Sputnik, Meet Nudnik!

Some outfit called Strong American Schools -- which gets money from, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (read: cosmic busybodies) -- has filed the 1000th formal complaint against American schools since World War II, contending that "students in the United States often fail to take the courses needed to compete in a global economy". The proposed solutions? (1) "Rigorous standards across the nation" -- read: No Child Left Behind, which is already starting to look like a beached whale; (2) "Effective teaching"; and (3) More time for learning through a longer school day or school year." Gee, I wonder which reform is supposed to be implemented first? If you do #3 first, all it means is that kids will spend more time not learning. Implementing #1 without working on #2 will give us... precisely what we have now, in the wars being fought over NCLB. And frankly, if we really had #2, #1 would be unnecessary and #3 would be optional. So what are we left with, class? Effective teaching is clearly the key to success. Now, why is that criterion the very last of the three that will ever be seriously tackled by the education bureaucracy? In fact, why is it that that criterion won't be tackled _at all_, thus rendering the other two -- predictably -- expensive, time-consuming, and irrelevant?

The first thing we need to do, to clear our minds of cobwebs regarding the education issue, is to realize, and acknowledge, two simple facts: (1) "public education" is a government program; and (2) every government program is a jobs program. That public education is a government program can hardly be denied. That every government program is a jobs program might strike some as an over-simplification, but I assure you that it's extremely true. But guess what, you'll just have to take my word for it for now; I'll argue the case at some other time. But what it means is that public education -- regardless of the stated mission, which is actually not at all clear (what exactly is "education" anyway? -- everyone thinks they know, but nobody agrees) -- is a gigantic bureaucracy in which the number of people in direct contact with the "customers" -- i.e. the teachers -- is a small minority, and getting smaller every day. This bureaucracy perpetuates itself in the exact same way as any other government bureaucracy does -- by constantly expanding its mission, and intruding into areas it was never intended to be in, and where it is not wanted....by creating sinecures and padding job descriptions so that ten people wind up doing the "work" of one... by maintaining a highly-paid elite "management corps" who can't "manage" their way out of a wet paper bag... and by hiring contractors (i.e., creating even more jobs) to do things the insiders cannot or prefer not to do. It also works to stifle competition and drive competitors out of business -- e.g., charter schools, magnet schools, private schools, parochial schools, and home schools -- and wages merciless war on any attempt to acquire "school choice". In all of this, as I've said, it behaves as a typical bureaucracy -- no more, no less. But on top of this, there is an additional aggravating factor, namely the teachers' unions, which enjoy political power and influence nearly unmatched by any other domestic organization or cause. While unionization in the economy as a whole continues to decline, the public schools fall more and more into the death grip of the teachers' unions. And their Job One is -- big surprise -- maintaining existing slots of union members, creating new slots for union members, and rendering it impossible for union members to be fired, disciplined, or sanctioned in any way. (Oh, and did we mention a pay scale that would have caused the court of the Pasha of Istanbul to marvel?)

Somewhere along the line, with the bureaucratization and unionization of public education, came the mysterious phenomenon by which the quality of education, and the relevance of the curriculum, became first a secondary consideration, and eventually not a consideration at all. Just as "bad money drives out good", bad education has apparently -- by a similar process -- driven out good, in many respects. Basic human psychology provides a clue. Behavior which is reinforced tends to persist; behavior which is punished, or ignored, tends to disappear. So, to begin with, anything that conflicts with the "jobs" criterion, like efficiency and limiting bureaucratic overhead, will suffer from neglect. And anything that conflicts with the "protecting union members" criterion, like job and performance standards, will likewise be neglected.

So -- into this morass of conspiratorial incompetence and negligence fall none other than Bill and Melinda Gates, and their "Foundation", and its cutting-edge organization, Strong American Schools. And great is the hand-wringing, and the posturing, and the pontificating -- but nonexistent is the outcome, because even Bill and Melinda occasionally meet their match, and in this case more than their match. And yet -- those old enough to remember will, in fact, remember the panic that followed the Soviets' launch of Sputnik, and the fact that it stimulated a near-revolution in American education, particularly a serious drive to increase the quality of education in math and science. (Of course, one might question why the achievements of a handful of -- mostly German -- scientists in the USSR should uproot the entire American educational system, but let that go for now. That falls under the heading of "mass hysteria aided and abetted by government", and is a huge topic in its own right.) In short, the system was challenged, and it responded. And yes, it was a bureaucracy then, but it had not yet reached critical mass whereby all but a few had lost sight of the original mission of public education, namely (to over-simplify) to educate people for good, and productive, citizenship. If public education has any trace of this mission left, it has been distorted by the intervening political fog into something like: to produce unquestioning, ignorant, dependent, compliant drones whose spirit is crushed by political correctness and who have no resistance to collectivization and totalitarianism -- i.e., the "citizens" of Orwell's "1984". Now of _course_ these people will be unable, or disinclined, to "compete in a global economy". They will "fail" to take the needed courses because there will be no incentive to do so. When outcomes have nothing to do with effort -- by dint of legislation -- then effort will diminish (basic human psychology again -- totally alien to liberal ways of thinking, of course). If most people can "get over" by dozing through their public school careers, guess what -- they will. Only a few fanatics will love learning enough to go seeking it on their own. They are in the position of a hard worker in a totally collectivized society -- it doesn't do him a bit of good, but he enjoys it, so what the heck. (But even that won't do, if he's accused of "speeding up the line", the way ambitious black students are accused of "acting white".)

Now, some naive person might say -- and it's hard not to chuckle just thinking about it -- "Well, why not just _require_ public school students to take a minimum number of "serious" courses, and enforce standards on both them and their teachers? Why not bring back the concept of failing grades, and having to repeat a grade? Why not make it possible to discipline teachers, and fire the really bad ones?" I would be willing to bet that the societies the "Strong" organization cites, namely India and China, have already embarked on that radical program. In fact, I'll bet that they've never done it any other way. So this organization is trying to urge the presidential candidates to "address" the problem -- as if it hasn't been "addressed" by every president since the days of Horace Mann, and in recent decades they have given up in despair.

I have to add that, at the time of Sputnik, American society, with all its faults -- all its "racism, sexism, homophobia", etc. etc. -- was considered to be superior, good, and worth perpetuating. Can we say that the people in charge of the culture now feel the same way? Not by a damn sight. Our political, social, and cultural movers and shakers are almost all, to some degree, anti-American -- or at least "anti-" the America that existed in 1957. You know the litany -- Eisenhower, McCarthyism, "Father Knows Best", "Leave it to Beaver", Wonder Bread, steaks on the grill, etc. -- all those bland, boring, paternalistic things that gave rise to the 1960s, when all that was old, and known, and secure was uprooted, turned on its head, and tossed in the nearest dumpster. And I am not saying that some of those postwar cultural habits and obsessions did not deserve to die -- far from it. I am simply pointing out that the level of resistance of any society to invasion by hostile forces has a lot to do with its own self-confidence, and with the real, day-to-day security and stability it provides for its citizens. Like it or not, these nice, comforting, "bourgeois" things are what keep a society together and enable it to respond to threats, whereas radicalism, revolution, and deconstructionism have just the opposite effect. They create a kind of societal version of AIDS, whereby there is _no_ resistance to threats from without. All that is left is a kind of ritualized pattern of "doing something" or "addressing problems", but the actual mechanisms for making changes have long since rusted into one solid, impotent block.

The bottom line is that ability to "compete in a global economy" is not an incentive. The government can mouth all the words it wants about "standards", but if they are unenforceable -- even assuming they are appropriate, which is highly doubtful -- what good are they? Keep kids in school all summer because they're no longer needed out on the farm? Again, a great jobs program for teachers and education bureaucrats, but when's the last time just having more of something mediocre made it any less mediocre?

Plus, hey, we know the "global economy" is the playing field of the multinational corporations anyway, and what do they care where their manpower comes from -- the U.S., India, China, wherever? In fact, they would prefer "Third World" manpower since our own educational "products" are so apt to be lazy crybabies and entitlement junkies. Finally, a quote from a local education bureaucrat. This is priceless. "One thing we haven't come to grips with in America is we haven't decided what we want education to be." Well gosh, we've only been here for 230 years, what's the freakin' rush?