|
Helping Poor Students Draws Opposition from Globe
By Paul
Moreno
April 2001
A column in the Globe complains that the MCAS
test is unfair to children in poorer districts because those
students do not perform as well on the tests as they do in
Wellesley or private schools.
But that's exactly the point. The poor will
continue to receive a second-rate education if we do not push the
schools to do better, through MCAS and charter schools.
The think tank in Cambridge that opposes the
MCAS, "Fair Test," does so because it believes that if
it is able to dismantle this type of education reform, we will be
taking the first step toward the end of capitalism.
Someone asked its president, Monty Neill, last
May, "Do you think...we cannot stop the testing and make real
progress toward good education for all without stopping
capitalism?"
Neill replied that it was unlikely that they
could stop testing while capitalism remained. He made the
following reply: "It may well be possible to stop high stakes
testing and corporate-led reform, though the fact that the same
corporate forces are imposing education reforms around the U.S.
and around the world suggests that they have a lot at stake. ...
And there are limits on the depth of the transformations of the
schools we can achieve while the corporations are the dominant
force in society. The elite have a fundamental stake in
maintaining social inequality, and the educational policies and
practices we would most want to change are designed to justify
social inequality by giving it an aura of 'meritocracy.'"
This has been the standard refrain of
"progressive" education for the last century. It is
their attempt to cover up the fact that they are the
"corporate power" in education and they are the ones who
contribute to social inequality, by making sure that the poorest
citizens receive only the worst, standardless product of the
public education monopoly.
Over half a century ago their arguments that
efforts to raise academic standards and improve schools were
really attempts to destroy public education by antidemocratic,
non-egalitarian reactionary elitists were answered by educator
Arthur Bestor. He explained that low academic standards were the
gravest threat to democracy and equality that one could imagine
and that liberals should be the first to condemn them.
"The way to perpetuate an aristocracy is to
give sound intellectual training to a minority and offer people
generally a cheap and shoddy substitute," he said.
And it was the educational establishment - which
Bestor famously called "the interlocking directorate of
professional educationists" composed of teacher colleges,
school administrators, and state education officials and which
former Education Secretary William Bennett calls "the
blob" - that created and maintained mediocrity in public
education.
Neill's comment was made on the list serve of
the Assessment Reform Network, according to The National Association
of Scholars. The column in the Globe was by Eileen McNamara.
|
