Public education’s enduring achievement

Dan Lips, an educational analyst at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, says that he supports a “quality education” for all of “America’s schoolchildren” (“Students waiting for a quality education,” BDN, June 19), but what he and his fellow analysts at The Heritage Foundation actually want is to undermine the vital heritage of American public education.

What they want is to take federal money away from the public schools, where everyone is entitled to a quality education, and bestow that money, our money, on private schools, where a quality education is available only to those who can afford it.

It is helpful to see Lips’ essay as a jeremiad, a speech that is delivered in response to a perception of cultural declension. Lips focuses his attention on the perception that American education – and by extension, American society – is declining in quality. For evidence in support of this perception, Lips refers to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB): “Millions” of American schoolchildren “were enrolled in persistently failing public schools back in 2000, and millions are enrolled in failing schools today.”

Lips’ solution to this terrible problem is to support President Bush’s 2007 budget, specifically Bush’s plan to give $100 million to America’s Opportunity Scholarship for Kids. This plan, says Lips, would award private school scholarships, worth $4,000 apiece, to low-income children enrolled in failing schools. This plan could ultimately provide 23,000 children with monies that would help them attend private schools.

There are a number of problems with this plan. First of all, at the most only 23,000 children would be awarded some financial aid. I’m not that good at math, but doesn’t Bush’s proposal still leave millions of children behind? Where are they going to be tutored and who’s going to tutor them? Public school teachers in public schools, that’s who undertakes year in and year out that daunting task.

Secondly, how do we know that the hundred of schools Lips refers to are failing? All we actually know is that the NCLB law mandated yearly testing of all students in public schools (ironically, private schools are exempt from this law). Each state was required to develop its own test and then the results – wealthy school district by poor school district, urban schools by rural schools, northern industrial regions by southern agricultural regions – are invidiously compared.

This style of testing, this method of evaluation seems to me not only unreliable but also self-serving. If one wanted statistics to support the claim that America’s public schools are indeed failing, I can imagine no more effective way of acquiring such statistics.

Thirdly, I object to the fact that the implementation of Bush’s scholarship initiative would in effect remove the best students from our public schools and bestow them on the private schools, thereby enhancing the social vitality and intellectual strength of the private schools at the expense of the already impoverished public schools. If we take away the classroom leaders, the models of diligence and manners and maturity and skill, we undermine the educational environment; we remove images of relevance and reasons for hope from the millions of children left behind.

And finally, let me add that I work as a teacher in a public school that has failed to attain the Adequate Yearly Progress mandated by NCLB, and I see little or no evidence of actual educational failure. What I do see, day after day, is an indefatigable staff encouraging and guiding the intellectual and social development of each and every child who comes its way.

Lips and his cohorts at The Heritage Foundation seek to foster the belief that America’s public schools are failing. Their constant repetition of this belief constitutes a jeremiad, a concerted effort to instill doubt and fear in the American people in order to facilitate the shifting of public funds to the private sector. This is their way of strengthening that political faction that Bush calls “my base.”

Our task is to deny the validity of such a belief. One effective strategy involves calling attention to America’s global prominence in the arts and sciences: surely our public educational system deserves a great deal of the credit for that enduring achievement.

William J. Murphy teaches English and history at Belfast Area High School in Belfast.