Our Public Education Debacle for Dummies

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In a nation characterized by diversity and complexity, technologically gifted, it is reality that solutions to its problems tend to be seen as technological, and orderly.  Choose the right algorithm, turn on the right tool, all will right itself.  

Not the stuff, however, that will resolve our nation's current political quagmire.   Nor its ongoing public school wars -- 150 year old, dug in system, versus the privatization driven model of "corporate reform."

Our public education dilemmas are very much the product of history, off course evolution, and foundational rather than tactical.

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Americans in this century have become increasingly prone to go into denial about the basics that have made our world more complex, unpredictable and contentious.

That psychologically compensatory drive also takes the form of majority tinkering with or contesting the detail or trivia surrounding an issue, rather than facing the hard reality at its core.  That is a large part of the continuing battleground pitting our public school system against an odd couples assortment of those naively advocating its privatization.

Both sides of the school privatization debate are, using an old metaphor, on the water missing one oar.

Are public schools up to knowledge speed and cool?  The system is simultaneously massive, but short of our military one of the most regimented and indictrinated segments of our society.  That reflects:  A previously virtually unchallenged 150 year monopoly on K-12 learning, with known effects of monopoly; controlling unions still quietly entrenched; schools of education monolithically isolated from knowledge’s trajectories; and an individual school organizational model obsolete for at least seven decades.  Add boards of education that became obsolete on the same timetable, and this $500 billion system, with the power to tax, lacking intelligent oversight and accountability, has – overall – been ‘running on empty’ for some time.

Hence, so-called “corporate reform” finally emerges, both because of the legitimate need for a different portfolio of learning products matching technological and cultural evolution, and the delusions about markets and competition, accompanied by political ideologies festering in the US since its formation.  Those advocating privatization apparently learned their economics from a comic book – ‘competition’ is not the simplistic “invisible hand” attributed to Adam Smith nor the economic mythology of Ayn Rand. 

How real is DeVos’ declared priority of making all public schools ‘businesses?’  Consider this; if over a half century of jawboning public education to do its own reformation, enlightenment and become contemporary, has produced where we are, how without a Constitutional change will DeVos overcome that massive public education inertia to go from 95+ percent of schools public, to privatization now at less than five percent of those schools charter?  She’s as delusional as the majority of our citizens who believe their public school is “just fine,” while it’s those other public schools that need to find their bootstraps?

The rallying cry of the privateers is a phony “choice.”  K-12 is heavily constrained by geography.  Even when proximity of options occurs, it is likely today to be limited to upper socioeconomic participation or gifted child status for multiple reasons, defeating the pitch that charters will magically equalize learning.  Most of the parents hearing that false call, the miracle of choice, are also rarely equipped to intellectually assess and choose how and where their child should best be educated.  Lastly there is no winner, this is not a zero-sum game. Irony, that overwhelming majority who missed some part of critical thinking in their own development, was produced by the same schools that are allegedly “doing just fine.”

Bottom line:  Neither side to this face-off is innocent, nor has registered close to a full awareness of what they are imposing on the nation, in expanding time and costs to achieve required change, nor of the nation’s opportunity costs, as our school wars drag on.