NCLB and the Commoditization of Education
Sunday, August 12, 2007
One of the issues bound up with the conservatives'
view of education is "commoditization, " the belief
that something has become so commonplace and
unremarkable that it can be mass-produced, packaged
and sold, like potato chips or ten-penny nails or
Windows computers. Originally the person who invented
potato chips had something new and remarkable; over
time the process for making them became so refined
and streamlined and advanced that almost anyone could
make them, and the only difference between potato
chips became price. The item in question thus became
a commodity. As Thomas Friedman has shown in The
World is Flat, when an item becomes
commoditized, it can be outsourced to Asian workers
who will do it more cheaply or it can be
computerized, mass-produced by algorithms that can be
programmed, measured, and assessed.
In some ways it seems that education is in danger of becoming commoditized. And I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect. Probably some of each. You see this happening already, and, even worse, in the way in which education is talked about, you have to fear that it's only going to get worse. The forces of rampant capitalism are closing in on American education.
Item: In the book Many Children Left Behind, Stan Karp makes the point that, "critics see NCLB as part of a calculated political campaign to use achievement gaps to label schools as failures" (page 54). Anyone who knows the first thing about probability and bell curves knows that in any group of people, by any measure there will be gaps. Since there will always be gaps between the best and the worst, this means there will always, inevitably, be "failures" which opens the door for "market measures, vouchers, and other other steps towards privatization" to move in and "reform" public education (58). It's either planned from the start (which I sort of doubt, knowing that at the very least Ted Kennedy was one of the co-authors of the original No Child Left Behind legislation), or a lucky break of cosmic proportions for the free-marketers. But the door is open.
Item: Blogger TeacherJay has noted that some schools are beginning to pay their students for attendance and achievement, thus making good little consumers of all their students. Get and A and earn a hundred bucks! Can there be anything that makes a clearer link between education and commoditization?
Item: Educational corporations are jumping into the NCLB game with both feet. It's getting to be big business--there's lots of money (LOTS of money) to be made by declaring some children, teachers, and schools to be failures. Special privatized schools, charter schools, commercial after-school programs--veritable cash cows.
But even worse, I think, are the pre-packaged "Pass state-mandated tests" programs, sold over the Internet and also increasingly hawked by large publishing houses. These are often the worst kinds of education imaginable, flash-cards, rote drill and kill memorization, phonics (don't get me started on the futility of phonics!). Often these are computerized, the CD version of flash cards. Mass-produced, pre-packaged education. Reading as a salable, measurable commodity: a thing.
Real education--the kind that requires attentive and informed intervention by real teachers--can't be commoditized, so it apparently must be sacrificed to mindless computer programs and state tests of trivia. For they can be commoditized. And sold at Walmart.
In some ways it seems that education is in danger of becoming commoditized. And I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect. Probably some of each. You see this happening already, and, even worse, in the way in which education is talked about, you have to fear that it's only going to get worse. The forces of rampant capitalism are closing in on American education.
Item: In the book Many Children Left Behind, Stan Karp makes the point that, "critics see NCLB as part of a calculated political campaign to use achievement gaps to label schools as failures" (page 54). Anyone who knows the first thing about probability and bell curves knows that in any group of people, by any measure there will be gaps. Since there will always be gaps between the best and the worst, this means there will always, inevitably, be "failures" which opens the door for "market measures, vouchers, and other other steps towards privatization" to move in and "reform" public education (58). It's either planned from the start (which I sort of doubt, knowing that at the very least Ted Kennedy was one of the co-authors of the original No Child Left Behind legislation), or a lucky break of cosmic proportions for the free-marketers. But the door is open.
Item: Blogger TeacherJay has noted that some schools are beginning to pay their students for attendance and achievement, thus making good little consumers of all their students. Get and A and earn a hundred bucks! Can there be anything that makes a clearer link between education and commoditization?
Item: Educational corporations are jumping into the NCLB game with both feet. It's getting to be big business--there's lots of money (LOTS of money) to be made by declaring some children, teachers, and schools to be failures. Special privatized schools, charter schools, commercial after-school programs--veritable cash cows.
But even worse, I think, are the pre-packaged "Pass state-mandated tests" programs, sold over the Internet and also increasingly hawked by large publishing houses. These are often the worst kinds of education imaginable, flash-cards, rote drill and kill memorization, phonics (don't get me started on the futility of phonics!). Often these are computerized, the CD version of flash cards. Mass-produced, pre-packaged education. Reading as a salable, measurable commodity: a thing.
Real education--the kind that requires attentive and informed intervention by real teachers--can't be commoditized, so it apparently must be sacrificed to mindless computer programs and state tests of trivia. For they can be commoditized. And sold at Walmart.
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