Doubling Down (Again) by Reverting, Not Changing: The Exponential Failures of Education Legislation
Political grandstanding about education and proposed as well as adopted education legislation make me feel trapped in something between a George Orwell dystopian novel(“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH) and a Firesign Theatre skit (“The Department of Redundancy Department”).
One of my most recent experiences with the political process exposed me to the horrors (real, not fictional or comical) of compromise while I witnessed people and organizations typically associated with being strong supporters of public education defer to what became the Read to Succeed act in South Carolina despite the addition of third-grade retention [1]; the justification was that the compromise brought more funding to reading in the state.
Political compromise for education legislation, I regret, results in more dystopian fiction:Ursula K. Le Guin’s allegory of privilege in which she illustrates how some prosper while knowingly sacrificing a child as the “other.”
Now after much sound and fury, public education is poised to be bludgeoned once again as the federal government has committed to doubling down (again) by reverting to state-based accountability and continuing its ominous tradition of Orwellian names for education legislation: the Every Student Succeeds Act [2].
A couple of decades of patchwork state-based accountability throughout the 1980s and 1990s convinced the feds that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was the answer, and now about a decade and a half of NCLB-style federal accountability has failed just a miserably (mostly causing more harm than good); thus, as Alyson Klein reports, “The ESSA is in many ways a U-turn from the current, much-maligned version of the ESEA law, the No Child Left Behind Act.”
And just as I experienced in SC with Read to Succeed, those we would hope are on the right side of children, families, and public education are scrambling (as many of them did toembrace Common Core) to praise ESSA—although this newest iteration is “really about the same.”
At best, ESSA is a very slight shuffling of the test-mania element of the accountability era; however, this reverting to state-based accountability will guarantee another round of new standards and new tests—all of which will drain state and federal funding for processes that have never and will never achieve what they claim to achieve (Mathis, 2012).
ESSA will be another boondoggle for education-related corporations, but once again, that profit will be on the backs of children and underserved communities.
Yet, ESSA is not all U-turn since it has remnants of the nastiest elements of the snowballing accountability era; while some of the unsavory teacher-bashing is waning, ESSA nudges forward the dismantling of teacher education (a sneaky way to keep bashing teachers, by the way).
ESSA is finding oneself in a hole and continuing to dig. For those who jumped in, it is time to climb out. For those standing at the edge, back away.
Although now tarnished by Obama’s promises of “hope and change” (the Obama Doubling Down (Again) by Reverting, Not Changing: The Exponential Failures of Education Legislation | the becoming radical:
