The Same Old Song

Some folks have been making the same complaints about public education for decades. It's intriguing every now and then to open a time capsule and see what complaints have changed--or not.

Here's a thirty year old piece, published on the Foundation for Economic Education website in 1993. FEE was founded in 1946, one of the first modern thinky tank and firmly rooted in Libertarian ideas. Plenty of Koch money. 

The piece is by John Hood. Hood was a former president of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina right wing thinky tank, with ties to Koch money, Bradley money, and Art Pope, who provides most of the money for the group. Pope is a former head of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch outfit that helped juice up the Tea Party, chair of the Bradley Foundation and just generally pulling lots of strings in NC. He made his money running Variety Wholesalers, Inc.

Pope used the John Locke Foundation to set up the John William Pope Foundation, which funnels more money to more conservative groups. It has ties to all of that same money as well as the State Policy Network, the network of right-wing thinky tanks and pressure groups. John Hood was president of that foundation back in '93. 

Like all of the groups in the SPN/Koch orbit, the stated interest is not "better education for all" but "Individual Freedom" and "Personal Responsibility" and "self-reliance" (because if You People would be more self-reliant, you wouldn't keep trying to tax me). It's important to remember this because this is the lens through which they view education issues. And always have. If your neighbor is constantly writing op-eds about expanding his back yard and posting blog stuff about expanding his back yard and giving money to people who might help him expand his back yard, then when he suddenly wants the city to pass a new ordinance about fencing that would just coincidentally require all his neighbors to get rid of their fences, it does not take a brain scientist to sense that he's up to something.

What's remarkable about Hood's piece is that you'd have to check the posting date to realize that it's thirty years old. Here are his arguments.

*One of the big problems in education is that people don't focus enough on results instead of the process of education.

The words outputs and deliverables and inputs weren't around education yet, but the idea is the same. Let's just talk about measurable outcomes and stop talking about resources and the educational journey.

*Building on that, Hood complains that we don't hold the "government-controlled school system" accountable. Not since World War II. "Public education is itself a failure."

Hood offers no evidence. Just going to assert it.

*A lot of reform ideas tried involved "almost comical misdiagnoses" and "humbug." Everyone thinks they're an expert. I'll give him style points for saying that everyone keeps looking for a magic bullet when what they need is a different weapon. (Spoiler alert: Hood's does not use "education reform" the same way we do today).

Well, yes, except for the different weapon part, which calls to my mind the poor dancer who blames the floor.

*Lots of folks blame the "education lobbies," and they're right, but also that's an excuse because some reform was doomed to fail.

*Lots of folks blame "cultural trends" and the destruction of "classroom discipline" and moral stuff and a national consensus on what students should learn. Also, students in this country lack communication and computation skills to succeed in college or the workplace.

Chris Rufo was nine years old when this was written, and yet he would later sing the same tune, complete with blaming it on those hippies from the sixties.

*Some folks think that free market principles will save school, but until you get rid of all those government rules and regulations, you can never have a truly free market.

And then he brings up something that has since been dropped from privatizer rhetoric, about how Kids These Days watch too much tv and their parents let them, and you can lead a horse to water but yada yada yada.

Next he presents a history of public ed, and brings up another thread that will be dropped, saying that there "is no past paradise when all students excelled." And then he launches into a history of how government captured and homogenized education even as it dragged all young humans into the system. The term "monopolistic" turns up here; also, references to the old tale of the factory model, a persistent myth that will never die its deserved death.

Then we get into the expansion of education, in which "do-gooders" try to expand "the role of public education in all aspects of what was once family life" including "instilling moral values, providing health and nutrition, fighting delinquency and crime, and protecting children from physical and psychological abuse." Also, business interests constantly warn of "economic threats posed by international competitors." And lots of folks want schools to provide social justice. All of these folks are what Hood means by "education reform."

And he will also throw in the various responses to A Nation At Risk (he will also call out Reagan for promising to end the Department of Education and giving it more money instead).

Now comes the What Did All That Get Us section, all of which seems very familiar.

We've dropped class sizes from 1955 to 1991, and it didn't help. We spend way more money than ever, and yet our NAEP scores are still low. SAT scores are dropping. And here's a list of Things That Many Kids Don't Know (according to some unnamed source)!! Kids These Days Aren't ready for college (and he throws in a quote from Chester Finn to underline that). 

Now he will explain why US education fails.

Rigid personnel rules, by which he means tenure and other rules that keep principals from ruling their schools like genius CEOs. Also, there should be performance pay, Get rid of uniform salary schedules--they were put in place to counteract racial and social inequities among teachers, but we've pretty well solved all that. Who's at fault? The "mediocre teachers" who "dominate the teacher unions and education lobbyists." 

Teachers shouldn't be unionized-- they should "best be organized in the future as firms providing specific services to schools."

The monopoly thing, because when a school enjoys "monopoly control over its students, the incentive to produce successful students is lacking." Yes, it's the same old economism, the inability to imagine any possible motivation for teaching. The schools must be filled with teachers who could teach better, but are holding out because they aren't having enough carrots and/or sticks waved at them. 

Also, he doesn't like centralized decision making about things like curriculum and bell schedules. And he doubles down on the notion that you can't get anywhere today without more education.

Hood finishes up by noting that politics has been on the rise, writing this following sentence back in 1993:

Both liberal do-gooders and conservative culture warriors look to public education to achieve public goods.

Mostly he means the do-gooders, who while combatting segregation shifted education's focus from excellence to equity, and the socialism, and then all kinds of mushy programs (1993 doesn't provide him with "social-emotional learning" as a term for what he's describing. But he's sure that schools can't progress while they're focusing various "social concerns." 

But, he says, while government-run schools are "wholly unsuited to teach America's students" because of all of the listed failures, private schools are awesome and get everything right (particularly those Catholic ones). He wraps up with his thesis, implied by all that has come before, and completely recognizable to us thirty years later. 

By any reasonable measure, America’s monopolistic, bureaucratic, over-regulated system of public schools is woefully unprepared to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Political, business, and education leaders continue to talk about “reforming” the current public education system. They should, instead, be discussing how to replace it.

That's one other cool feature of privatizer writings from way back when. In those days they didn't think anyone was really listening, so they just went ahead and said the quiet part out loud. But thirty years later, this brand of right-wing thought is still focused on supplanting public education that better fits their values and goals.