Connecting the Dots: The Picture Is Ugly

The political season of 2012 will once again offer a blur of dots that few will bother to connect because the resulting picture is ugly—a disturbing caricature of the real American character beneath the political veneer and behind the empty discourse.

In South Carolina, as the Republican primary approaches, TV ads for Ron Paul promote the Libertarian/Republican as a good Christian; while in New Hampshire, Republican Rep. Jerry Bergevin is introducing legislation addressing the teaching of evolution in public schools:

“His House Bill 1148 would require that evolution is ‘taught in the public schools of this state as a theory, including the theorists’ political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.’…

“’I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights.’”

So if we begin to identify the dots, and just start to connect, let’s consider what we begin to draw.

The Libertarian wing of the Republican party is somehow ignoring the contradiction between candidates’ religious faith and their actions as government agents: Ron Paul as pro-life Christian v. the Libertarian mantra of less government intrusion (except when government can impose my ideology). And that disconnect between ideologies and what is left unsaid is also reflected in the logic behind the New Hampshire legislation: Evolution is wrong because it has ties to people who are atheists (at least that is the claim). But the same people decrying the teaching of atheism—the Libertarian wing especially—again fail to connect the rugged individualism discourse with one of their often-cited heroes—Ayn Rand, an atheist.

If we continue to identify more dots and make the connections, we see a portrait that would make a Picasso painting appear realistic, but I think the failure lies not so much with the politicians and their handlers, but with the electorate—those who appear to have similar problems with logic and understanding the ideologies and concepts they claim to embrace.

Education Claims in a Political Season

One topic that will not be absent from the 2012 political season will be education reform—especially (but not exclusively) among the Republican candidates who will continue to argue for both less government and increasing government’s direct role in running (and ruining) public education.

In the education reform debate, the cultural myths that are dominant include nods to rugged individualism, meritocracy, and competition, but these narratives and assumptions—as I discussed above—will be tossed out without context or evidence. And here is where true accountability comes into play.

Republicans—and Democrats—have shifted the education reform debate further to school-based reform, focusing on national standards, teacher accountability tied to testing, and so-called alternative approaches such as corporate charter schools (such as Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP]) and Teach for America (TFA).

While the cultural narratives appear robust and enduring, the evidence is simply not supporting the claims, and in 2012, educators and scholars need the support of the public to hold political leaders accountable for both claims that are false and the dynamics that have created the conditions that contradict the American faith in rugged individualism, meritocracy, and equity.

Some of the key realities that fly in the face of the current “No Excuses” Reform movement in education include dots that need connecting:

• In their lives and in the schools, children are being told to suck it up—”No excuses!” But without political or economic power, children have suffered greatly in the twenty-first century U.S.: 6.5 millions children living in homes paralyzed by unemployment and:

Child poverty has risen by a percentage point or more for each of the last four years, from 18 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2010. The number of poor children has increased by 3 million over the same time period, totaling 16 million children nationwide in 2010. Child poverty varies dramatically by state, with rates reaching 30 percent or higher in three states (the District of Columbia, Mississippi and New Mexico). The author predicts that child poverty will continue to rise in 2011, by about a half percentage point. Child poverty will remain high across the country. Isaacs’ child poverty prediction model suggests that 27 states will have poverty rates of more than 20 percent in 2011, a dramatic increase from 14 states having such high poverty in 2007.

• But, remember, “poverty is not destiny,” “poverty is not an excuse,” right? It seems both poverty and privilege are destiny in the U.S.:

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage….

Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.

That is but two dots of a large, complex, and ultimately ugly picture of the U.S., one that includes staggering facts and unanswered questions about the disproportionate number of men, especially African American men, who are spit out of our schools and our society and then into jail.

While I am not optimistic, the political season in 2012 is an opportunity for clarity, confrontation, and action that address these sobering realities about the U.S. and its public education system:

• U.S. children are ignored and suffer the greatest burdens of inequity with the least power to confront those inequities. The fact of high childhood poverty in the U.S. lies at the feet of the privileged and the powerful.

• U.S. public schools reflect social inequity in the U.S., and those schools have done little to affect social change—primarily because public education has been burdened by bureaucracy and a corrosive commitment to measurement, labeling, and ranking.

• The U.S. is not a meritocracy, and it is moving further and further from that ideal.

• The U.S. is not exceptional in reality as other countries have attained our values in both their societies and their schools—primarily by addressing social inequity, which creates positive outcomes in society and schools.

Political and popular claims otherwise are delusion; they are endorsing the status quo of privilege and inequity that the U.S. has become. It is beyond time to connect the dots, face the ugly picture that reveals, and set out to redraw that which we have claimed to be seeking since our founding:

Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up
Our father’s father’s father tried, erased the parts he didn’t like
Let’s try to fill it in, bank the quarry river, swim
We knee-skinned it you and me, we knee-skinned that river red
“Cuyahoga,” R.E.M., Lifes Rich Pageant