What if you were a product of public schools and found yourself years later getting a graduate degree in business management at Oxford University? Your British friends are very taken with ideas like accountability and competition. Maybe they saw “Waiting for Superman” and they too want to close the achievement gap.
What would you tell them?
Susan Altman found herself in that situation and she explains it here. This is a young woman with a keen sense of values. She has had a good education.
This is how she begins the explanation:
“Data isn’t everything.
“Did anyone here get really fired up for practicing the GMATs? Would your 9 year old self have loved school if you practiced 3rd grade GMATs all day, every day? Of course not. Testing is miserable, uncreative and doesn’t inspire us to be lifelong learners.
“The education reform movement is driven by a vision of the world that isn’t grounded in the messy (and potentially wonderful) reality of education. Instead, these policies come from a world of numbers, data, and a deep, compulsive desire for statistics. Which is fine if you are running a business and profit is the only outcome. But education is not a business. Test scores are not currency. And doing well on a test does not serve as proxy measure for “received a high quality education.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not really all about data, it’s about selling the tools to collect data, tests, tablets, subscriptions. The new Amplify, supposedly being adopted by NYC and sold by NewsCorp, only cost $299 but the annual subscription per year is $99. so if you do the math, $99 x every student in NYC = a pretty big pay out but not really all that much data.
http://www.zdnet.com/news-corp-education-unit-launches-299-android-tablet-7000012199/
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Interesting.
It’s certainly true that the minute you consider data from tests (and other forms of arbitrary measurements) as THE measure of “education,” and start to tie people’s livelihoods and the fate of community schools to it– you have already gone so far down the wrong rabbit hole that the rest of the nonsense follows naturally.
Which is all pretty frightening.
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OMG…it really is a GRAB for money off the backs of our young and our teachers. This is most horrid.
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Simple–Corporate control over schools to take taxpayer money as an income stream and produce passive workers.
See this about ALEC’s war on local control and school boards:
http://vltp.net/school-boards-beware-alec-calls-for-elimination-of-school-boards/
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Ms. Altman–thank you for an insightful essay. Exactly right–the conditions of private schools are the conditions we should demand for all children in society. Small classes and rich curricula filled with projects, critical thinking, and creative field work will light up the natural curiosity and intelligence all students bring to school but which only some students in some privileged schools are allowed to practice.
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Interesting post — when I think of my favorite classes, it is not the “stuff” I learned that I remember, but the energy of the teacher and the curiosity that he/she instilled in the students. I didn’t just learn facts, but learned to think, to analyze, to learn, and to problem-solve. Those are the skills that have made me succesful in life and they are not measurable by a standardized test.
I highly recommend Ms. Altman’s orginal post also — her assesment of education and the difference between private/public schools is spot on. Why do the wealthy send their kids to private schools anyway?
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Thanks for your comments! There are many good reasons to send kids to private schools, but one group that is interesting are the thousands of wealthy families from Korea/China/Japan who apply to American (and British) boarding schools in huge numbers.
An admissions officer in the US once claimed we could fill every bed in the entire boarding school league with Chinese or Korean students, five times over.
On the surface, the families are trying to improve their chances of getting into American universities, but there is much, much more to the story. Korean, Chinese families I’ve worked with are so grateful they have the means to get their child out of test-cram-drill-prep hell and send them to the US for education.
Teary-eyed Korean mothers have told me how much they love that at these US schools, their child gets the chance to develop his or her WHOLE self. They can do art and music and public speaking and poetry and environmental studies. That they matter as a person, not just a test score, and that their personal progress, the journey, is what counts most. They say they can see the marked improvement in confidence and self-awareness over their years in the States.
I’d imagine that if they followed this debate they’d be beyond confused as to why we would ever, ever move away from what we do so well. To them, the kind of education we do best– the education that creates the thinkers, the leaders, the movers and shakers in the world– is special, important, and something they consider a great luxury, a privilege, a gift to their children. Why would we change the foundation of an ed philosophy that is the envy of the world?
Let’s not let corporate or political interests hijack the best version of American education, which should be available to all students. Period.
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Thanks Sue. Great points. There certainly has been a flood of wealthy students coming to our private schools so we must be doing something right. And, these same private schools are moving away from grades, giving less tests, reducing AP courses, and implementing student-driven education (Harkness etc). But, of course, the elephant in the room is money — can we model our public schools after a system that can cost $20,000 or $30,000 (or even more) per student? Private schools have class sizes of 10-12 students; not sure the public schools can ever match this. Great ideas though.
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“…these policies come from a world of numbers, data, and a deep, compulsive desire for statistics. Which is fine if you are running a business and profit is the only outcome.”
The obvious point is spot on. But there is another key point here: why would we leave to the wolves of profit the matter of ethics? Why is it that we dismiss businesses proper from the ethical and moral dilemma of “profit is the only outcome?”
No wonder Marxist cultural criticism continues to be the best and most incisive cultural critique in our time – too often we Americans are far too quick to give business an ethical or moral pass, because after all, if you are a legitimate business it’s okay to only care about profit – damn the people who slave to help create those profits.
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