Education and education reform have a special place in the hearts of American conservatives. In one issue the forces of the American right are confronted with all the things they hate about America: bureaucracy, unions, failing government, and pointy-headed liberal elites and educated experts who love those first three things. Education, they say, needs top-to-bottom reform so that American students can get the best possible schooling. Better yet, add lots of school choice and testing into the mix so that we can have accountability, and U.S. education will soon be the best in the world.
As is usually the case in the conservative movement, such broad-based rhetoric rarely meets reality. Yes, in many cases reform along these pro-market lines has worked in raising test scores, but not in the way conservatives would like. The Knowledge Is Power Program charter network is a case in point, as the schools have done phenomenal work in raising test scores and graduation and college matriculation rates in some of the most blighted urban districts in America. Yet it also turns out that things like smaller classroom sizes, consistent discipline, intense one-on-one interaction with students, and a paternalistic intervention into the home lives of low-income students does work wonders — just as liberal reformers have long argued. It’s also very expensive and dependent upon exploiting young and naïve labor through union busting, which suggests that liberal arguments for more school funding also ring true.
Perhaps the most bizarre way in which conservative championing of education reform has backfired, however, is in the area of testing and standards. That’s because testing reveals the dirty little secret of the conservative education movement: terrible schools aren’t just a problem for big-city Democrats. Rural areas in a lot of deep red states also suffer from terrible schools, and testing reveals rather clearly that poor education outcomes apply equally to whites in Appalachia as they do to “minority-majority” districts in places like New York and Chicago. Indeed, in many respects the poor white children in these neglected and underfunded rural areas have it worse than their black and brown peers in urban areas — at least the latter kids ostensibly have a large political movement behind them working to get them more funding and better schools. Working-class white kids in Alabama or Kentucky are, in contrast, pretty much out of luck.
Mayberry Orwellianism takes hold
Little wonder then that many deep red states are now as opposed to testing as big-city liberals, since testing shows, albeit imperfectly, that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Even more curious, though, is the growing conservative reaction against the education standards that these nationalized tests must necessarily test against. After all, given that math, science, grammar, and so on, are the same regardless of where you go, it makes sense to have one standard curriculum to follow. Indeed, local control of curriculum has long been seen as undermining national progress on education improvement by allowing parochial local interests uncomfortable with competing on a national stage to set the terms of their own success.
Given that this was long a charge leveled by conservative education reformers at big-city districts, it’s now ironic to see conservatives growing uncomfortable with standards for much the same reason, though it usually isn’t stated in just quite those terms. Rather, in places like Kansas and Texas where opposition to the teaching of topics like evolution is boilerplate for grassroots conservatives worried about secularism impinging upon the prerogative of religious obscurantism, national education standards are cast as a cultural issue, not an accountability one. Instead of having one single standard of accountability, which conservatives tend to like in most other government programs, suddenly when the shoe is on the other foot and it is their terrible schools that are under the spotlight conservatives find, as if magically, an appreciation for local control and cultural nuance.
After all, just look at the brouhaha in Colorado, where a conservative school board in suburban Denver rejected the national standards for AP History — a popular course that if successfully completed via a national exam gets high-flying high school students college credit. AP’s curriculum, said the board, too often cast the United States in a bad light and failed to take into account such concepts as “American exceptionalism” in its teaching of our country’s history. Instead of teaching about such things as Americans’ long struggle for human rights and the role civil disobedience and rebellion played in attaining those rights, teachers of U.S. history should instead present “positive aspects of the United States and its heritage” and “promote citizenship, patriotism, and essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system.”
In what surely must go down as a shining example of Mayberry Orwellianism, Colorado conservatives then ordered that teachers should not give students materials that “encourage or condone civil disorder or social strife.” How one would then go about teaching much of American history, especially the Civil War, in any way remotely approaching the truth is a bit of a conundrum that the state’s conservative know-nothings have also nicely answered: Simply substitute lies and feel-good ignorance for historical fact. As one of the state’s school board members recently opined, in the instance of slavery, for example, the country gave up the practice “voluntarily.” Yes, a school board official with actual power to set education standards over something like history actually said this. One wonders if perhaps the good conservatives of Colorado also think it should be taught that King George III was simply misunderstood or that modern physics and chemistry are, in fact. modern-day examples of demon-powered sorcery and witchcraft.
All joking aside, conservative problems with curriculum standards aren’t just limited to science and U.S. history. The new Common Core standards being touted by the Department of Education are being vilified by the right as some sort of back-door route into communist subversion that will turn our nation into a Marxist-Leninist hellscape. This is nonsense, of course, and while math problems may be getting a bit harder for us older folks to follow, the general consensus by America’s education experts — though conservatives would argue that they are all part of the vast international conspiracy that somehow failed to die in 1991 — is that the new standards are an important step in the right direction.
Conservatives set their own trap
The trap conservatives now find themselves in is thus a delicious one for their opponents: How can the country hope to provide a quality education for every student, even test them on what they have learned and hold whole schools accountable therein, if the curriculum isn’t standardized in some way? The reality is that much as how businesses compete not just locally or nationally but globally, today’s students compete in the same way. If our local standards and practices are weak compared to what is found elsewhere, then strengthening them through a beefed up system of accountability to commonly-held standards would, just as conservatives argue, seem to be a natural course to take. After all, if GE and Toyota follow industry best practice, why not do the same in education, too?
Unfortunately for conservatives, best practice necessarily leaves much of their ideology choking in the dust and cut off at the knees. That’s because rigorous academic standards and scholarship demonstrate pretty clearly that the idea of American exceptionalism or the scientific case for the Earth being made in seven days is bunk and hokum, little more than religious or nationalist propaganda that we would call out as such if, for example, such blinkered views were being taught in a Pakistani madrassa.
What’s more, because testing to national standards will necessarily accelerate the trend toward teaching a more honest version of science and our own national history everywhere in the country, standards very quickly become an even bigger threat to conservative ideological orthodoxy than even something like “Obamacare.” While programs can be deprived of funding, even the most determined minority can’t capture and hold a culture’s intellectual commanding heights with consistently losing ideas once free thought, free debate, rigor, and empiricism are used to judge them. In effect, in demanding reform of education conservatives have created the mechanism of their own destruction: a system that trains young people in the fine, necessary art of bullshit detection.
Educated liberals
So, spare a chuckle for these poor conservatives as they begin to be hoisted by their own petard in the ongoing war over American education. In trying to destroy a bastion of American liberalism, they’ve accidentally sprung a long-term trap on themselves that will ultimately destroy the foundations upon which their very movement is based: ignorance. Testing, rigor, and accountability are nothing to be feared in liberal America. Is it not after all to liberal Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford that even the most conservative of America’s wealthy elites aspire to send their children?
If as a consequence of all this conservative grandstanding on education America’s schools were to adopt standards that look like those encountered at America’s top universities, then that would be a big step in the right direction and one well away from where conservative America would like to see us go. The fact is that educated people tend toward liberalism not because liberal standard-setters are god-hating communist subversives seeking out a way to destroy truth, justice, and the American way, but because reality, as goes the quip, has a well-known liberal bias — something conservatives are finding out to their own regret.