On Educational Reform I

This post was initially premised as a contribution to current debates over education reform in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  As I began to rethink the current debate over educational standards and evaluations grounded on student performance between the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)/Common Core standards and earlier or newly developed versions of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, I realized that the concerns that I had with educational reform in Massachusetts run much deeper than the grounds of the present debate.  For that matter, as an intellectual otherwise amenable to the idea of utilizing charter schools as a means for building greater heterogeneity into the public education process, I shoulder certain misgivings regarding the larger, market-oriented framework of consumer choice in public education currently being advanced as the primary argument for expanding the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth as an alternative to "standard" public education.  In the end, debates over educational assessment/accountability and over choice in public education fundamentally take certain rationales in the educational reform process for granted without undertaking a broader debate about where the education process fits within the economy, civic/political life, and cultural development of the Commonwealth.  Emphatically, we are taking for granted that public education constitutes, for all intents and purposes, the production of workers for the Massachusetts economy.  Insofar as the educational process certainly does have an economic rationale grounded in the development of a workforce capable of undertaking tasks that will sustain the vitality of a dynamic, Twenty-first century economy, including programming of electronic devices for automated manufacturing techniques, it further stands to reason that, if we allow the public educational process to degenerate into a "cradle to career" workers' training program, then we will condone the hijacking of public education by a strictly economistic logic that subordinates broader human developmental concerns, including citizenship, nurturing of artistic creativity, and the interpersonal socialization of young people, to the problem of employability upon graduation.  With my basic concern that the administration and reform of public education, from kindergarten through grade twelve, is becoming a subject of public debate along lines ensuring that economistic rationales always take precedent over other priorities in defining the mission(s) of the public education process, this post seeks to advance a larger vision of what public education is, what purposes it serves, and how it should be evaluated in the interest of ensuring that it serves the needs of the community that undertakes its establishment.  At this level of abstraction, the arguments advanced here will necessarily obtain cursory treatment.  The material broached in this post could occupy several book-length monographs.  My intention is not to be conclusive but to lay down a set of principles on which I think any discussion or debate over the direction of public education should be premised.

1.  The educational process, as the inculcation of accumulated curricula of ideas to students on a range of diverse fields of knowledge, fundamentally expresses the outcomes of political processes, determining the overall mission of education and the necessary standards for transmission of knowledge to students.  That is to say, in order for a process involving the transmission of ideas between individuals to be qualified as education, it must involve a broader, explicit or implicit, determination that the ideas being transmitted achieve some mission that the broader community or politically dominant groups consider definitive of the educational process.  Education is necessarily an outcome of political processes and the educational process necessarily works, at least in part, to reinforce existing power relations within a community, however large or small, diverse or homogeneous, democratic or authoritarian, the community is.  This is not to say that the truths expressed in the educational process are purely rhetorical objects of partisan control over docile, infinitely mutable minds or that educational processes can ever take place to the exclusion of other information transfers between individuals that do not qualify as educational matter.  Simply stated, the body of information that qualifies as educational matter derives from processes through which individuals or groups with the political capacity to evaluate ranges of ideas determine which ideas are important to convey to students.  This determination is fundamentally predicated on the principle that the transmission of these ideas will advance the welfare of the community, as determined by those with the power to make the determination of what is in the community's best interests.  This principle is sufficiently broad to encompass all scales at which decisions on curricula take place, whether we are talking about the determination, in the American context, of national educational standards in federal statutes or through collaborative processes between various state-level educational decision-makers (e.g. the Common Core initiative), or we are talking about decisions on curricula effected by home-schooling parents.  To the extent that we accept this general principle, the idea of educational reform is subsumed within a larger structure of decisions through which politically influential decision-makers in a given community (of any size) have already determined the mission and goals of education from diverse potential missions.

2.  The notion that education and formal schooling are not equivalent amounts to something more than a cliche, to be posted on a bumper sticker. Education is a lifetime endeavor, transcending the temporal boundaries of formal schooling. This conclusion should, likewise, be basic to my further argument. When an individual in their forties, like myself, is introduced to a new set of ideas, either through formal lecturing/training or by incidental or purposeful exposure to divergent information media, education is taking place. Examining this conclusion in reference to conclusion 1, we, emphatically, must recognize the political nature of the process taking place, even when the individual has freely chosen to be exposed to a certain set of ideas that reflects the efforts of their creator or disseminator to exercise authority in reframing the reality of the particular subjects involved in order to change the way the subject is perceived by the student. The education process, as a conjointly political and cultural process, in this sense, is absolutely coterminous with every dissemination of information, by every conceivable media, however mundane. If we accept this principle, then we must simultaneously truncate the larger subject of this document in order to prevent its degeneration into a larger discourse on epistemology writ large. In this document, I am not concerned with educational processes as they affect me, in my forties and, at least presently, out of any formal educational setting - my interest resides entirely in formal schooling, as a distinct educational process, and, more pointedly, on formal schooling from kindergarten through grade twelve (henceforth: "k through 12").  

3.  The financing of formal schooling is a secondary question except to the extent that public financing of formal, k through 12, schooling with tax revenues invokes concerns regarding the sufficiency of returns to public investments in the education of young people.  As a final, critical entry point to the broader argument that I intend to make in this document, it is fundamental that the educational process, in all of its divergent forms, involves expenditures of labor and capital that usually, though not always, demand a rate of return, frequently involving market processes.  With regard to formal k through 12 schooling, professional educators, possessing years of specialized schooling (with costs incurred at their expense), an evaluated formal practicum, and, perhaps, years of prior experience in the formal schooling process, demand a rate of return sufficient both to maintain a desired, if modest, standard of living and to reimburse the (increasingly less than modest) costs of their formal schooling (e.g. to compensate for the servicing of higher education debt!).  Such concerns, channeled through the collective bargaining power of public teachers' unions, in turn, elevate the concerns of tax payers that their investments, to compensate teachers and administrative staff and to finance infrastructure development, are yielding an adequate return in regard to educational goals.  Educational reform, as a legislative initiative at the state and federal levels, remains ultimately grounded in these latter concerns of local tax payers, filtered through policy debates in higher echelons of government on the best ways to support local educational processes at the least possible cost to higher level governmental authorities.  The public financing question, thus, becomes wholly intertwined with educational reform, as an agenda, to the extent that the latter seeks to tweak the educational process in ways that will render it more efficient relative to the investment of tax revenues for its purposes.