Bob Unger gets a lot of it right in his essay on education (“Our nation has lost its edge”) in Sunday’s Opinion page. He asks what has changed from the decades of relatively good public education in the Fifties and Sixties, and concludes that it is the loss of a national mission toward excellence in education. However, Mr. Unger’s prescription for thousands of fresh-faced Harvard and Yale grads dedicating themselves to teaching is a little too “Hollywood” for my taste. Haven’t we seen Hillary Swank in “Freedom Writers”, or any number of movies in which a single, caring teacher turns around the lives of students in an uncaring institution? It’s the teacher version of “High Noon”.

Teachers alone, even a legion of them, cannot pull us out of the educational gutter we have thrown ourselves in. Our failures in education are less the result of single working moms and penurious taxpayers, and more the result of a general devaluation of education and literacy, as well as poor choices and self-delusion.

Our poor choices are reflected in the piles of money we throw at education without understanding the value we receive in return. Large proportions of educational budgets are spent on children with severe injuries and medical conditions who are housed in special care facilities where they receive medical, not educational, services. We pour money into acres and acres of football and soccer facilities sited on costly pieces of real estate. We are obliged by federal law to build computer labs with a certain number of workstations per student where, often without regard for how these resources should be used, children can Twitter and plagiarize from online versions of books that have long since disappeared from the stacks of libraries.

We delude ourselves by thinking our children can compete with those from other nations when they attend school 60 to 90 fewer days a year. Taxpayers and the school boards they elect delude themselves by thinking they can compete while they cut AP and enrichment programs, the arts, school days, school weeks, and even school years. Communities delude themselves by thinking that the little bumps in standardized test scores are really measures of success. While they read their Excel spreadsheets looking at financial tea leaves, qualitatively the schools continue their decline because the primary mission of education has long been abandoned to Quality Assurance metrics and proper business management techniques. The parents think that the experts have everything under control. The politicians have better things than education to fund, such as wars. And the students themselves, not easily deceived, know quite well that they are being cheated, scammed, and relegated to second-rate futures.

Add to this the general abandonment of a social contract which should commit us to the care of the next generation’s future, as we benefitted from the care of a previous generation, and you have all the ingredients for educational decline.

Don’t expect a first year teacher to fix it.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 29, 2009
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20090429/opinion/904290314