Tag Archives: Technocrats

Montgomery County Public Schools’ World Studies Mythology

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

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Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling's The White (?) Man's Burden ("white" colonial powers being carried as the burden of their "colored" subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

My son is taking Advanced World Studies in seventh grade this year. As a historian — and one that’s taught World History fifteen times over the years — I thought it was a good thing that he would have exposure to world history and cultures before engaging in US history in eighth grade and in high school. Once again, the technocrats in K-12 education have proven me dead wrong. While there may be some exposure to the rest of the world, the frame for the curriculum is one that not-so-subtly implies that world studies, advanced or otherwise, cannot exist without a European or Western frame to tell students how to think about the non-Western part of the globe.

I noticed it the first week, but didn’t pay much attention to the brief synopsis (what teachers call their “syllabus”) of the course until Back to School Night last week. The four units for my son’s course are

  • Unit One: The Foundation of Modern Political Systems: Europe in the Middle Ages
  • Unit Two: The Influence of Culture in Africa: The Middle Ages and Today
  • Unit Three: Geography Shapes Latin America
  • Unit Four: The Impact of Economics: One World Past and Present

When I finally read through it, I was incensed. It sunk in with my experiences with AP World History and with World History at the college level why so many of my own students were almost completely ignorant of world history that wasn’t about ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, or Western Europe. School districts, even ones as above par as MCPS, have helped lull students into a false sense of security through the exchange of knowledge as comfort food, rather than a higher protein diet of actual history.Screen Shot 2015-09-29 at 7.12.09 AM

Unit One is fine, for the most part, although the idea of a nation-state or some sort of constitutional democracy doesn’t entirely come from Europe. But it’s downhill from there. Culture, Africa and the Middle Ages for Africa? Really? The Middle Ages is a specifically Western and Central European experience, as no civilization from the classical world experienced a greater decline or collapse than Rome in the fifth century CE. To just take that term and paste it unto another continent, another group of people, and their different history is just plain wrong. How about Culture and Africa, 1000-1500 CE? You don’t need the frame of Europe’s Middle Ages to discuss Africa, unless your point is to embed some sense of Western dominance as a subliminal theme within the curriculum.

Or unless the curriculum developers in Rockville were thinking about making the Age of European Discovery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Africa’s “Middle Ages.” The period between 1450 and 1800, in which the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the English, and the French helped stoke the fires of intertribal and cross-kingdom warfare to obtain millions of slaves for their colonies in the Western Hemisphere. That’s probably too much for the advanced twelve-year-old, though, no?

Storming of the Teocalli by Hernán Cortez and His Troops (1848), painting by Emanuel Leutze, January 11, 2012. (Penelope37 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Storming of the Teocalli by Hernán Cortez and His Troops (1848), painting by Emanuel Leutze, January 11, 2012. (Penelope37 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Unit Three and the term “Latin America?” Seriously? It covers the Maya, the Mexica (or rather, Aztecs), and the Inca, all prior to European contact in the sixteenth century. So technically, there’s no Latin in the Americas before 1500. MCPS, ever heard of the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, Mesoamerica, and Andean civilizations, all terms that are more accurate alternatives to Latin America in the time before Columbus and conquistadors? Unless, again, the point of curriculum designers here was to bake into the recipe for this course a sense of inevitability. That is, that the pre-Columbian cultures of the Western Hemisphere, no matter how sophisticated, were doomed to fall by the wayside in the wake of Western dominance over the globe.

Unit Four and “One World Past and Present” in the context of trade, economic systems, and communication bring the themes of European dominance together in the period since 1450. The MCPS curriculum designers do hint that “the cultural diffusion between many ‘worlds’ had both positive and negative consequences.” But for the most part, the technocrats provide a sense of progress to market-based economies and positive globalization in this unit, as Europeans led the charge to make the world one and whole.

Stainless steel Crock-Pot, September 29, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

Stainless steel Crock-Pot, September 29, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

This is a crock of a curriculum, MCPS, a shameful attempt at world studies. The course might as well be called, Advanced and Expanded Western Civilization, How Europeans Went From the Middle Ages to Dominating the World. The point of any world history or world studies course is supposed to be the study of specific bits of history of the world, without imposing a Western model, frame, or sense of progress and comparison on the rest of the world in the process. Otherwise, what’s the point? You might as well teach Western Civ in middle school, then, and save world history to teachers and curriculum designers who understand that the world is a bigger place than Western-culture-navel-gazing.

Though the pressures of Common Core may have birthed this new curriculum as part of MCPS’s Curriculum 2.0 efforts, it’s not specifically a Common Core-inspired curriculum. One of the problems with Common Core State Standards and PARCC assessments is that they mask the problems that existed in America’s K-12 education long before. One of which is fake efforts at diversity and a multicultural curriculum, of which MCPS’s World Studies is but one example. It may well be true that virtually all world history curriculum is bs, however. But that is an article for another day.

The Importance of The Great Society, 50 Years Later

10 Friday Apr 2015

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Cartoon about American politics and the economy during the Great Recession, May 9, 2010. (Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws (low resolution, relevance to subject matter).

Cartoon about American politics and the economy during the Great Recession, May 9, 2010. (Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws (low resolution, relevance to subject matter).

This weekend marks a half-century since President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the first series of bills into law that signified his Great Society/War on Poverty work. We won’t hear much about this, though. Not with 2015 being a benchmark year for commemorating and celebrating so much else. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Appomattox at 150, along with President Lincoln’s assassination, Juneteenth, and the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, ending legal slavery (except for prisoners, of course). The trench warfare of World War I, and the Battle of Gallipoli (if one’s a real war trivia buff). Even the 30th anniversary of Back To The Future and the UN Conference on Women, which gathered in Nairobi, Kenya in the fall of 1985, will likely get more air time, cyber time, and ink than the first of LBJ’s Great Society programs.

But the Great Society was supposed to be a grand experiment and experience. It was supposed to wipe out poverty, end all legal forms of discrimination and segregation, and make the opportunity to achieve the modern American Dream of a middle-class life or better a reality for almost everyone. And it would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those pesky kids, um, LBJ’s pesky decisions to go escalate the Vietnam War. The war cost $269 billion in 1970 dollars, or, $1.7 trillion in 2015 money.

What $1 trillion looks like, January 2012. (http://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/ via Elsolet Joubert).

What $1 trillion looks like, January 2012. (http://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/ via Elsolet Joubert).

Yet it’s not exactly true that it would’ve worked, or that it didn’t work. You see, despite the best efforts of an elitist, right-wing and ineffectual federal government corrupted by plutocrats and its military-industrial complex, the Great Society programs are still with us. For starters, there’s the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, the first one LBJ signed into law on April 11, fifty years ago on this date.

Without these laws, the modern era of educating millions of children whom states, colleges and universities and local school districts had shut out of K-12 and higher education wouldn’t have occurred at all. With federal government dollars and regulations, not to mention a foundation in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ESEA and HEA in its initial years provided real hope for “an equal opportunity for all.”

This wasn’t and isn’t just about Jim Crow and racial discrimination and segregation, whether de jure in the South or de facto via residential segregation and redlining in cities outsider the South. This became about opening doors for whole classes of children and adults that had been steel-reinforced-concrete walls before.

Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer at American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, July 16, 2007. (http://aei.org).

Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer at American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, July 16, 2007. (http://aei.org).

Technocrats and other public education crises gurus of the likes of Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and Roland Fryer would have us think that the $600 billion that states and the federal government via ESEA spend on public education each year is all wasteful spending. They say that we have about the same number of students in schools today (about 50 million) as we did in 1970.

Of course, they don’t tell the whole story, leaving out a lot of truth for us. For in my lifetime, students with disabilities (cognitive, physical, emotional) have gone from shutout to included in public schools as part of the Americans with Disabilities Acts of 1989 and 1992, and of course, ESEA. Students with language proficiency issues became part of the public education fabric under the Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court decision in 1974, with funds provided out of ESEA. Charter schools, magnet programs, school counseling, and so many other things that have made public education more inclusive and also more expensive wouldn’t have been possible without ESEA. Meaning, technocrats, that public education was severely underfunded and exclusionary prior to 1965.

The HEA hasn’t had the same effect, primarily because we as a society tend to think of higher education as a luxury and not a right, and have fought hard to make many colleges and universities the exclusive domain of “the worthy.” Still, without HEA and the Pell Grants (named after former Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-RI, 1961-97), the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, the Direct Student Loan Program, and the Supplemental Loan Program, a whole generation of low-income and middle-income families wouldn’t have been able to send their kids to college. They were often the first in their families, as Blacks, as women, as Black and Latino women, as working-class Whites with only a steel mill or automobile plant in their future. At least back then.

President Lyndon Johnson signing the Higher Education Act of 1965, Master's Gymnasium, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, November 8, 1965. (http://smmercury.com/). In public domain.

President Lyndon Johnson signing the Higher Education Act of 1965, Master’s Gymnasium, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, November 8, 1965. (http://smmercury.com/). In public domain.

There’s also the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Head Start program, and Congress passing Medicaid and Medicare, providing health coverage for the elderly and deeply poor for the first time. And all in 1965.

What does all of this mean in 2015? That despite the mountains of books written on LBJ and the failures of the War on Poverty and the Great Society, that these programs worked and work in ameliorating poverty and expanding opportunities for all, even across racial lines. Would they have been more effective with more investment, especially in those initial years, when Vietnam became more of a priority? No doubt.

That’s just it, though. Most Americans — who despite the fears of Ted Cruz and Rudy Giuliani, remain White — didn’t care about poverty and racism and the structures that supported it then, and they mostly don’t care now. They want Congress to work, just not on issues that would permanently unbalance the social hierarchy that they’ve assumed as their birthright for two centuries.

Hence the constant one-two punch of a relationship they see with poverty and those with black and brown skin. Hence the constant carping about taxes and needless spending on food stamps and welfare, even though the true face of government assistance in the US has always been a haggard White one. Hence the constant media tropes about hard work and so-called self-made men worth billions making their money without holding a college degree, who somehow can tell the rest of us how to live. The Great Society, for all of LBJ’s foibles and its weaknesses, remains a great legacy of what America could be, and at times, has been, but overall, refuses to be.

Technocrats, Journalists, and Statistical Orgies

25 Sunday Jan 2015

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Front page of The Washington Post, January 25, 2015. (http://newseum.org).

Front page of The Washington Post, January 25, 2015. (http://newseum.org).

There are times when I wonder if exposing racial and socioeconomic disparities is really an eye-opening and life-changing exercise. Or, does the exposure merely serve to confirm the racial and socioeconomic stereotypes that Americans hold against each other? In today’s Washington Post, on the front page and above the fold, there’s an article titled “A Shattered Foundation,” with the smaller type “African Americans who bought homes in Prince George’s [County] have watched their wealth vanish.”

Above the title and subtitle are a series of charts and statistics noting the national chasm of a gap in total wealth accumulation between Black families ($95,300) and White families ($678,800). The theme here is that since the housing bust and subsequent Great Recession, the burgeoning Black middle class of PG County has fallen on desperate times, as home equity — their main means for accumulating wealth — for tens of thousands of these families caved in on them.

Michael A. Fletcher’s article is pretty even-handed. But this is kind of tangential to my larger point. In any given three-month period of my life, for nearly as long as the forty years and two months I’ve known how to read in full sentences, I could’ve scanned at least one article or book about the cruelties of structural racism and capitalism. Even if I’d never grown up in poverty or experienced racial discrimination, there have been enough articles, op-eds, books, book chapters, poems, short stories, plays, letters to the editor and scripts written about disparities to cover the US a mile deep in paper. The fact is, no statistics on growing wealth gaps and persistent racial gaps in wealth and education have led to lasting changes in policies, politics or institutional structures substantial enough to end poverty or ameliorate the most vicious forms of racism in this country.

Hand reaches out from big heap of crumpled papers, January 25, 2015. (http://galleryhip.com).

Hand reaches out from big heap of crumpled papers, January 25, 2015. (http://galleryhip.com).

Then again, there are some folks whose business depends on mantras like the “growing wealth gap” or “closing the achievement gap…as the civil rights issue of our time.” Technocrats in corporate education reform, social scientists in the world of conservative and “libertarian” think-tanks, neoliberals and so-called American liberals in search of compromises to strengthen the American middle class. They all turn to these statistics to tell their stories, to sell their experiments and their research, to promote their politics. It’s as if the statistics on racial and socioeconomic gaps in wealth and education provided a high, like crystal meth or a speedball. In some ways, for these groups, a five-story brothel in which they practiced S&M would be more appropriate for their use of misery statistics.

I am hardly suggesting The Washington Post‘s Fletcher or I or any other journalist, academician or writer should cease making their points with statistics about racial and socioeconomic disparities. But America’s poor and poor people of color or falling-through-the-cracks middle class are far more than “statistics on a government chart” (to quote The Police’s “Invisible Sun“). These are real people with families and lives, people who represent generations of lives in which this construct of racial capitalism has limited their choices and their opportunities, whether they believe in fate or not. So-called objectivity has never been sufficient, and neither have been statistics. What we need is a revolution in thought and in action, quiet or otherwise.

“The Negro Problem,” “The Jewish Question,” & “Closing the Achievement Gap”

10 Saturday Aug 2013

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Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, May 9, 2005. (Fastfission via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, May 9, 2005. (Fastfission via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What do these three disparate phrases have in common? This came up during my recent lunch with my friend Andrew at Lebanese Taverna a little more than a week ago. Among other things, we were lamenting the dominant theme of education reform as union-busting and the supplanting of teachers with high-stakes tests and Teach for America substitutes.

As we discussed Andrew’s second book on the 1990s culture wars and their roots in the 1960s conservative movement, it occurred to me that what both of us have thought of as recent or new really wasn’t. The efforts over the past decade to “close the achievement gap,” an actual problem really, are based in the nineteen and twentieth-century eugenics movement more than it is in a real sincere effort to confront the barriers to high academic achievement for students in poverty and for students of color.

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling's The White (?) Man's Burden ("white" colonial powers being carried as the burden of their "colored" subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

“How does it feel to be a problem?,” W. E. B. Du Bois asked numerous times and wrote in numerous ways in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903).  The Negro problem for White scholars and politicians at the turn of the twentieth century varied from Frederick Hoffman’s 1896 statistical eugenics argument that predicted the “extinction of the Negro” to the much more common struggle of how to educate the Negro (but not educate them too well). Hoffman’s White supremacy argument was a bit outside the mainstream even for his Whites-are-always-right era. The more mainstream problem of Negro education became one of “practical” vocational (or, as it was called at the time, industrial) education as advocated by accommodationist Booker T. Washington versus Du Bois’ higher education and leadership preparation for the Black Talented Tenth.

We’re here again, in the early twenty-first century, with the technocrats in government and White paternalists in the private foundation world sounding the alarm that there’s an achievement gap between the affluent and the poor, as well as between Whites, Blacks and Latinos. Except that this achievement gap’s been around for a half-century. Except that the biggest single factor in raising student achievement rates is family income and occupation(s), not more testing or a theory of change to assess teacher effectiveness. Except that schools in the districts in which the achievement gap is the most obvious — segregated, mostly poor and of color — are underfunded when accounting for inflation and other factors (e.g., age of school buildings, teacher-student ratios).

So too with the “Jewish question” in comparison to this crisis in education. One of the worst kept secrets in the first half of the twentieth century was that the Jewish question wasn’t just a Nazi German one, but an American one as well. The real Jewish question for American educators was how to explain Jewish overrepresentation as high achievers in public education and as the best and brightest in higher education. That despite the work of eugenicists — the technocrats of their day — to tweak IQ tests and entrance tests in favor of affluent White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

They couldn’t answer their Jewish question in higher education, except to limit the number of Jews accepted in elite institutions like Harvard, Yale and Princeton (in the latter case, to the point of exclusion). But we know how Nazi Germans decided to address their Jewish question — exclusion, discrimination, persecution, and the Final Solution. All to the detriment of advanced science and technology programs, not to mention the German economy. Vast resources went to a deadly and ultimately useless cause, all in the name of racial purity and betterment for “Nordic Aryans.”

"Mind The Gap" warning in London Underground, Victoria Station, November 27, 2011. (Reinhard Dietrich via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

“Mind The Gap” warning in London Underground, Victoria Station, November 27, 2011. (Reinhard Dietrich via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

In a very limited sense, the same is occurring with the education reform movement these days. Educators and politicians all pulling billions of dollars that could otherwise go to free breakfast and lunch programs, psychological services, physical education and arts programs for an eugenics-light agenda. No one from this movement has suggested a final solution as such, but they do believe that teachers unions, bad teachers and not enough STEM programs are the problem. Note that though the goal here is to “close the achievement gap,” the actual things that occur at schools in which most of the high-achieving Whites and Asian Americans (many of whom attend private and parochial schools) aren’t on the table at all.

Ultimately, the problem with the fear-mongering crowd on the “problem,” the “question” and the “gap” is that their perspective is one of the all-knowing, all-seeing White paternalist. One whose ideas about a situation or a group comes out of thin air, in some strange attempt to help said situation or group. In the case of today’s version of education reform, the only end-game is to destroy public education while exacting a profit in the process. Closing the achievement gap? Yeah, if “closing the gap” is defined by closing schools, killing unions and leaving most of America’s poor and of color students with no alternative for a better future.

Providing the Wrong Frame for Higher Education

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Neera Tanden and Drew Gilpin Faust, Center for American Progress' "Investing in the Future" event (screen shot), Washington, DC, December 10, 2012. (http://americanprogress.org).

Neera Tanden and Drew Gilpin Faust, Center for American Progress’ “Investing in the Future” event (screen shot), Washington, DC, December 10, 2012. (http://americanprogress.org).

I was supposed to attend the Center for American Progress event “Investing in the Future: Higher Education, Innovation, and American Competitiveness” yesterday morning (who does a two-and-a-half-hour event two Mondays before Christmas, really?). But my son happened to have his worst night of sleep in his nine and a third years of life, compounded by a minor asthma attack. So I didn’t get to go.

I’m glad that I didn’t attend, though, as the above link to the site and video will indicate to even an educator with the patience of Jesus. After watching and skipping through the 138-minute recording today, I realized that passing a kidney stone (which I’ve actually done) would be preferable to hearing the drivel that the Center for American Progress, Harvard University and Google sponsored yesterday.

It was a tour-de-force of K-16 education as preparation for practical careers and scientific/technological innovation. Period. Not education to formulate a critical mind. Not education for the betterment of society, for social justice, for changing the world. No, Americans, our very future depends purely on the willingness of Harvard (and other elite universities), corporations and government to work together to turn out millions of students to work in STEM fields, apparently the only fields that matter in the twenty-first century.

Yesterday’s Center for American Progress event proves, more than anything else, that K-12 public education has lost the battle for educational equity and US higher education is in the process of becoming a two-tiered system. The comments and answers from Neera Tanden, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, Glenn Hutchins, Gene Sperling, et al. were indicative of a class of folks who hold little interest in providing the resources necessary to level the educational playing field for poor and struggling working class students.  Or, when they did address K-12 education, it was purely in technocratic scales-of-efficiency terms, as they gave K-12 most of the blame for America’s reduced economic competitiveness.

Box of Cracker Jack bags, December 11, 2012. (http://crackerjackpopcorn.com).

Box of Cracker Jack bags, December 11, 2012. (http://crackerjackpopcorn.com).

But this is the problem with leaders involved in American education these days. Instead of opening up K-12 education to real innovations in philosophy, curriculum, a teacher’s ability to use all of their skills (measurable and intangible) in a student-centered classroom, critical thinking and neuroscience, we were given the typical mantra of testing, teacher effectiveness and cost-cutting. It means that even among our alleged best thinkers — apparently still White, mostly male and over fifty years of age — the best ideas involve an expansive education for the well-off and a Cracker Jack education for the growing numbers of the poor and those struggling to remain above the poverty line.

As for higher education, I’ve already noted that we are well on the way to a two-tiered system in the US (see my post “edX and Ex-lax (& Higher Education’s Future)” from September ’12). One tier will consist of group of schools that will remain elite and near elite, the top 500 or so colleges and universities in the country. The other group of colleges (public, HBCU and for-profit) will struggle mightily with the weight of providing a specialized education for the masses of unprepared and underprepared low-income first generation students, of color and otherwise. They will increasingly lose out to the elite university/corporate/government partnership that will lead to a cheaper, streamlined college education, and mostly online. And all without the complications of providing a well-rounded, liberal arts education.

Ben & Jerry's half baked ice cream flavor, December 11, 2012. (http://bestuff.com/).

Ben & Jerry’s half baked ice cream flavor, December 11, 2012. (http://bestuff.com/).

The speakers at “Investing in the Future: Higher Education, Innovation, and American Competitiveness” also discussed the need to make higher education cheaper. Their solutions of cheaper loans and more stringent requirements for students to meet in order to obtain merit-based aid is nothing new, and in fact reflects trends that date back to the late-1970s. Even Faust’s encouragement of spreading the Harvard solution of providing need-based aid for low-income students only works for high-achieving students, the “low-hanging fruit” strategy that allows the other grapes on the trees to rot.

To be sure, the speakers at this event also talked about comprehensive immigration reform, green jobs/economy and universal health care. But without sufficient attention to the millions and millions of poor and of color people affected by their words and deeds, the Center for American Progress event might as well have been called “Investing in the Oligarchic Past.” Same new-old solutions, same half-baked ideas that show that as long as American education and industry leaders try to force solutions on our poor, we’ll be about as competitive as the USSR was between Stalin and Glasnost/Perestroika.

My Take On K-12 & Higher Education & Corporatism

08 Monday Oct 2012

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Pink Floyd–The Wall (1982), February 16, 2012. (http://free-education.info). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low res and related to blog subject.

We often treat K-12 education and higher education as if they have nothing in common, as if they possess completely separate values and have developed in complete isolation from each other. But in this age where the American technocratic and the plutocratic elites want to privatize everything, there are clear connections behind and between emerging trends in corporatized K-12 education reform and with the rise of for-profit colleges and universities. These trends and connections aren’t good ones for the mass of American students, particularly for those who are poor and of color.

It’s pretty simply really. Both public education and postsecondary education have been under attack from profiteers and the politicians who do their bidding for at least a quarter century. In particular, the issues have been how to improve public schools so that poor Black and Latino kids can graduate high school on the one hand, and how to modify higher education so that the adult version of these kids can obtain a serviceable certificate or degree on the other. With these changes comes the theme of a watered-down education for the poorest twenty-five percent of Americans. It’s the new pathway to a sub-living wage job and tens of thousand of dollars of student loan debt.

A better way of presenting this reality, though, would be to overlay my own educational journey as a poor African American growing up in Mount Vernon, New York onto this corporatized educational insanity. I would’ve gone to public school to be sure. But instead of the SRA exam test that I took every year between third and sixth grade (not a high-stakes test evaluating teaching effectiveness, by the way), I would’ve seen some sort of comprehensive reading/mathematics test from at least second grade on.

Overcrowded classroom (with DOE Chancellor Joel Klein) with two teachers, PS 189, Brooklyn, NY, September 16, 2009. (Craig Warga/NY Daily News). Qualifies as fair use – blog subject with no comparable picture.

Given where I grew up, instead of having a group of veteran Black teachers for most of elementary schools, I would’ve ended up with some teachers from Teach for America or The New Teacher Project. For the technocrats surely would’ve held my teachers responsible for the sixty-percent poverty rate at my elementary schools, um, I mean, the low test scores. Teachers from these alternate certification programs tend to be well-meaning, perhaps even extremely smart, but not passionate or fully trained teachers. Certainly not like the highly dedicated African American teachers I had at Nathan Hale (now Cecil Cooper) and William H. Holmes Elementary, who held us all to high enough standards to prepare me for a gifted-talented magnet school program known as Humanities.

Of course, given the resources devoted to high-stakes testing, and the constant practice tests, there would’ve been the virtual elimination of music, art, PE, and creative writing. With that shift, there wouldn’t have been a Humanities Program, just a few classes for the best and brightest students. Instead, the option of a private charter school or a KIPP program may have been a possibility. With an average cost of $10,000, however, I doubt a $1,000 or $2,500 voucher would’ve made it possible for me to attend the one, and with KIPP schools being all about discipline, I would’ve thrived there about as much as fish thrive in the desert.

I would’ve moved on to middle school and high school, received algebra in ninth or tenth grade (if at all), struggled to enhance my reading, writing, science, math and other skills, and otherwise would’ve goofed my way to a high school diploma. Would I have taken an AP class, or had a Meltzer as a history teacher, or taken the PSAT or SAT? I’m not sure, but highly unlikely. Still, I would’ve graded with a diploma, with proof that my education was the equivalent of an average ninth or tenth grader’s, confirmed by a decade of standardized state tests!

Then, after three to five years of struggling to find full-time work above minimum wage, or after several years in the military, I’d make the choice between  a University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, DeVry University or some other for-profit college. I’d discover quite quickly that I was wholly unprepared for even the most watered-down online college curriculum, taking courses in a four, six or eight-week format (instead of the typical ten or sixteen-week semester format).

Romanian Army POWs from Battle of Stalingrad, February 3, 1943. (http://ww2incolor.com).

There would’ve been no agonizing choice between Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, no switch of majors from computer science to history, no big moment in my development as a person. All because I wouldn’t have had the kind of earth-shattering experience that attending college full-time and in-person often can be.

Somehow, if I’d somehow survived the first semester or first year, I might’ve eventually graduated, albeit with a degree that will be of limited use in obtaining a good living wage. And with $70,000 in student loan debt and a degree from a disreputable for-profit college, forget about me going to graduate school to be a professor.

That’s what this K-16 system will lead to. Money flowing into the hands of illegitimate technocrats, testing companies, charter schools and for-profit institutions. Money and influence flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Teach for America. A permanent, if slightly better educated, low-wage underclass. That’s the now and future construction of K-16 education if we allow these trends to continue.