A couple of items on the education front caught my attention over the past month.
The first was a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Glenn Sacks, who just happens to be co-chairman of the Los Angeles teachers’ union. In his article, Sacks argues that the success of charter schools is all an illusion, essentially, arguing they are cooking the books.
Sacks acknowledged that charters’ outcomes are superior to those of traditional public schools. But he attributes this disparity not to the quality of the schools or teachers, but to “self-selection” — that the students in the charter schools are themselves inherently more likely to succeed by the simple fact that their parents sought a better education for them.
Sacks uses as an example the magnet school he teaches at: “Our magnet accepts everybody, as any public school does, but its students outperform residential students in practically all areas, including standardized tests, participation in extracurricular activities, and college admissions and scholarships.”
So far, so good, but Sacks continues, “What separates them from the residential school’s students is self-selection — they applied to a magnet. Yet that’s a big difference. The pursuit of a school of choice is evidence of a student’s and a family’s commitment to education.”
It’s a little tough to decipher Sacks’ point, but it would seem his assertion is that children with parents who are committed to their education ought to just suck it up and accept relegation to substandard schools for the sake of egalitarianism. He’s not the only one taking this type of approach.
The same day, the New York Times reported that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s school task force recommended, among other things, the elimination of “most selective admissions and all gifted and talented programs.” The contention was that such programs were exclusionary and elitist, catering only to, well, gifted and talented students at the expense of less talented students. De Blasio said as much when he recently stated that the testing of four-year-olds for gifted programs was “a real concern.”
Elimination of gifted and talented programs is, thankfully, a bridge too far for even the NYC teachers’ unions, but it is fully compatible with what many on the Left see as the goal of education. They deem the purpose of schooling not the passing on of knowledge or even the training of an individual necessary to be a contributing member of society — but instead believe our school system ought to pursue the nobler aim of social leveling.
Both the NYC task force recommendations and the usual criticisms made against charter schools illustrate the pernicious lust within the educational establishment for homogenization. The concept of individual excellence is at best a secondary consideration, at worst it is increasingly seen as an immoral enabler of inequality.
At about the same time, Roger Kimball wrote an interesting piece in which he explored the idea that a key feature of socialism is incuriosity regarding individuals, or as he put it, “its ingrained, indeed programmatic, lack of curiosity about other people.”
It’s one of those things perhaps so obvious as to be rarely noticed, even more rarely commented upon. Socialism, in whichever of its multitudinous forms, is concerned with civilizations and communities as a forest, and is necessarily uninterested, except in a most abstract sense, with the individual trees.
The individual — whose goals, desires, and, yes, abilities, may differ from his or her neighbor’s — is the natural antagonist of the collective. If the goal is levelling, a homogenized society where absolute equality is the ultimate ambition, the pursuit of individual excellence doesn’t have much of a place.
It may seem counterintuitive for the educational establishment in this country to harbor at its core an antagonism for any reform that may allow for greater outcomes than the media, but it just goes to show how far the concept of education itself has changed, to our childrens’ detriment.
Kelly Sloan (@KVSloan25) is a Denver-based public affairs consultant, columnist, and the Energy and Environmental Policy Fellow at the Centennial Institute.
