On Obama's Talk to the Urban League-July 29, 2010

PART I: It is quite interesting to consider what people actually take to be the aims and goals of becoming or being educated. What does it mean to receive an education? What are the aspirations of an educational system? President Obama addressed the centenary gathering of the Urban League today and chose as his central topic: "Education". I'll not enjoin your attention to the minutia of his entire presentation, but instead try to engage several larger issues. Referring to education as an economic issue, as the POTUS did, may have merit, but merit of the most ancillary sort. It is a by-product of our consumerist culture which seeks the commodification of all social and cultural creations for the purpose of producing the most economically viable "products/things" which yield profit or material benefits. Our approach to education must resist this. To say that education has economic implications is trivially true. The field or study of economics is a social science (in particular it concerns the allocation of scarce resources and goods), and as such it is an outgrowth of the interactions of groups, communities, states, nations, etc. Therefore, one would impoverish a catholic perspective of human activities if one were to extricate any or all economic implications from educational structures. But there is something more fundamental to education. Education is arguably, and most fundamentally, a moral concern. We become better human beings through education and its attendant implementation. Education enables us to investigate and re-imagine the greatest possibilities of human expression, while struggling not to have these possibilities attenuated by an equally tragic and repulsive history of human cruelties. With regard to educational evaluations, there is a tendency to seek some "bottom line" reasoning and to try to gain some economic and social advantage via arbitrary ascriptions of social value when making educational choices. Modern society has been reductionist in its approach to education, wherein even the pursuit of education is often determined by the social potency of the particular institution one chooses for matriculation. This breeds forms of elitism and aristocracy that debilitate and diminish social cohesion and true democratic cooperation and participation. For instance, under this interpretation someone having attended Stanford University is prima facie assumed smarter, more desirable to graduate schools and employers, and dare we say deemed more human by way of her/his associations with the "smartest" and "brightest". To be sure, this is a caricature, and does exaggerate the point. Stanford is a great institution. Although it should be noted that it does speak to a particular social concern which is, that the goodness of a person, as person should never be evinced or qualified as "good" merely by virtue of educational affiliation. The point here is that we have consistently categorized the value of the arbiters of education as we have done with the producers of goods, viz., designer clothes are deemed better than wholesale goods simply by virtue of its social standing and/or extravagance. Cars of German persuasion are viewed as symbols of success and social status, versus cars of different extractions that may better serve one's practical needs (e.g., one may actually do better with a minivan-lol). The aim of this type of critique is to inspire change and thereby reduce the potential probability of the occurrence of this sort of unabated social and economic asymmetry. The present educational arrangements and structures foster these social assumptions. Public schools that serve economically deprived communities "fail" at a higher rate than schools in middle to upper income communities. Considering that all these schools in these categories are "public", would the Obama education team wish to explain how this is even possible, without weighing the social, racial, and economic obstacles that support and encourage these disparities? One traditional response is to assuage confrontation in this regard by explaining how central the tax base of a respective school community will be a profound determining factor in resource distribution and accumulation. Well, at least if this were taken seriously as a legitimate contributor to the maldistribution of educational resources, then the "failing" school should at least not be gauged by the same standards as schools with better resources and superior educational environs (this includes teachers). Maybe the value and productivity of an education should not be mitigated by such concerns of economic disparity. If not, then it becomes much more difficult to explain how so-called "failing public schools" in particular deprived communities become ripe for Charter school development, while its public school counterparts on "the other side of town" celebrate successes and freedoms similar, if not greater than, Charter schools. Might we be witnessing educational gerrymandering?
An additional concern is the foci placed on charter schools and the retributive justice parceled out to so-called failing public schools. Charter schools seem to be to public schools, what Teach for America is to Education concentrators/majors in college. Of course there are successful Charter schools as well as successful teachers who have maneuvered through the Teach for America training. But there are also successful public schools with successful teachers who believed it necessary to spend more than a summer vacation in preparation to teach, not merely for America, but more specifically to teach because of their commitment to a calling and vocation. Here's a quick fix for the "Charter" school advocates out there -- simply allow the "regular" public schools to have equal freedoms in curricula development, hiring, and evaluation as you presently provide for charter schools. Charter school development buoys school systems like Chicago's to undermine protections of teachers' rights maintained by teachers' unions. Yes, it is clear that some, maybe even most, teachers' unions are not providing the best services for their constituents. But let's not indulge in "throwing the baby out...." Why have we cultivated an aversion to struggle to make the local school better when we know the stakes are so high. Charter schools can and do make choices in the type of students they wish to "educate" and they can remove students whom they deem "problematic" or "detrimental" to the school. A majority of public schools MUST work with what they get from a respective community. Many of these schools that have "failed" are in the midst of blighted, under-developed communities and the result is systematic and cyclical poverty and social wretchedness. (I'll hold the social structures commentary for another day, but suffice it to say, it is a more complex issue than simply closing down low performing schools.)
If one believes, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has shown, that the approach to low performing schools is to close them down, then what would one do with educationally low performing states? For example, statistically Mississippi has traditionally performed at or near the bottom in educational standards when compared to the rest of the nation's school systems. We shutter to think that jettisoning the entire educational structure of the state of Mississippi is a rational discussion to be had. What is viable are the concerted efforts of the state and federal governments to seek creative means and approaches to enliven this educational system--this doesn't mean Charter Schools. The central flaw in the extant educational reform is assuming that the corporate model of tearing down, firing, reconstituting, etc. are the best methods to be employed when the profit margins and yield are found insufficient. To be sure, educational outcomes are measured in lives well ordered, and well lived, not in terms of material net profits. Duncan has demonstrated a total lack of insight regarding real struggles associated with "educating" students. His career path has been replete with bureaucratic tenures (cf. Ed.gov for Duncan's professional bio), and lacks practical and substantive engagement with actual instruction. To answer your next question: Yes, I do indeed believe that one should demonstrate some knowledge of the task of having to actually teach, devise lesson plans, organize and maintain class decorum, etc. in order to decree the closing of any school because it has "failed". He fails to even satisfy the ole' saying, "Those who can do, those who can't teach." He fails on both fronts. Maybe he operates from a different adage, "Those who can do, those who can't teach, those who do neither, govern." Education is not business, it's a moral matter to be experienced, practiced, and lived. (To Be Continued in PART II)