On the State of Education, Part 3: Dollars, but Not Much Sense
It’s all about the money. This truth has been self-evident over and over throughout history, and today, during a time of dire need and precarious futures, it is once again showing itself. For example, congress passed a historically large stimulus bill in response to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing $2 trillion of financial support to various sectors of the economy, including direct payments to individuals and “forgivable” loans to businesses. The nature of the distribution of those funds and the conditions attached to the passing of the CARES Act are a discussion for another day. However, among those trillions of dollars were $30 billion allocated for propping up, supporting, and sometimes rescuing educational institutions and the people upon whom those institutions depend. Great idea, right?
The intent was to keep public education and state governments afloat until such a time as they could reopen schools; however, because of some (intentionally?) ambiguous language in the bill, the Secretary of Education, rather than sending that funding to struggling public institutions – who were its intended recipients – funneled hundreds of millions of those dollars to her favorite highly-endowed private and religious institutions. That money was intended to support low-income students, families, and school districts and public colleges; instead those districts have been instructed to share large portions of their relief funding with wealthy private schools. The privatization of education - the DeVos family runs a for-profit college empire - is an example of the fundamental inequality in education in America. You can read a more detailed account here.
That Secretary DeVos is doing what she’s doing isn’t a surprise, given her background (which is in business, not education). She’s a powerful cog in a broken system. From a student’s perspective, it also places her on par with my most hated and feared of all movie villains, the consummately evil Cruella DeVille (last name similarity notwithstanding; what kind of monster skins puppies?). But what she’s doing isn’t the point; the point is that she is able to do so because the language of the relief bill intentionally gives her that power, language that exemplifies, confirms, perpetuates, and deepens the sad reality: If you are not a source of immediate profit, you don’t matter.
Though they are cynical, biased, cruel, and short-sighted, the actions of Secretary DeVos and many others of her ilk in positions of power are aligned with America’s status quo, and are possible because of how deeply ingrained is the classism and racism that guides this country’s policies. And, We the People participate in this paradigm by failing to come together to decide – and then defend – what really matters. Many of us don’t vote, don’t participate in discourse, avoid conflict and choose to live with blinders on, would rather not stir the pot. Our fear, mindlessness, and disunion of purpose allows those with money, strong ideals, and minimal moral scruples to step in and impose their prejudiced will on society; they, unlike us, are united in their goal, which is maintaining a republic by and for the Wealthy, Christian, and White.
For historical context: At this country’s inception, only the children of landowners were eligible to go to school, and at the time, property ownership was only legal for white males. A little later, some Native American schools were established, but the purpose of this was not altruistic or pure; the purpose was assimilation of the “savages.” These are some of the founding philosophies of our educational system – exclusion, privilege, indoctrination – and we Americans are nothing if not true to our philosophical roots. Of those roots, Capitalism is perhaps the most vaunted and holy. It is a system that literally depends on inequality and ideological assimilation and indoctrination; what today’s mainstream educational system does is prepare students to step into capitalism’s paradigm of conflict, division, classism, racism, and ideological conformity. By championing this shared philosophical foundation, education marries itself to capitalism, and capitalism only has room for what’s profitable. Both historically and today – though there have been throughout history and are now brave people and organizations working hard to effect change – mostly what is profitable in the United States is a status quo that is founded on wealthy Eurocentric (White), heteronormative, divisive, profit-driven ideals, established early and maintained by nearly any means necessary.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not at all saying that education doesn’t or shouldn’t cost money. We have to build and maintain schools and playgrounds, feed kids, pay teachers and administrators and bus drivers and janitors, purchase books and computers and art supplies and musical instruments, pay utilities, and the list goes on. No one is arguing that schooling is cheap, and we undoubtedly have to find ways to pay for it. However, education cannot be reduced to a balance sheet, just as students cannot be reduced to scores and their corresponding funding dollars; we cannot commodify human beings or their formative experiences. A fatal flaw at the heart of American education is that its founders decided to look at schools in much the same way we view businesses: in terms of profits and losses. The problem with this perspective, and especially with making it a mandate as we have done, is that the profits produced by schools don’t show up linearly or immediately.
Letting Go of the Past
The financial investment made in an individual student does not come directly back to the school or to society the way that investment in an individual product is recouped by a producer and investors via sales of that product. Commodities that turn a profit are mass-produced; those that cease to be profitable are worse than expendable, they’re a liability. The problem with viewing education through a capitalist lens is that we try to make children those mass-produced, identical profit commodities. We also treat as liabilities – and discard – the ones that don’t fit the model. None of this may be my fault, or your fault, and it’s very easy to point fingers and rail against the system; in fact, I’ve just spent many words doing both, to provide historical context and reference for what we’re seeing today. However, assigning blame isn’t productive, because it keeps us anchored in the past, and who is at fault isn’t the point. The way to anchor ourselves in the present, look towards the future, and cultivate unity and hope, is to let go of the idea of fault while taking up the mantle of responsibility.
Rather than coldly dismissing any student that doesn’t “turn a profit,” what we in education must do is help people build their unique strengths and feel inspired, self-determined, and supported while giving them the information and skills they need in order to thrive socially, emotionally, physically, intellectually, and psychologically. This produces resilience and holistic well-being, which in turn helps ensure their contribution to overall economic prosperity and social progress, which then comes back to schools through levies, bonds, taxes, and general economic productivity and growth. Investment in education is never going to produce direct returns, and by applying a corporate model to education, we are ingraining an unrealistic and wholly unreasonable expectation of direct profitability.
This leads to similarly narrow evaluative measures like standardized tests, which then lead to unfulfilled profit goals, which lead to cuts, which decrease success, which drives up costs…you see how this works. Now, education is becoming prohibitively expensive, either barring the door entirely, or hamstringing the future economic, social, and intellectual productivity and contribution of otherwise qualified people by exacting sometimes lifelong, high-interest loan payments. That is money that would otherwise be injected into the economy, providing those very investments that local, state, and federal governments claim to need in order to continue supporting schools.
We also stake the livelihoods of teachers, the survival of schools, and most importantly the well-being, educational balance and success, and future of students and society at large on the false and impossible premise that “you can accomplish anything with hard work and a dream” while we perpetuate a system that actively works to kill most of those dreams. The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, yet the wildly disparate distribution of resources and our inflexible and foolish adherence to a narrow capitalist ideal of success when it comes to education, results in a consistent place at or near the bottom of the academic rankings among developed countries. Rather than punishing teachers and students for innovating, and keeping certain people out, we should be taking cues from the countries at the top, who all use much more progressive, positive, well-rounded, and inclusive educational models.
What we need to understand is that the benefits of a real and balanced education are nuanced, multi-fold, and non-linear; they defy the narrow relationship between investments, commodities, profits, and losses. We cannot produce well-rounded human beings, or build a well-rounded, balanced, and forward-thinking society, using a system and methodology that don’t value well-roundedness, balance, or forward thinking. With the exception of explicitly for-profit institutions (which are simultaneously disingenuous and egregious about prioritizing profit and overwhelmingly cheating their students), schools will never produce direct financial returns, and it is critical that we stop trying to force education into a corporate paradigm. It is one of this country’s fundamental failures, a self-perpetuating downward spiral that can only be stopped by changing the lens through which we view education. Doing this could have a powerful, positive ripple effect throughout our society.
Making a Change
Right now, schools are closed, and the educational system is quaking as it finds a way forward in uncertain times. The thing is, all of this uncertainty opens the door wide for us to make serious and critical evaluations of our social, economic, and political systems. And if in that evaluation we discover that some things in our world were not that great before (spoiler: they weren’t), we have not only an opportunity but a mandate to take the chance that has been given to us by this slowdown to decide what we value moving forward. Who do we want to be? What kind of world do want to co-create with our children? For me, this has been a time of seeking balance through some serious – and sometimes painful – reflection on my life, my thought and behavior patterns, the systems in which I participate, and what I want my world to look like. I’m considering what’s really important, what my values truly are. I’m trying to apply this type of thinking to my relationships with others and my relationship with myself, and I’m putting it into my work. I’m learning to take responsibility for myself, to stop blaming and let go of what has already happened. We can do all of this as individuals in whatever capacity our situation affords us; we can also do it as a society.
Originally published on May 30, 2020