I wrote a post last night called “When Competition Is Pointless.” The very idea that a federal education program would be called “Race to the Top” is indicative of a religious belief that competition will provide a better education, even if it can (by definition) NOT produce equality of educational opportunity. We might well wonder when our federal goal changed from equality of opportunity to a “race to the top.” Every race has winners and losers. Life has winners and losers. How did it become the job of the U.S. Department of Education to side with the “race,” rather than the effort to level the playing field for all?
This reader responded to my post about competition, expressing exasperation about our culture’s need to rank and rate and grade and find winners and losers:
“We used to teach children skills that would provide them with abilities to produce….to make products, to be productive. It now seems that we are teaching children to BE the product. All the testing and measuring and standardizing of the child seems to indicate that we see children as our produce….not as the next generation of producers. Its as if they are a crop to be consumed rather than a new generation of producers. Our mentality of competition shows in the popular programs of the day…Survivor, The Great American Race, American Idol, etc. The attitude that there can only be a select winner and there is only enough good stuff available for the top achiever is drowning us. The culture of competition is so much part of our lives we don’t even realize its taken over. Its most inappropriate in our schools at this time but it is a malaise throughout our culture. The attitude that there are only a few winners and all the rest are losers and you better know which you are at all times it going to take us down. Its like an ever growing barnacle that will sink us. Judging the value of everything (by rigid, narrow standards) has become our national pastime. Of course children are being abused by this practice. We can’t allow our leaders to continue this madness. Thank you for being a voice for the generation of children who are being cheated by this mentality.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Exactly. That is why applying the rules of business efficiency to teaching students is absurd. Children are not products on an assembly line. They should not come out of the graduation ceremony as clones.
But in a world that has created “financial products” is it any wonder that we have decided that human beings are products in the same sense? After all, our Supreme Court think corporations are citizens and dollars are votes…right? So why can’t humans be products for evaluation as to worth? (Never mind that being hydrocarbon human life forms is their only real similarity.)
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Whatever happened to the old line “you don’t fatten a cow by weighing it”?
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This is the change I believed in?! Where are you President Obama?!
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Very silent and ignoring the voices of many who supported him. Yep, I was one who believed too. Disappointed doesn’t begin to describe it.
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Fooled the first time, not the second. Held my nose for reasons I still think were correct given the options, but harbored no illusions that we were going to see an improvement in educational policy.
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Reminds of Gaddis, “The Rush for Second Place” in re: competition.
Also, I couldn’t help seeing Jefferson’s five major principles that were justifications for schooling in the reader’s response: “The first two were to teach people their rights and to teach them how to defend those rights. The third was to know the ways of the human heart so well that you can be neither cheated nor fooled.” The fourth deals with not being intimidated by experts and five espouses the value of useful knowledge: how to make, construct, etc.”
But these principles seem to be universally absent from our current system and the influence of corporate culture advocates a framework of commercialism that only allows consumerism as the viable form of citizenship.
Of course, Giroux et al.
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Looking at the language so-called reformers use, it is impossible not to see how they reduce everyone and everything – everyone, save the bogus meritocrats they claim themselves to be – to a fungible product.
Children are “assets.”
Teachers are “human capital,” to be evaluated upon their ability to “add value to a product or service before it is sold to a customer,” (the definition of “value added”).
Principals are no longer “Principal Teachers,” the origin of the term, but “Chief Executive Officers.”
Schools are units in a “portfolio.”
And on and on…
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Hey Diane,
Are you familiar with Mario Savio’s Sproul Hall speech? I’d love to read your take on it, the speech seems more relevant now than ever before. Link: http://youtu.be/fYSY2ohHFnQ
To add upon some of the other commenters, I saw a commercial for University of Phoenix some time ago, and forgive me for paraphrasing it, but it mentioned that ‘more big time companies trust Uni. of Phoenix graduates than any other place, why not enroll today?’ While visually depicting a woman trying to find a parking space and smiling once she finds one. No other person is depicted in the commercial, just her alone finding a space. The commercial left me wondering – maybe money isn’t the only end game in privatization, maybe it’s also corporate interest to strip people of their social and collective humanity and make sure they’re a product that never questions, never lashes out, never unionizes. After all, cheap labor is an asset that many companies go to extreme lengths to secure, why not make the students pay for it?
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The assembly line vision of children as identical products to be identically milled via identical milling processes (a single set of national standards, a single set of national tests, a single national database of responses and test scores serving as a conduit for curriculum materials from a few vendors) IGNORES the facts that
children differ enormously from one another, and
we need them to differ enormously from one another.
And it ignores what I think should be our central charge as educators–to discover the differing genius in this child and that and to develop it.
Totalitarians and technocrats share in common that they think that things are simple and that a single solution is appropriate for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether these people come from the left or the right. It doesn’t matter what good intentions they might have. They still put everyone in the same Procrustean bed and start lopping off body parts to ensure that they will fit.
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I think there is another aspect at work here. It is administrations which want to measure performance, and they want to measure because they have no hold on what is going on inside schools. Teaching is solitary work, the teacher is alone in the classrom with the children. Measuring how children perform will give administrations numbers which will allow them to point out that they’re doing their jobs right.
So, basically, they’re measuring because simply trusting schools and especially teachers to do their jobs right doesn’t let them show to others that they’re doing *their* jobs. It also doesn’t protect them if something goes wrong, and since we seem to have lost our capacity to accept and deal with failure now and then and must always be in control of everything, trust in letting schools handle their own affairs is no longer an option. It’s funny, in a way, because administrations do not want to let schools have too much responsibility, but then they shun the responsibility they take away from schools by trying to measure performance. And the only way of measuring they see is to have kids compete via specially designed tests and compare the results, however flawed that process is. The important thing is not how good the test is, but that it turns performance into a number.
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