Reform School

“Capitalists will constantly seek to reshape schooling because their labor supply can always be more efficient”

“BY the time most public commentators are old enough to publish a book, they have put enough distance between themselves and their compulsory education that the particular ways in which it sucks are hard for them to recall.”

“At 20, education reformer Nikhil Goyal is an exception to the rule.”

“In his Schools on Trial he captures the particularities of a kid’s frustrations with rare vividness. A typical sentence: “In both prisons and schools, you are cut off from the rest of society, stripped of your basic freedoms and rights, like free speech and free press, told what to do all day, and surveilled dragnet style.””

“Although there are many people within the public education system who believe in the noble goals of civic pedagogy, that’s not what America’s schools were built to do. Goyal argues convincingly that, before compulsory schooling, unenslaved Americans were not only extraordinarily well-read by international standards but widely covetous of learning.”

“Compulsory schooling was not introduced to solve the problem of uneducated, unengaged, or unthinking masses. If anything, the opposite is closer to the truth.”

“In 1837, Horace Mann, the founder of American compulsory education, established the Massachusetts Board of Education, the first such agency and one which would become the model for the nation. But Mann didn’t want a more intellectually engaged population—literacy in the state already stood at 99 percent.”

“Social control was a serious concern for Western elites after a series of failed revolutions, and Mann was very impressed by the system he saw on a visit to Prussia. He returned with a plan for public education.”

“The system was profoundly anti-democratic by design.”

“Whatever else it has become, compulsory education was originally built to produce a rigid class hierarchy of adult workers and ensure obedience to the Kaiser.”

“By the early 20th century, industrialists had become obsessed with the idea of efficiency and scientific management. Concerned as always with their labor source, the business community wanted to reshape the schools, but first they sought to undermine public confidence in the schools they already had.”

“Goyal describes the first school reform movement this way: “The business community began its assault by bashing the state of public schooling, employing statistics on the ascending illiteracy rates, low student achievement, and the number of children who didn’t finish high school as evidence of failing schools.””

“Successful, they ported metrics like average achievement, work speed, and most importantly cost-per-pupil, into the discussion about pedagogy.”

“The ruling class corporate reformers are a persistent feature, and they can be relied upon to come up with new ways to tailor (and Taylorize) education to fit their needs.”

“What are American public schools for? Despite as many different perspectives on the question as there are people who’ve passed through them, American public schools are for American economic progress in today’s global economy.”

“If education was once meant to produce good Prussian monarchists, and later to battle the Soviets, these days the justification is an internationalized labor market.”

“The Obama Administration cites four key objectives in its reform agenda, and they’re worth examining in detail because they map very well onto the larger corporate reform movement:”

“• Higher standards and better assessments that will prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace.”

“• Ambitious efforts to recruit, prepare, develop, and advance effective teachers and principals, especially in the classrooms where they are most needed.”

“• Smarter data systems to measure student growth and success, and help educators improve teaching and learning.”

“• New attention and a national effort to turn around our lowest-achieving schools.”

“Of course no one calls for reform to lower standards, but assessments designed to measure future workplace success are somewhat specific. This first plank ­establishes the direction for the following three. The second plank calls for “effective” teachers and principals where they’re most “needed.” Since efficacy and need are determined by the assessments and standards in the first plank, that means bringing staff who will produce more future workplace success to schools that aren’t producing enough. The data systems in plank three are an update to the scientific methods imposed on schools a century ago, to guide the path from assessments to standards. In plank four, schools that don’t meet the standards will be “turned around,” presumably so that they face achievement.”

“In this formula, the president implies that with hard work everyone can get a good job. This is the premise for a lot of public education rhetoric, and it is 100 percent false.”

“It may be technically true that in the American system anyone can get a good job, but that doesn’t mean most people aren’t out of luck.”

“Anyone can win the lottery, but everyone certainly can’t. America is still a class system, and by design, most people—no matter the average level of education or job skill—will have to sell their labor to property owners in order to feed and house themselves.”

“Those property owners are the same people that have spent the past hundred years shaping the education system and scientifically reducing labor costs.”

“At the end of the day, in a capitalist system, public education will produce wage laborers, and the American education system does a good job at producing the wage laborers that employers require. If it didn’t, employers would be forced to increase pay and train the skilled workers they need themselves.”

“Goyal thinks education should be about human flourishing, and it’s hard to disagree. But in the American economic system, flourishing is a question of competition.”

“You can’t set children up to compete to exploit or be exploited for the rest of their lives and promote the values of joy and comradeship and learning at the same time. Luckily, America only needs one of the two.”