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Education reform: Rounding up the usual solutions

Ohanian Comment: This fine op ed addresses the lack of will to address the real problem: the broken physical and social infrastructures. We should follow Triggle's lead and get this messages into our local papers across the country. We must insist that our corporate politicos stop fiddling with schools and address the real problems, our broken physical and social infrastructures.

Here in Vermont, a slate of candidates is running to replace every existing member of the Vermont legislature. Others should go forth and do likewise. We must demand local control.

By David Triggle

As concern over the quality and competitiveness of American elementary education receives renewed attention, the usual solutions come from the usual suspects. These include privatizing schools, more charter schools, closing "non-performing" schools, more standardized testing, abolishing tenure, firing "bad" teachers, evaluating teachers on the basis of student test scores and vouchers for everyone. Alone they will fail.

They will fail because none addresses the underlying problems in American society--the broken physical and social infrastructures and the lack of will and now resources to remedy them. Over the past several decades we have dug a very large financial hole. Repair of our physical infrastructure alone will demand in excess of $2 trillion. To remedy our decayed social infrastructure will require far more.

We have currently the greatest level of social inequality since the early 20th century. We have more than 20 percent of children living below the official poverty level, a minimum wage that cannot support individuals and almost 40 million people receiving food stamps with a significant number representing this as their only income. We have the largest prison population in the world, with almost 1 percent of adults in jail, and we have almost 50 million Americans without health insurance. More than 4 million homes have been lost already to foreclosure and 15 million are under water. All of these factors contribute to family dysfunction and the highest level of poverty of any nation in the developed world. Absent change, the situation will worsen.

That inequality and poverty affect educational achievement is scarcely a novel finding, having been explicitly recognized more than 40 years ago in the Coleman report and in many subsequent findings in the United States and elsewhere. Repairing school buildings, removing incompetent teachers and having real nationwide standards are important goals, but are not in themselves sufficient. And privatization and charter schools are simply mechanisms for increasing social inequality.

What is needed to fix the problem? Recognition that this will take decades, with reordered national priorities and significant public money. We need genuine universal health care, a minimum wage that can actually support people, affordable child care and paid family leave, increased investment in affordable housing, the revitalization of our urban centers and an energy-smart transportation infrastructure. The cost? Trillions over the next 30 years.

Can we change? Only with great difficulty. Our money has gone. The financial rescue, the war on drugs and overseas wars each cost trillions of dollars and the annual defense budget approaches $1 trillion. Maintaining those priorities makes change impossible and further societal and educational failure becomes inevitable.

David Triggle is a SUNY distinguished professor at the University at Buffalo, where he teaches ethics and science and public policy.

— David Triggle
Buffalo News
2010-01-31
http://www.buffalonews.com/opinion/anothervoice/story/941174.html

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