COUCHING THE STANDARDS DEBATE IN HISTORICAL TERMS, standarized tests, Nation at Risk, history of schooling, Sputnik, testing, Dewey, Gates, the Lumina Foundation, Walton, Broad, reactionaries

standards, standarized tests, Nation at Risk, history of schooling, Sputnik, testing, Dewey, Gates, the Lumina Foundation, Walton, Broad, reactionaries:

COUCHING THE STANDARDS DEBATE IN HISTORICAL TERMS: Developing a dialectical understanding of the standards debate through historical awareness

by Danny Weil

The need to couch the standard’s debate within historical context and develop a Marxist analysis of the role of capitalism and schooling is essential.  Too much time has been expended fighting standards for almost one century.  It is time to understand that capitalism has no interest in education of its population.  for its administrators and executives education is essential, for they will spull the levers of the new techno-surveillance society that is barreling towards neo-fedualism.  However, for working people, immigrants, people of color and those not represented in the corridors of power, the standard’s debate is an old one.

It is time to seat it within a materialist context and see it for what it is: an attack on education, not reform.  Reform means leaving structures or instituions relatively the same, but with a tweaking or slight change at the margins.  This is not the agenda of Gates, Walton, the Lumina Foundation or any of the other anti-teacher, anti-student ‘revolutionary’ measures aimed at stripping education from the American landscape.  their attack on public education is not a reform, it is a reactionary revolution at a particular time in history when capitalism is in crisis.