Are public schools the source of hidden riches and starting points for the transformation of society or are they impoverished zones to which the construction of real education can only be opposed?
Schools are sites of an unresolved ambiguity, the source of both alienation and–at least potentially–dis-alienation. The initial challenge for anyone interested in the creation of education that serves the public interest is to negate what has become the prevailing image of a successful school and what has come to constitute “good” learning and teaching.”Accountability”–strategies that rely heavily on measuring outcomes, especially student achievement, and attaching consequences, either positive or negative, to various levels of performance–is the prime concept driving education reform in North America.
These “reform” efforts are the ironic product of unaccountable corporate/state power that has made self-interested decisions ostensibly on behalf of the public (e.g., “No Child Left Behind”) when, in fact, the public has no meaningful say in what or how decisions are made or in what can count as legitimate knowledge for their children to learn. Coordinated control of goal setting, curricula, testing, teacher education and evaluation, works to restrict not only what and who can claim the status of “real” knowledge, but also who ultimately has access to it.
There can be no freedom apart from activity and within accountability-driven education all activity, other than the pursuit of the test score, is considered irrelevant.
Where accountability-driven educational reform prevails, teaching and learning are presented as an immense accumulation of test scores. Education that was directly experienced has become mere representation–students and teachers quickly learn that what you know or you can do doesn’t matter, only the score counts. Even assuming that the demands of these reforms could be met, this kind of education can never offer a qualitatively rich life, because its foundation is quantity, banality, and standardization.
We are now in an age in which all social relations within schools are mediated by test scores. The entirety of social activity is appropriated by the spectacle for its own ends and in education, like any other aspects of everyday life, there has been a continual downgrading from being, to having, to appearing. Educational reality has been replaced by image. In the topsy-turvy world of schools, what is true has become a moment of falsehood.
Local school communities are left without the authority to bring their collective resources to bear on a matter as important as the education of their children. The people who know children best–families and teachers–must give way to tighter control over how and what they learn to people in corporate board rooms and state capitols.
In today’s “reformed” schools every moment of life, every idea, and every gesture achieves meaning only from without. Direct experience and the determination of what is taught and learned by individuals themselves has been replaced by a passive contemplation of the images of “good” schools, students, and teachers. These images have been chosen by other people and are organized in the interests of only one portion of society–affecting the real social activity of those who contemplate the images.
The real social contradiction is between those who want (or are obliged to maintain) the alienation produced by accountability-driven education and those who would abolish it. What now passes as education reform implies the continual reversing of thing and image; material reality of learning has been reduced to an abstraction.
Education, as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life. In this form education constitutes the only reality in the face of the unreality produced accountability-driven education (which now seems more real than anything authentically human).
Genuine community and genuine dialogue can exist only when each person has access to a direct experience of reality, when everyone has at his or her disposal the practical and intellectual means needed to solve problems. The question is not to determine what the students are at present but rather what they can become, for only thus is it possible to grasp what in truth they already are.