Why Don’t Conservatives Like Public Schools?

I just read an article about Kansas.  Seems that the conservatives in charge there have reduced taxes.  Surprise, surprise the effect of tax reduction is state revenue reduction.  Now they seek a way to balance the budget, and you guessed it, they will do so by cutting funds for public education.  We hear no less from the new leadership in Texas where our Lt. Governor has vowed to lower taxes and then guess what, we will have to cut spending, and guess where we will cut?  The same place those same voices have been cutting over the past couple of legislative sessions:  public education.  Our Governor wants to increase the availability of full day Pre-Kindergarten, but offers no new funding to do so and includes additional accountability measures for 4 year olds.  What in the world is going on? Has public education somehow sinned and fallen short?  Have we offended the political right?  Are teachers and principals and superintendents employed by some demon enterprise that is soaking the life blood from America to the extent that we must increase accountability and cut funding?  I have been thinking about this a lot and listening to the rhetoric a lot and I have some theories about what is motivating what I see as a wholesale assault on public education.  My theory is based on some assumptions:

 

The education of all children in this state and in this nation is a classic liberal mission.  In the macro sense, anytime the government provides free services to all we are talking liberal solutions.  Public schools are to educate rich, poor, boys, girls, Blacks, whites, disabled, gifted, non-English speaking, etc.  We are to teach all and promote success for all.  What a grand mission!  But this is not a conservative mission.  It is not based on the market model, nor the competitive model, nor the model practiced widely internationally of sort and select where only a percentage of kids are allowed to get an education based on their performance, income, political connections or birth right.  No, this is a model to promote the success of all.  It is purely a notion born in a democracy where all humans are created equal.  I think that rankles the conservative mind-set.  Especially those on the far right, the ultra-conservatives, the wing-nuts.  In this piece when I say “conservatives” I mean ultra-conservatives and wing-nuts.

 

Worse, the effort to educate all children is not only very expensive, it is funded by tax dollars.  In Texas we use sales tax revenue at the state level and property tax revenue at the local level.  Other states include state income tax revenue which Texas does not have.  These revenues fund all state functions, and typically public education is at or very near the top of the most expensive state function.  Why is that?  Few operations are as labor intensive as public education.  Well over 70% of each school’s budget is the salary of staff.  And, most of the staff are college educated, degreed, certified professionals who are not willing nor should they be to work for minimum wage.  Teachers and administrators merit a professional salary.  We could reduce the personnel costs by reducing the number of school employees.  We can make a few reductions, but unless we are willing to see a dramatic escalation in teacher/pupil ratios, reducing staff is not practical.  And unless we are willing to stop providing support services for kids reducing staff is not practical.  If we are to serve every single child, then we can do so better the closer we get to one professional per every single child.  Personnel reduction moves us in a direction contrary to our core mission.  Well, we could reduce teacher salaries.  But that makes no sense either.  We are facing a dramatic shortfall in the number of teachers, especially high school teachers, and recruitment will not improve with reduced incentives.  In short, conservatives really do not like the basic mission of public education and they resent paying for it via taxes.

 

So the conservative mission, as I see it, is to do several things:  Reduce taxes needed to support public education, diminish public support for public education, promote the market model and competitive characteristics in public education, increase the accountability of public education, and if we must collect taxes to support education let’s find ways to shift as many of those tax dollars to the private sector as possible.  If that summarizes the conservative mission they are brilliant at the implementation.

 

Reducing taxes is fairly simple and ever popular.  To reduce taxes simply requires legislative action to do so, and a great argument against an incumbent legislator is that he or she either opposed reducing taxes or supported raising taxes.  That argument works so well we have devolved to legislatures hell-bent on reducing taxes.  Once governmental income is reduced, cutting public education is now a fairly safe governmental function to cut.  Why?  Public support of public education has been dramatically reduced.

 

Public support of public education has declined because the accountability movement complete with high-stakes standardized testing purports to show schools are failing, they must be fixed, and the solutions are to be found in the private sector.  Educational scholars like Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, Sandy Kress, Dan Patrick and Pearson have the solutions to fix public schools.  The solution is to spend less money, require more accountability, and simultaneously use the results of those efforts to rationalize shifting public tax money from public schools to the private sector in the form of charter schools and vouchers.  Therein is the rub.  Conservative mind set resents governmental services and supports promoting the private sector.  What could be a better strategy than to demean public schools with spurious data and then use the argument that public schools are failing to promote shifting tax dollars to the private sector?

 

The hard core bottom line is that the conservative mind set cannot include the notion of actually providing a governmental service that helps promote the success of all kids.  Do we really want all kids to be successful?  If so, there are clear strategies to help support that mission, and current conservatives do not support any of those strategies.  If not, then current conservative leadership is following a brilliant strategy of decreasing the likelihood of success, collecting crazy data to show that success is declining, and then shifting dollars from the public sector to the private sector.

 

What is so sad is that even conservatives seem to recognize, though they are not likely to publicly admit, that the government does a much better job in many settings than the private sector, especially when the effort is more moral than economic.  Should we have the private sector regulate meat production?  Nope, been there, done that.  Should we have the private sector provide law enforcement?  No, that is a frightful proposition.  Should we have the private sector manage our national parks?  Should we have the private sector charged with ensuring our water is safe?  Should we have the private sector tasked to provide our national defense?  Should the producers of products for infants be charged with monitoring the safety of those products?  On and on I could go.  The bottom line is if the motivation for performance is financial reward, then anything that increases profit is “good” and real ethics takes a back seat.  I think of organized crime operations as the classic unregulated free enterprise, private sector model.  There is a demand for drugs, prostitution, pornography, etc. and organized criminals provide those services and generate a lot of income.  They do so because making money is “good” even if it is not “right.”

 

I find these efforts of the current leadership to be beyond sad.  I find these strategies to be unethical and self-serving.  If all kids are successful via public schools, if we in fact educate all kids, rich, poor, boys, girls, racially diverse kids, then there is no special place for the children of wealth to get a leg up.  I remember a wonderful principal who was assigned to a low performing elementary school, 98% Hispanic and 100% free and reduced lunch.  In two years the campus became high performing.  Parents of kids in the affluent elementary schools where no kid was on free or reduced lunch and the student population was all Anglo, stormed the Board.  They argued it was not fair if poor kids did better on the accountability measures than their kids.  They demanded the principal be fired.  Ever since I have known there is no real support for the education of all kids to the same level of success as rich kids.  At least, no real support in the conservative camp.

 

As conservatives seek to deregulate the private sector, decrease taxes for the wealthy, and shift public revenue from the support of public programs to the private sector those of us in public education, those of us who deeply believe in educating all kids and deeply believe that there is no greater American mission than this mission, continue to labor in an ever increasingly hostile environment. 

 

What is truly amazing, is that despite all the efforts to derail public education we are doing one hell of a job.  So much so that when we begin to demonstrate improvement in all the accountability measures new accountability measures are implemented to re-distribute the outcomes and create more failing schools.  And, the evidence continues to show that public schools are performing as well or better than charter schools. 

 

Yes, public education is expensive.  Yes, public education is a governmental program designed to serve all children.  Yes, it has been very successful. And yes, conservatives have a real hard time with all that.  So public school folks will continue to be slaves to a hostile master while we strive to uplift all kids.  Know that as we continue to show success in those efforts, the conservative agenda to demean those efforts will increase.

 

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act is up for reauthorization.  The current version is called, “No child left behind,” and it is full of strategies to identify poor schools via testing and reduce the ability of schools to serve all kids.  A proposed new version entitled, The “The Student Success Act” is more of the same.  Neither piece of legislation is really devoted to the success of all kids, despite the positive, clever monikers of the bills.  The oxy morons are at work again.

 

Wouldn’t it be nice to serve all kids in an environment where professionals diagnose and prescribe the strategies needed to promote each kid and had the resources to do so? 

 

I wouldn’t know.