The Over Managed School

                As schools across the country start doing the first parts of the NCLB mandated testing, I think we should stop for a moment and consider what it is we have normalized as part of public education.  In spite of all the blathering about improving schools and learning outcomes, all this testing does is add to the bureaucratic control of schools and enrich the textbook and testing companies that feed this insanity.  These tests are not about student learning or better education.  They reinforce the socioeconomic status the students bring with them to the school, and they are used to put a very early limit on how much most students can ever be expected to achieve.  They are part of what happens when a politically motivated managerial class takes over a school.  The ‘data’ collected just becomes part of an endlessly recycled and recalibrated set of numbers that administrators use to justify their salaries and positions in the hierarchy of the school.  It doesn’t make schools better and it doesn’t make students smarter.

                Since 1983 and the publication of A Nation At Risk, we have been wringing our hands over how bad our schools are.  Most of the blame has been placed on the teachers, who went from respected members of the community to fakers and frauds living on the public dole.  We all know the tune.  First, we produce some suspect data about how bad the students are, and then we find an appropriate villain to start in the revival.  Teachers are almost always the villains.  Even though we spend less on real education (after deducting the money spent of government mandates and administration) than before, we somehow always come to the same conclusions:  the schools are terrible and the teachers suck.  Bush’s NCLB program upped the volume and made this charade into a major Broadway production.  Now public schools are caught in the endless cycle of testing that leads nowhere.

                What happens during these testing cycles is that the teachers, still wearing the black hat, spend less time teaching and more time filling out reports so administrators can fill out still more reports to justify the pitiful amount of state aid coming their way.  Every second spent on this nonsense is time away from what the teachers are supposed to be doing: teaching children.  In ‘bad’ schools, the teachers can’t even choose the pace of sequence of the lessons because the managerial class has decided they know how to do it better.  More and more teachers leave the profession, and schools keep failing in the same places and for the same reasons as before.  If any of this worked, even a little bit, wouldn’t the problem be solved by now?

                Public education is supposed to be the life blood of a democracy.  It can’t serve that function if it is instead held hostage to political agendas that are more interested in preserving the economic fortunes of a few over the democratic interests of the majority.  Far from improving or saving schools, we have drained them of their relevance and importance.  While we have been playing this shell game with education, the disparity in wealth in the country has become more severe and the democratic institutions we rely on have eroded.  Mobility in America is lower than in any other industrialized nation, except maybe Britain.  School is not a social or economic engine of democracy, it is instead a place where students go to learn their place.

                It’s past time to call of this to a halt.  There is no validity to the testing regime we are currently practicing.  There is no value to vocationalizing education to the point of losing democratic values and political citizenship.  The next time, and their will be a next time, you hear that test scores are down and the budget requires that we lay off teachers, let’s do this instead.  Let’s stop giving money to the giant textbook and testing companies, lay off most of the central administrators and give the schools back to the teachers.  They’re the only ones who are in this fight for the right reasons.  They’re the only ones who can make a school a school.  If your kid is taking a computerized test this week, ignore it.  Look in their eyes and make sure they are still excited and still want to learn.  Don’t feed the monster.