GOOD INTENTIONS, POLITICAL REALITIES, PRIVILEGED CLUELESSNESS: ON EDUCATION REFORM AND POVERTY
Education and education reform are vibrant examples of the wide spectrum of good people with good intentions and then all the way to the other extreme, spurious people with dubious intentions.
When my home state of South Carolina began sliding down that slippery slope of adopting (flawed and misrepresented) reading policy modeled on Florida, I came face to face (actually, voice to voice) with the harsh realization that good people with good intentions can be as harmful as spurious people with dubious intentions: Good people with whom I had been talking suddenly brushed me off, citing political expediency—better to get the money for reading and swallow the horrible grade retention element than to get no money at all, I was told.
I thought of this when I saw associate editor at The State Cindi Scoppe’s To fix SC schools, start with governance. Scoppe, for full disclosure, has published a number of my Op-Eds in The State, notable is that my positions are decidedly not in line with the politics or ideology of my home state.
Also, I am certain Scoppe is a good person with good intentions; she genuinely wants equitable and effective schools for all children in SC.
However, I also know good intentions (even mine) are not enough.
Scoppe opens with admitting she isn’t an expert on educating students, and then offers a relatively modest plan for education reform—ones she characterizes as “commonsense reforms that come from across the political spectrum.” Scoppe endorses the “best ideas from the right and left,” including:
- Making it easier to fire bad teachers (right);
- increasing teacher pay to teach impoverished students, and freeing teachers from non-teaching tasks (left);
- increasing charter schools, magnet schools, and parental choice, and giving schools more freedom in spending (right);
- implementing a better school funding formula, with more equity, and pursuing, possibly, district/school consolidation (left).
My immediate response was to share on Twitter my argument that we need not simply appease the political right and left, or the public, but instead should endorse evidence-based reform addressing equity.
So that leaves these questions:
- Are bad teachers, and the difficulty firing them, major (or even minor) hurdles to high-quality education for all children in SC? I have never seen anyone making this claim show evidence that this is true. I am deeply skeptical of these claims, also, in a right-to-work state where teachers’ unions have no legal power and very limited buy-in by K-12 teachers in the state. The real teacher quality problem in SC (and across the U.S.) is a tremendous inequity of teacher assignment: affluent and white students disproportionately have experienced and certified/qualified teachers while impoverished, minority, ELL, and special needs students disproportionately have beginning/inexperienced and un-/under-certified/qualified teachers.
- Would targeted merit pay for teaching high-needs students and relief from non-teaching tasks help improve education for high-poverty, majority-minority schools (notably along the Corridor of Shame)? Unlikely, since Good Intentions, Political Realities, Privileged Cluelessness: On Education Reform and Poverty | the becoming radical:
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