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the general problem with public education is that funding levels are tied to local taxes--property taxes--and so are the exact mirror of the economic/class situation of the community in which they are located.
american is a brutally stratified class society---all the more so because so much of the political discourse is geared toward pretending it is not. among the victims of this stratification, and of the delusions that enable people to imagine it does not exist, are students in schools located in poorer communities.
the idea that there is a difference between the outcomes in public schools in wealthy communities and private schools is false:
i teach at a university--this is the third---and i have been doing it for 10 years: i have seen no appreciable difference between the students who come from the two.
then the problem cannot be the teachers union.
there might be other reasons to dislike the teachers union--but the claim that links it to lower quality educational outcomes seems to me false. i have looked at the "data" on this matter, and what seems to underpin it is an attempt to avoid the problems of economic class and find another way to not address the problems it creates.
personally, i think that the right hates the teachers union because it supports democrats. i dont think there is anything else to it.
if at any point there had been a serious effort to level funding to education across localities--by state or by federal mandate---that is to create the possibility of a "level playing field" for students, then maybe the arguments above about "throwing money" at education would be less laughable--but as such an effort had not been made, they mean and say nothing.
one more note:
bush's obsession with standardized testing is absurd--the claim that because there is more standarized testing that somehow education is being improved is also absurd. there are lots of problems. i will relate one example regarding the sats.
when i taught somewhere in california, not far from sf, a little south, i polled my classes one year to see how many of the students had taken a kaplan course or equivalent private test-prep thing. the sample was about 300 students. 95% had taken one. the average cost of these courses is easy enough to figure out.
the moral of the story: if your family has the cash, you can buy access to a better score.
in this context, standardized testing is little more than yet another mechanism that enables people to pretend that class does not matter. they feature pseudo-objective standards with a back-door pay-to-really-play system.
this combination of pseudo-objectivity with a back channel to promote the status of the economic elite seems the perfect symbol of the right's educational policies.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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