U.S. education reform: let’s talk race & class

Americans constantly worry about public education. There is a mantra that we keep repeating: “Our Schools Are Failing!” But have our schools, in fact, failed? And if so, who or what is really to blame?

President Obama plans to reform the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. George W. Bush’s signature educational legislation, NCLB intended to improve test scores and school accountability. It federalized educational standards and expanded the nation’s education budget.

Like most Bush policies, No Child Left Behind was poorly thought out and detrimental to the poor. It focused on standardized testing rather than learning. It penalized poor schools with high dropout rates rather than look at the deeper reasons for these educational failings. It allowed states to refuse to give exams in languages other than English, punishing schools with high immigrant populations. Schools who did not measure up to improved test scores could lose their federal funding.

Since NCLB failed to work, Americans have looked for a scapegoat. The popular victims have become teachers. Recently, a Rhode Island school district fired every single teacher in a failing school. Politicians on the national, state, and local level believe in holding teachers directly accountable for student progress. Blaming teachers is easy. It gives us someone to point to rather than ourselves, even if teachers do their best to educate our children.

Teacher unions have especially come under attack. Teachers unions’ effectiveness in protecting their members has outraged conservatives. Like during most attacks on labor rights, conservatives use the most egregious cases of teacher incompetence to attack the entire existence of teacher unions.

What Republicans really want is to eviscerate the unions, promote taxpayer funded religious schools, and bring in corporations to run public schools. Given corporate mismanagement of the economy, this is a recipe for disaster.

Do our schools have some bad teachers? Sure. But the average teacher uses every strategy possible to help students learn. They mentor students outside of class, coach them in after school sports, and try to reach them within the classroom.

I went to a poorly funded high school in a white working-class Oregon logging town. I had some terrible teachers who went through the motions. But I also had wonderful ones, including a couple that set me on the path to becoming a historian. I am forever grateful to them.

Thanks to good teachers, American schools are not failing any more than they ever have. The nation’s education system has always reflected political trends and entrenched inequality. The poor and people of color have always received substandard education. That continues today. Most of the supposedly failing schools are in poor neighborhoods, serving traditionally underrepresented communities.

Throughout the 20th century, African-Americans and other historically marginalized groups moved to northern and western cities to create a better life for themselves and their children. They hoped their children would receive better education than they did. For a time, mixed race student bodies became common.

But northern whites did not want to live next to African-Americans. Tensions in these racially mixed schools led to fights. Riots in Detroit, Chicago, and other northern cities during World War II displayed American racism for the world to see. Whites fled to the suburbs after World War II. Their tax dollars went with them, leaving impoverished, African-American dominated inner cities without the means to fund decent schools.

By the 1960s, African-Americans had become increasingly desperate over the lack of education, employment, and social services in the cities. Police violence contributed to this general frustration and led to the riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and many other cities in that decade.

White flight has caused our current education problems. Rather than blame teachers, we should recognize this problem as reflective of the massive racial and class divides in the United States. We refused to deal with these problems in the 1960s, and we continue to ignore them today.

Unfortunately, President Obama’s educational reforms, while improving on No Child Left Behind, do not deal with the root causes of educational problems. Inherent race and class prejudice is not being addressed.

Obama supports eliminating the penalization of the lowest performing schools and focusing on a longer-term measurement of school improvement over time. However, he still supports standardized testing and punishing teachers of low-performing students.
Obama also defended the firing of the Rhode Island teachers, which is little more than cheap political rhetoric.

Why would a young teacher take a job in such a school if they might get fired? How would that help their career? How does punishing all the teachers in a school help solve any problems? Who will take their place? These questions remain unanswered.

The nation does need to revolutionize its education system. Obama’s reforms are a useful start, but they are only a drop in the bucket. We need to centralize American schools under federal rather than state and local control, dividing money equally among all students rather than privileging those from wealthy backgrounds.

We will have to raise taxes to pay for better teacher salaries. If we want great teachers, we need to pay them. We must make the profession appealing for the nation’s smartest people. We have to recognize that taxes have benefits. If we want good education, it will cost us.

We also must realize that teachers cannot create educated children by themselves. Teachers play a positive role in children’s lives, but they cannot overcome a bad home environment, a lack of employment, or a paucity of after-school activities. We also need to raise taxes to finish Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Poverty combined with racism creates conditions that make it very difficult for children to learn. Fighting poverty is fighting for our children’s future.

Society, not schools and teachers, have failed our students. Standardized testing, firing teachers, and tinkering with reforms will not solve these problems. A solution must include fighting poverty and raising taxes. Nothing else will do.