How to Destroy Public Education

Spend decades slashing social programs and sabotaging civil rights programs such as integrated housing and education to ensure that poor people in poor neighborhoods never have a chance to climb out of poverty, thus ensuring that their poverty-entrenching schools stay overcrowded and starved of resources.

Then point - with a finger quivering with righteous indignation - at the schools that fail because they are trying to teach poor children in poor neighborhoods without a fraction of the state and federal money that flows to rich children in rich neighborhoods - and demand such horrible schools be closed down forthwith.

Not given even the bare minimum of money necessary to function. Not supported with economic justice programs that reduce the neighborhood poverty that so harms the schools. Not rejuvenated with forced integration that brings wealthy students to the neighborhood and sends impoverished students to successful schools.

No, just closed down. Teachers and staff fired. Buildings left to rot. Students shuffled off to phony "charter" schools that will serve them no better - and probably worse - than their old school, but at least some corporate whore will be getting rich off tax dollars.

Linda Darling-Hammond at The Nation:

Now comes the federal government to announce that such schools — where students score lower on tests than in more advantaged communities — should be labeled as failing and threatened with closure or staff firings. This makes educational redlining official. The federal share of less than 10 percent of school budgets is a tiny drop in the bucket, and far from enough to tip the scales that are so dramatically out of balance. Not only is there no plan in federal law to tackle poverty, segregation or the massive state and local underfunding of these schools; the plans embodied in Senate ESEA proposals are likely to undermine these communities even further.

Today, NCLB—and plans to replace it—deliver primarily on the promise of more tests and sanctions. New proposals would focus the law’s punishments even more pointedly on schools in high-need communities and on educators who are willing to serve in these schools, where they earn lower salaries, teach larger classes, deal with more stress and spend longer hours than those who work in more affluent schools. This passes for accountability in America. It is also a recipe for educational redlining.

The test-and-punish approach to school reform has already made it more difficult for schools labeled as failing to attract and retain well-qualified educators—thus, ironically, reducing the quality of education for students still further. Rather than increasing the incentives and supports for teaching in high-need schools, recent federal policy has encouraged states to lower standards for prospective teachers, despite evidence that doing so increases teacher attrition and reduces student achievement. Blaming teachers for the ills of high-need schools lets policy-makers off the hook and keeps the more fundamental problems of severe poverty, a tattered safety net and inequitable funding under the rug.

Instead of making long-term investments in these communities, the strategies promoted in Race to the Top and the current proposals for ESEA will cordon off “failing” public schools and seek to close, replace or reconstitute them, or use them to experiment with high-risk reforms like for-profit educational management firms.

SNIP

Excluding low-scoring students from public schools gets scores up, but it expands the school-to-prison pipeline, which has quadrupled over the past thirty years, along with corrections costs, which now threaten to devour funds that should be spent on education. Most inmates are functionally illiterate and high school dropouts. In a devil’s bargain, the public spends as much as $50,000 a year to incarcerate young men on whom it would not spend $10,000 a year for a decent education.

The truth is that the competitive market approach leaves the most vulnerable children behind. It is impossible to punish schools that are struggling without punishing the children they serve. When schools are closed, it is the students and families who suffer the chaos and confusion. And if teaching and leadership positions in high-need communities become even more unappealing as a result of such policies, educators with options will be even less willing to come to or stay in these schools, leaving students and their schools with an even more inexperienced and transient teaching force. This is not a strategy that promises great wins for these students or for the nation.

There are alternatives that work. Find them here.