The Decline of Education in the Corporate Empire

I recently read The Decline Of Education In California by Sarah Knopp, a chapter in California Under Corporate Rule (Peter Miguel Camejo). As a treatise on the state of our education system it’s thought provoking but horribly dismaying. Education has been on a decline throughout the United States since the 1970’s and it’s not stopping. If anything, its accelerating at a tragic pace, fed by our current administration’s greedy goals that are taking us down a path to Imperial America or — even worse — a Corporate Empire where we’ll be living in corporate-states ruled by pathological competitive business goals.

President Bush touts No Child Left Behind (referred to here as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or ESEA) as education “reform.” The law threatens to strip federal educational funding, amounting to about 7 percent of total education funding, from schools that don’t meet testing criteria. By the year 2014, schools will have to have 100 percent of their students pass standardized tests or risk losing their funding. This is widely acknowledged by educators to be impossible given the current conditions in schools. The sanctions imposed on the schools that don’t meet the tests’ criteria will hurt poor children the most. (Conveniently for Bush, though, these poor kids are still given “options”; under ESEA, students’ names and contact information are automatically turned over to the military for recruitment purposes.)
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In the schools in danger of failing, though, there is enormous pressure to adopt drill-and-kill, teach-only-the-test methods. Four-year-olds are now being given standardized tests in the federal Head Start program. In many schools, recess, art, music, nap time, and even science and social studies classes have been cut to provide more time for drilling fundamentals.

Is it any wonder that these tactics focus heavily on memorization and obedience? The mere regurgitation of basic facts, learned by rote and executed without any trace of creativity or thought? Sounds a bit like the military or — perhaps more to the point — an ideal corporate cog ready and willing to do the company’s bidding and not ask questions.

This is not an accident. In his book Kozol reports a conversation with a fifteen-year-old student named Isabel, who says, “It’s like we’re being hidden… It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it where they don’t need to think of it again.”

Please, think about it — and do something. Start by picking up this short book and learn more about what a mistake privatization would be, and how solutions being offered by politicians — testing and accountability, vouchers, and charter schools — are ineffective, fake reform. Vote for legislation that really supports improving our education system, both locally in California and across the country:

  • Increase school funding! Do it by taxing corporations and by making sure that Californians spend at least as much of their personal income on public schools as does the rest of the nation.
  • Provide extra funding for schools to voluntarily desegregate. These programs are so popular in St. Louis and Milwaukee that they have five applicants for every space in the program.
  • Increase funding for programs that strive not only to close the achievement gap between English-language learners and their native English-speaking counterparts, and also programs that reach all young children in more than one language.
  • Stop the testing and accountability craze. These programs waste weeks of valuable educational time. The tests focus on promoting a corporate age agenda. The single biggest predictor of how a school will score on the tests is the income and educational level of the parents of children in the schools. Of course we need to evaluate our students, but these evaluations need to be more comprehensive than multiple-choice tests that focus on fundamentals.
  • Do not privatize public education. Provide all children with quality education.
  • Politicians talk about “getting rid of bad teachers.” The real problem is how to attract and keep talented teachers. When adjusted for the cost of living, teacher salaries in California average $38,845, last among the five biggest states and thirty-second in the nation. That’s a sad place to be for the richest state in the country.
  • We need more college counseling and less military recruiting in our schools.