Hard Times for Public Education

by Stephen A. Jones
March 1, 2010

Recently, the students in one of my classes read Studs Terkel’s book Hard Times — an oral history of the Great Depression, featuring the recollections of people who lived through it.

The thing my students found most remarkable about the book was how many people described incidents of profound generosity despite great deprivation — people who had almost nothing helping those who had even less. Many of my students expressed doubts that Americans today would be so generous and helpful to each other. I told them we never really know what we’re capable of until we are tested.

Well, we’re being tested now, and one of the most important questions on that test is how we will provide for the education of our children. The economic hardship we currently face, especially in Michigan, is forcing us to reassess our priorities: are we committed to providing a good education for all our children or shall we abandon our system of public education altogether?

Before I go further, some disclosure: I currently teach history at Central Michigan University and for 10 years I taught English at a Detroit high school. I come from a family of teachers and I believe in education — particularly public education — fervently and unrepentantly.

That said, it seems to me that for a couple of decades America’s public schools have been under attack. Often that attack has been driven as much by ideology as by the actual performance of our schools, and the assault has encouraged a mindset that sees public education as fundamentally flawed.

Certainly there are problems in the public schools, especially in urban centers like Detroit. But if you listen to the policy makers and reformers, you could be excused for believing that our schools’ motto should be: Where am I going and why am I in this hand basket?

But how then are we to explain these phenomena: educational attainment levels for the total population have been rising for at least 20 years, ACT scores are as high as they have ever been, and college enrollment is at record levels. Nationally, high school dropout rates are at record lows — 9.3 percent in 2008, compared with 12.4 percent in 2000 and 17.3 percent in 1970. The percentage of high school graduates — ages 18 to 24 — enrolled in college is up about 40 percent since 1970 and nearly 8 percent since 2000.

So what is the crisis in public education? The problem is that in many places (mostly urban areas) many students (mostly from minority groups) are not achieving as well or persisting in school as long as most of the nation’s students.

Explaining the source of that problem and devising a solution for it, however, are neither easy nor simple — although some appear to think so. For the last decade, poor performance in urban schools has been defined largely as a curricular problem, hence the obsession with the Procrustean bed of standardized tests.

Once, while I was administering such a test, two young men in the room simply quit after three hours of virtually non-stop testing and refused to answer any of the questions in the final section. They could have marked random answers and improved their scores but they would not. As a colleague put it: “We’re not testing what they know, we’re testing what they’re willing to do.”

Lately, it has become fashionable to blame teachers, as they did in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where the administration fired all 93 teachers and staff members at a “failing” school. The teachers had agreed to take on extra duties and work extra hours but had the audacity to suggest that they should receive additional pay for the additional work.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan added insult to injury by praising the decision to fire the teachers. And the Central Falls massacre is likely to be repeated in other cities around the nation. Duncan’s aides were in Detroit late last month to discuss a plan that would provide nearly $136 million in federal money to Michigan to help low-performing schools.

In return, those schools would have to adopt one of four federally approved reform models, among which is the approach adopted in Central Falls.

But the problem facing our “failing” schools is not essentially one of either curriculum or personnel. The real problem is environmental.

Environment in this context needs to be examined in at least a couple of ways. First, it is no secret that such societal problems as poverty, crime and substance abuse are not limited to cities, but they are concentrated in ways that put large numbers of inner city students at a disadvantage, relative to their counterparts in suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

Meanwhile, teachers and administrators have been required in recent decades to add responsibilities to their workload without a comparable increase in resources. They have been asked to do more with less while officials in Lansing and elsewhere have pandered to voters’ basest instincts by promising — and delivering — repeated tax cuts.

State support for public schools was cut this year by $168 per student. It may have to be cut another $268 per student for the 2010-2011 school year to erase a projected state budget deficit. And yet, Republicans in the legislature have been adamant that they will not even consider increasing taxes.

Environment also means the schools’ physical facilities. The school I taught in was built in 1931 and showed its age. One year, I was in a classroom where if it snowed heavily outside there were flurries inside.

But environment is also emotional and psychological. Many of the students I had did poorly on standardized tests, but not for a lack of intelligence.

On the contrary, they were smart enough to perceive that the schools were organized and operated not for their benefit but to suit some political agenda or satisfy someone’s idea of economic efficiency. They saw no benefit for themselves. Quite understandably, many students chose to withdraw psychologically even when they remained physically in the classroom.

That is not a problem that will be solved by giving more tests or firing more teachers. It will be solved by making a real commitment to our public schools — all of our public schools.

When we refuse to make devastating cuts to school budgets — even if it means paying more taxes in tough economic times — we tell our children that we care more about them than we care about our wallets. We show them that we are willing to sacrifice for their well-being.

When we shun the temptation to turn schools over to for-profit management organizations, we tell our children that they are not a commodity for sale to the highest bidder.

When we support teachers by reducing class size so they can teach differently and more effectively by spending more time with each student, we give our children what they most need but what they have been getting less of by the year — the attention of caring adults.

Maybe my students are right to be pessimistic. I hope not, because the logical conclusion of current education “reform” trends has already been portrayed with disturbing accuracy in another book with the same title: Hard Times, by Charles Dickens.

Pick up a copy. Let me know if you’d like to go to a school full of teachers and administrators like Thomas Gradgrind. Generosity of spirit is not what Dickens’ Hard Times is about.

Stephen A. Jones is a Detroit resident and assistant professor of History at Central Michigan University. He is co-editor with Eric Freedman of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).