the nation.
However, the CTU was unable to dissuade the mayor from his plan to close scores of public schools. Rahm Emanuel, like Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and other proponents of privatization, continued to be wedded to the belief that the private sector has a “secret sauce” (Emanuel’s term) for school success, not realizing (or pretending not to realize) that the great results he admired were usually obtained by skimming the students they want and exclusion, attrition, and expulsion of those they don’t want. More of this “secret sauce,” and the nation’s cities will be left with a dual school system of haves and have-nots, reinforcing the structural inequalities of American society, leaving many children not only behind but hopeless, and destroying public education in the bargain.
In time, perhaps, legislators will demand proper oversight of charters so that they are expected to collaborate with the public schools, so they take a fair share of the neediest students, and so their finances are transparent. If charters could be freed from corporate control and freed from the profit motive, if they became stand-alone, community-based organizations that meet the needs of the community, they might yet become a useful part of the landscape of public education.
The overwhelming majority of the American public were themselves educated in public schools and, once informed, will not readily hand these valuable public assets over to entrepreneurs, profit-making organizations, or well-intentioned amateurs. They want better neighborhood public schools, not chain-store schools that pick and choose their students. Despite the grandiose promises made by charter corporations and their political allies, the public is awakening to the threat posed by privatization.
The corporate reform movement has capitalized on the American public’s infatuation with consumerism. Consumerism is as American as apple pie. People shop for their shoes and their jeans and their homes, say reformers, why not shop for their children’s schools? Competition may produce better shoes and jeans, but there is no evidence that it produces better schools.
The advance of privatization depends on high-stakes testing. The federally mandated regime of annual testing generates the data to grade not only students and teachers but schools. Given unrealistic goals, a school can easily fail. When a school is labeled a “failing school” under NCLB or a “priority” or “focus” school according to the metrics of the Obama administration’s program, it must double down on test preparation to attempt to recover its reputation, but the odds of success are small, especially after the most ambitious parents and students flee the school. The federal regulations are like quicksand: the more schools struggle, the deeper they sink into the morass of test-based accountability. As worried families abandon these schools, they increasingly enroll disproportionate numbers of the most disadvantaged students, either children with special needs or new immigrants who can barely speak English. Low grades on the state report card may send a once-beloved school into a death spiral. What was once a source of stability in the community becomes a school populated by those who are least able to find a school that will accept them.
Once the quality of the neighborhood school begins to fall, parents will be willing to consider charter schools, online schools, brand-new schools with catchy, make-believe names, like the Scholars Academy for Academic Excellence or the School for Future Leaders of Business and Industry. In time, the neighborhood school becomes the school of last resort, not the community school. When the neighborhood school is finally closed, there is no longer any choice. Then parents will be forced to travel long distances and hope that their children will be accepted into a school; the school chooses, not the student.
Does it matter?
Yes, it does.
Public education is an essential part of the democratic fabric of American society. Nearly 90 percent of American students attend public schools, whose doors are open to all, without regard to race, ethnicity, language, gender, disability status, national origin, or economic class. Control of public education is democratic, subject to decisions made by elected or appointed officials, rather than by private boards and for-profit corporations. Community schools are controlled by residents of the community, not by corporate chains. In 95 percent of the school districts in the United States, if the public does not like the decisions of their school boards, they can vote them out of office.
The goal of our public educational system, evolved over many decades, is equality of opportunity. Have we met our goal? Absolutely not. But choice will not bring us any closer. Choice does not produce equality; choice exacerbates inequality, as a free market produces winners and losers. Choice intensifies racial and ethnic segregation, as well as segregation by class. Both choice and high-stakes testing erode equity by encouraging self-segregation and by ranking that reifies socioeconomic status.
Liberals should be at the forefront of the effort to defend public education, because public education has been a force for social and intellectual progress, a force to achieve a more just society. Liberals should understand that the public schools are an integral part of the commons that belong to us all and should oppose any efforts to give them away to entrepreneurs.
Conservatives should be at the forefront of the effort to oppose privatization because the public school is a source of community, stability, and local values. Conservatives do not tear down established institutions and hand them over to the vagaries of the free market or the whims of financial and political elites. Conservatives do not destroy communities. What we are witnessing today is the Walmartization of American education, an effort to uproot neighborhood schools and Main Street businesses and outsource their management to chain schools and chain stores run by anonymous corporations. If they do not make their bottom line, they may pull up their stakes and abandon the community, leaving it bereft, as many chain stores and charter chains have already done. Conservatives protect their community and its institutions. There is nothing conservative about the chain-store mentality that is now being introduced into the control of schooling.
Ours is a diverse nation that respects the choices that people make about their children’s education. We respect the right of parents to send their children to private and religious schools. We respect the right of families to homeschool their children. Yet more than a century ago, our nation decided to separate church and state, to restrict the allocation of public funds to public schools, and to keep religious doctrine out of public school classrooms. The public schools became the schools where children of all religions and no religion could learn together. Those who wanted a religious education for their children were free to seek it elsewhere, at their own expense. Catholic education has been especially valuable for the families and children it serves; the best way to maintain Catholic schools is to keep them independent. Where public funding goes, public accountability must follow. Here is a principle that might be useful in our present debates: public money for public schools; private money for nonpublic schools. If Catholic and other religious schools received even half of the munificent private philanthropy now directed to charter schools, they would have the financial stability they require to continue their mission for many decades into the future. Meanwhile, the principle of separation of church and state that has served our nation well would remain intact.
Why do we have public schools? In the early decades of the nineteenth century, most children were schooled at home by their parents, by tutors if their parents could afford it, in private academies, or in church schools. The children of the poor were schooled, if they were lucky, by charitable and religious organizations. As communities grew, parents and concerned citizens realized that educating children was a shared public responsibility, not a private one. The private, religious, and charitable schools were largely replaced by public schools, paid for with taxes raised by the entire community. For many years, the public schools were known as common schools, because they were part of the public commons. Like parks, libraries, roads, and the police, they were institutions that belonged to the whole people. Some people complained that they didn’t want to pay taxes for other people’s children either because their own children were in private school or because they had no children. But most people understood that paying for the education of the community’s children was a civic duty, an investment in the future, in citizens who would grow up and become voters and take their place in society.
Public education has enlarged our democracy since the mid-nineteenth century. It was the public schools that assimilated millions of immigrant children from Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by teaching them how to speak English and how to participate in American democracy. The public schools were the immigrants’ ladder of social and economic mobility into the middle class. The Brown decision of 1954 ended the rigid, legally mandated segregation of public schools in the South, a historic change that eventually desegregrated not only schools but other public institutions, and eventually most of American society. The integration of large numbers of African Americans into the middle class began in the public schools. Similarly, the public schools were the first major public institution to insist upon gender equality in American society. At the same time, the public schools opened their classrooms to students with disabilities of all kinds, which paved the way for their integration into other sectors of our society.
None of these advances happened without court orders and legislation, but no other institution could have done it except the public schools. A century ago, John Dewey explained the connection between democracy and education. He wrote:
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.2
What Dewey taught us, which we have spent the past century trying to incorporate into our way of life, is that democracy is more than the institutional arrangements for governing and voting. It requires that decisions be made with the involvement and participation of those who are affected by them. Democracy functions most effectively when people from different backgrounds interact, communicate their interests, and participate in shaping the purposes by which they live. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln put it best when he described American democracy as that “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
More than any other institution in American life, the public schools have broken down the barriers of class, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, language, and disability status that separate people. They have not eliminated those divisions, but they have enabled people from different walks of life to learn from one another, to study together, play together, plan together, and recognize their common humanity. More than any other institution in our society, the public schools enable the rising generation to exchange ideas, to debate, to disagree, and to take into account the views of others in making decisions.
Over time, as the public schools opened their doors to all, they expanded opportunity to more people, distributed the benefits of knowledge to more people, and strengthened our nation. Public education has been an American melting pot, an American salad bowl, an American orchestra, an American mosaic. The public schools have taught us how to be one society, not a collection of separate enclaves, divided by race, language, and culture. They have contributed directly to the growth of a large middle class and a dynamic society. Our nation’s public schools have been a mighty engine of opportunity and equality. They still are.
But no matter how much we improve our public schools, they alone cannot solve the deeply rooted, systemic problems of our society. Federal, state, and municipal policies have isolated many children, especially in urban districts, into schools that are segregated by race, class, and income. Many of our public schools have also been badly underfunded and regularly pummeled by budget cuts, rising class sizes, and damaging mandates that have undermined their mission. The inevitable result of such segregation and underfunding is low academic performance, which is then blamed on the schools. The failure of public policy is not the failure of the public schools. The challenge to our society today is to repair public policy and to give our public schools the care and support they need to thrive, in all communities and for all children, rather than abandon them to the idiosyncrasies of the free market.
Our communities created public schools to develop citizens and to sustain our democracy. That is their abiding purpose. This unique institution has the unique responsibility of developing a citizenry, making many peoples into one people, and teaching our children the skills they need to prepare for work and further education.
The public schools have made real the promise of e pluribus unum, without sacrificing either the pluribus or the unum.
When public education is in danger, democracy is jeopardized.
We cannot afford that risk.
The way forward requires that education policy be shaped by evidence and by the knowledge and wisdom of educators, not by a business plan shaped by free-market ideologues and entrepreneurs.
We must take care not to reestablish a dual school system, with privately managed charters for the most motivated, most able students and public schools as the repositories for those unable to get into the charter system. We must take care to avoid a future in which the rich have small classes with teachers, while the poor are taught by computers.
If we take seriously the charge to improve education, we must improve both schools and social conditions for children and families. To reduce the achievement gap, we must reduce the opportunity gap. We must invest in early childhood education and make sure that all children have the medical care they need.
If we mean to lift the quality of education, we should insist that all children have a full curriculum, including history, civics, literature, foreign languages, physical education, mathematics, and science. We should make sure that every child has the chance to sing, dance, write, act, play instruments, sculpt, design, and build. Students need a reason to come to school, not as duty, but for the joy that comes from performance and imagination.
If we truly care about the welfare of the most vulnerable children in our society, we will turn our efforts to reducing segregation and poverty. These are the root causes of poor academic performance. We must lower the child poverty rate. It is a national scandal. Other nations have figured out how to protect the well-being of children and families, and we have not. It’s time to get to work on policies and programs that address root causes.
Only well-qualified, well-prepared teachers should be hired to work in our schools. We must stop giving them orders and scripts and let them teach. In turn, teachers need to be evaluated by human beings, including their principals and their peers, rather than computer-driven metrics.
Yes, we must improve our schools. Start now; start here, by building the bonds of trust among schools and communities. The essential mission of the public schools is not merely to prepare workers for the global workforce but to prepare citizens with the minds, hearts, and characters to sustain our democracy into the future.
Genuine school reform must be built on hope, not fear; on encouragement, not threats; on inspiration, not compulsion; on trust, not carrots and sticks; on belief in the dignity of the human person, not a slavish devotion to data; on support and mutual respect, not a regime of punishment and blame. To be lasting, school reform must rely on collaboration and teamwork among students, parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and local communities.
Despite its faults, the American system of democratically controlled schools has been the mainstay of our communities and the foundation for our nation’s success. We must work together to improve our public schools. We must extend the promise of equal educational opportunity to all the children of our nation. Protecting our public schools against privatization and saving them for future generations of American children is the civil rights issue of our time.