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I think we can all pretty much agree that education is important. It's a predictor of economic success; it affects America's role in international relations; it initiates children into society and strengthens cultural norms.
So why is American education policy such a mess? We don't trust schools, a colleague suggested.
Hmm. A provocative idea. Wondering if I could glean whether the presidential candidates' rhetoric indicated any underlying attitude about schools, I checked out the websites of the top candidates on both sides.
Clinton didn't have an education topic under her issues tab. Instead, she had "Supporting Parents and Caring for our Children."
"Support" and "care." Nurturing words. Maternal -- and yet paternal, too: I can see a pair of firm, guiding hands shepherding families toward a better end. Hillary is androgynous even in her verbs. Why choose between Mars and Venus when you can have the best of both?
Still, Clinton did have a few education policy points:
*Attracting and supporting more outstanding teachers and principals, and paying them like the professionals they are.
*Reforming the No Child Left Behind Act. This law represented a promise -- more resources for schools in exchange for more accountability -- and that promise has not been kept.
*Increasing access to high-quality early education and helping to create Early Head Start.
All these phrases sounded fine to me. What struck me was that they were not sentences. Instead of a subject and a verb, each phrase opened with a gerund, that handy -ing ending that turns a verb into a noun. A gerund nicely obscures who is doing the work and also makes it seem as if the work is never-ending -- like a 24-hour construction crew, anonymous under their hard hats, jackhammering by the light of flares.
If the Clinton campaign were pressed for a full sentence, I assume the real opening of these phrases would be something like "Public policy should be...". In any case, the hide-and-seek sentence fragments don't tell me much about an underlying attitude toward schools; however, they cue me that Clinton comes at the topic strictly from the perspective of a legislator.
As for Obama, well, no wonder we love him! He has a full page on "Improving our Schools." The "improving" implies they're not exactly broken, but they could be better. We could all be better. It is the tone of a coach or a pastor, encouraging but not Pollyanna.
He opens with a panorama: "Throughout America's history..." Obama is a candidate with a vision -- he looks toward the past, he looks toward the future. He stands on the Saint Louis Arch and can see all the way from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate.
What follows are not bullet points but paragraphs. Obama respects his audience. He speaks to us as adults, with facts and figures and transitions words like "however" and "nevertheless." (Hey, this guy should be a lawyer!)
On the paragraph entitled "Pay Teachers More" (aha! this is not a gerund, but an imperative, with the implied subject "you." Yet, in Obama-speak the implied subject sounds more like "we."), Obama invokes the second person. "If you're a teacher or a principal doing the hard work of educating our children..."
There it is! The charisma at work. I'm being personally addressed, my contribution is being acknowledged, but the responsibility for children is shared.
This guy is really good.
Of course, once I close the browser, I have no idea what he said. I have only an impression of Obama being respectful and a little deferring -- but in that way of good-looking people in high-status positions, so their graciousness in light of their obvious superiority only makes them more attractive. I also know that he's going to "treat teachers like the professionals they are."
Why do I remember that? Because John Edwards is, too. And that makes three-for-three top Democratic presidential candidates in favor of "treating teachers like the professionals they are" -- not only the same idea, but the same phrase! Never mind that Orwell would seize it as an example of avoiding original thought in favor of "phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse." I am a consumer of the media, and three impressions apparently make something stick.
Too bad it does nothing to distinguish the candidates. As a consumer, I have been reached. As a voter, I'm back at 0.
What do the Republicans have to say? For better or worse, their attitude on education is a lot more transparent.
Giuiliani throws around the phrases "a quality education" (why the modifier? should we be talking about any other kind?), "real school choice," and "save our public schools." The message here is that schools and the policies around them are not much more than a sham, liable to blow over in the next strong gust.
Less there be any doubt about Giuliani's view, he goes on to say, "I would not have had as good an education if my mother did not take control of it."
Not trust our public schools? Giuliani seems to have nothing but contempt for them. Yet, in his blustering and bravado (hey, I'm not sure if you know this, but Giuiliani was at Ground Zero on 9/11), he ends up sounding a bit like a Mama's boy.
Romney, on the other hand, is strictly pleasing the crowd. "I like choice. I like English being taught at our schools." The audience bursts into applause.
Since both Giuliani and Romney primarily use video to convey their policies, they speak with much less polish but a lot more punch. Short sentences. Gutteral words. I don't have to work as hard to understand what they're saying, and I remember it afterward.
On the page, Romney is a bit more expansive. "Today's schools are falling further and further behind world standards. It is time to raise the bar on education by making teaching a true profession, measuring progress, providing a focus on math and science, and involving parents from the beginning of a child's school career."
Who says liberals blame America first? In Romney's view, globalization is a race, and Americans are lagging behind and getting sloppy. Teachers aren't even true professionals. (Someone should tell the Democrats.) Parents are left in the dark, and children are the only ones we can take seriously. After all, they have "school careers." I picture them -- whey-faced urchins in tiny suits and briefcases, tromping off to sub-standard math and science curricula, only to be enslaved later by the Indians and Chinese.
It's a sad state of affairs. I'm not sure what Romney's going to do about it, exactly, but one presumes more than McCain, who does not even address education on his website. It is not under "Issues," nor does it emerge in a site search. However, press releases indicate he has appointed some folks to advise him on education policy, which is more than Fred Thompson, who does not yet appear to have a candidate web page.
Though enlightening, none of this research tells me much about the candidates' -- or the public's -- underlying assumptions about schools. This is too bad. I would like to have that conversation. What is the role of schools in contemporary America? In a democracy? In a time of globalization? What we want for schools is likely to reveal what we want for our future.
Yet, instead of inviting that conversation, the candidates' use their air time and web pages to tell us more about themselves.
The above piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here. If you're interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.
Sure, they may sling the hype - what else have we to go on, after all - but they won't make any effort to fulfill those promises.
The whole "no child left behind" notion is silly, whether espoused by the right or the left. The only way to ensure that no child is left behind is to make school so easy that it is meaningless. Where school is (appropriately) challenging, some kids will naturally leave others behind because some kids are naturally more talented (smarter) than others. As the comedian Chris Rock has put it, in a class of thirty kids, you will have five dumb kids, five smart kids, and twenty B and C students. That's the score. Gearing everything to the talents of the five dumb kids is a recipe for disaster. Gearing things toward the five smart kids, and letting the twenty mediocrities hang on as best they can, seems to me to be a better strategy (what about the five dumb kids? Well, hotel rooms don't clean themselves). I don't expect to see that, though. What will continue to happen is that the parents of the five smart kids (and many of the parents of the twenty mediocre kids) will continue to seek alternatives outside the traditional public school system.
Bush's apparent belief that any child can achieve as much as any other child if only given the right "resources" (money, tutoring, special teachers, whatever) is just silly. "Every child can learn," the pious bromide goes - well, yes, every child can learn *something*. Not every child can learn as much as every other child, however. You can't pour two gallons into a one gallon bucket, no matter how slowly or carefully or expensively you pour. As long as we are uncomfortable with this basic fact of life, we will continue to see public schools that are mediocre or worse.