Education Action: Toronto

by Dudley Paul

The timing couldn’t have been better.

Fed up with the gradual strangulation of pedagogy in the service of politics across the United States, five thousand people rallied in Washington this weekend calling for an end to standardized testing and other polices diminishing public education. Organized by the parents’ and educators’ group Save Our Schools the rally was part of a 4 day series of workshops bearing titles like “Winning the Testing War” and “Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.”

For over a decade we have watched the corporatization of schools and fierce economic rationalism that entails. In Ontario successive governments vastly increased the size and inaccessibility of school boards as they reduced the power and usefulness of the people elected to oversee them.

Vibrant pedagogy has withered as teachers twist themselves around to accommodate a plethora of corporate standards. Standardized reporting of children’s progress has become so opaque as to mock the very language of learning. Standardized individual education plans are anything but- driven by an obsession with format, rather than ideas to help a child learn. The turgid Ontario Curriculum is unteachable. Standardized testing through instruments provided by EQAO has spawned a side industry based on test preparation and enforced remediation for those teachers whose students have failed to measure up.

All of this is to prepare students to participate in a so-called knowledge economy, something based on an unsupportable notion that they will trade on an undefined skill of thinking acquired from pedagogy that has been sufficiently narrowed to make it teacher-proof. Supporting this idea is the conceit that such learning can be measured, that for example 8 year-olds can reliably demonstrate not only their basic comprehension of a reading passage in the EQAO, but related abstract thinking. This is what will make them competitive in the knowledge economy. This is what must be monitored and remediated if necessary.

We do not want inquiry in schools. It takes too much time from the important task of preparing students to take their place in the knowledge industry.

Preparation for this calls for feeding a hungry beast, even as the walls and roofs of schools crumble. The high-tech equipment needed does not come cheap, especially during a time of economic retrenchment. So sell schools and eliminate the little thread that holds neighborhoods together. Sell advertising to pay for flat screen TVs in school hallways – something that will also help prepare students for the knowledge economy. Kids will always be reminded that their dual function in the world is to trade in knowledge and of course, consume.

Join forces with the local business school and present a strong corporate brand to show allegiance to the knowledge industry. As we have come to see in light of the Wall Street-initiated economic crisis, business is to be praised for its breadth of concern for the common interest. Extras like the arts, gym and shops might suffer for this cause. After all the knowledge economy is corporate, not literate as extra-Mayor of Toronto, Doug Ford recently lamented; he thinks his ward has more libraries than Tim Horton’s shops.

It’s worse in the United States. As Rethinking Schools’ Stan Karp wrote recently Who’s Bashing Teachers and What We can Do About It U.S. federal policy of late has been to turn from supporting school integration, extra funding for special needs and other equity-promoting initiatives to firing school staff and closing schools. Meanwhile federal policy focuses on high-stakes testing, doling out federal funds to the “winners” in this lottery over the “losers”.

The Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation in 2003 introduced annual reading and mathematics testing for students from grades 3 to 8. Schools that fail to meet “adequate yearly progress targets” two years in a row must be provided with technical assistance and offer students a choice of other public or charter schools to attend. Continued failure to make adequate progress forces schools to offer tutoring or have governance changes imposed upon them. It doesn’t matter how far behind students start, doesn’t matter whether they’re poor or live in under-funded school districts, doesn’t matter how much progress kids might have made – the arbitrary line is drawn and schools better measure up. Is there time or money for subjects like gym or shops, for good pedagogy in general? Of course not – just pass the test.

Despite schools’ practical though myopic focus on just passing the test, U.S Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said recently that 82 per cent of U.S. schools could fail to make the grade this year. Sounds like a major rethink is called for – but no – instead the Obama administration introduced “Race To The Top” in 2010, that atypical for public policy is what it says. Top performing states that have increased test scores, have improved so-called teacher quality and have become more open to charter schools may receive federal grant money out of an initial pool of $4.35 billion. So “top” schools – those that link teacher evaluation to test scores for example, that revise texts to reflect test standards or that form better corporate relationships through initiatives like charter schools – can expect more. So-called “failing schools” can expect what usually comes to those who struggle with poverty, different language skills, state economic disasters and so on – a race to nowhere.

Stan Karp goes on to say, the effect of these policies has made public education out to be a failure, justifying further control and the discipline of under-funding. It would only be cynical if it wasn’t all about children.

And there certainly has been failure. In the past year, Providence RI, fired all of its teachers. To fill a $327 million funding chasm, Detroit closed half of its schools increasing average high school class sizes to 60. States like Wisconsin, Idaho, and Indiana have worked hard to strip contracts, by cutting the collective bargaining power of teacher and public service unions (see Teachers Fight for Rights Across the U.S.) Massachusetts, New Jersey, Indiana, New York and California are all either considering or introducing legislation that would allow test scores to make up part of teacher evaluation. It’s beating a tired horse to pull an impossible load.

While parents and educators chanted and listened to speakers in Washington U.S. legislators worked out a deal that would cut as much as $2.4 trillion dollars of public spending over the next ten years in order to increase federal borrowing limits so the government can meet it payments this week. Who is anybody kidding about leaving children behind?

Five thousand people attending a rally in a country as large as the U.S. isn’t much considering the stakes involved. Whatever the reason for the small turnout, there has never been a greater need to support public schools. Good teaching is being crushed by efforts to remake education as a knowledge industry. School officials must get over this self-destructive notion that their work needs to emulate that of business. It is absurd that corporate lobbies like the Fraser Institute, rating schools in order to step up competition, should instruct educators about teaching the quirky, disparate group of kids who make up their classrooms.

Those who slavishly follow the ideology of business, preparing students to enter an ill-conceived knowledge economy, who buy its solutions of measuring learning and nurturing only the successful will fiddle as public education fails.

Save Our Schools, indeed.