Ok. Where was I…
Right.
So.
Throughout the 20th Century, the dominant ethnic culture's expectation for schooling was to provide factories, businesses, institutions, public works, etc., healthy, obedient, and comfortable-with-routine-tasks employees. Literacy and numeracy would be nice as well.
By the time I was in elementary school (the 70s), international schooling assessments were gaining more credence (e.g., PISA). So, how we as the United States ranked among the nations on our schooling system was associated in the media and politicians with how economically viable we were and how strong or weak the armed services were. Seriously. This allowed folks standing for office to blame EVERYTHING on the public schools and give ALL of the achievement, innovation, and productivity credit to…you guessed it—" American Ingenuity," "American Exceptionalism," and Capitalism.
But when the Russians launched Sputnik and made America look second best, the ire of the dominator impulse reared its head again by pointing ALL fingers at teachers, school administrators, and school boards. The seed of standardization quickly crept into State Education Agency and Local Education Agency meeting rooms. The New Math, equivalent to our Common Core Math (seriously, check it out), hit the schools throughout the late 50s and into the 60s and 70s.
The moronic backlash against the states' adoptions of the Common Core Standards by primarily communities of fundamentalist Christian and primarily of Western European racial heritage wasn't a phenomenon. All we had to do is look four decades back, and we would have learned from history that the reaction to Common Core Math in the aughts was an attempt at oppressing the nation's critical thinking ability/skills; not by an evil genius smoking a cigar in a dark room with her cronies, but by the very values/traditions Americans were fooled into identifying with throughout the nation's formation and early development. The oppressor never thinks she's an oppressor. Often, she thinks she's a liberator: a sentinel defending the honor of mother America.
It's what happens when there's a deep-seeded, theocratic, non-critical domination impulse quietly spreading and propagating throughout mostly unregulated schools and just about EVERY Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox Christian church in the country. Fools are fooled into being fools.
That's right, folks. We Americans blamed American public schooling for our second-best defensive posture. So, throughout the second half of the 20th Century, national and local policies caused state and local education agencies to bring into play standardization efforts to optimize and improve the American citizen. And that's when the slide started. Poverty, racism, inequality, urban decay, cultural unrest, and a host of other national challenges were to be dealt with by America's public school systems. That makes sense, right?
Categorical Programs
In the middle of the 20th Century, most parents worked long factory hours, which engendered fancy-free teens roaming the streets for hours. Plus, some of the students weren't doing so well at hitting the books. So what we did in response was to lengthen the school day/year and create 'Categorical Programs' like the now-infamous Title I.
By the mid-60s, folks noticed that the standardization efforts and policies regarding curriculum and instruction weren't showing the sort of results the dominant American culture was hoping for. As such, it was determined that the real reason why we weren't seeing an equitable rise in the collective skills of American children was that we had too many students with special needs: students with learning disabilities, communicative disorders, the handicapped—which included students with limited or no English proficiency who were mostly the children of immigrant families. They were all referred to in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 as the "educationally deprived."
Those Language Wars I referred to in part one of this series continued throughout the 60s and 70s (Lau v. Nichols, Bilingual Education Act of 1968). In the mid-70s, Congress passed a law that eventually became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1997—the law that activated what is commonly known as Special Education for students with disabilities attributable to physical or mental challenges. To be clear, IDEA didn't come on out of the goodness of the American people's hearts. It was partly thinking that it would help boost our international education ranking and partly because of the reaction by the parents of students with special needs and students with limited-English proficiency (LEP) to their children being lumped in as "low achievers".
So now, it's the 1980s. Reagan.
An inept actor, turned (you ready for this) governor, turned (you ready for this?!) POTUS. Engineered by the conservative Christians of America at the time, Ronald Reagan took on the following approach to fixing America's problems (which, again, were aaaaaaaaall caused by the schools). The categorical programs approach, wherein substantial, increased funding was provided to local education agencies to meet the needs of the neediest of students apparently wasn't working. So, he figured he'd slow down the funding and make our "failing schools" issue a matter of needing better values; a values-based approach.
According to the Reagan administration and those that supported it, White supremacy and chattel slavery which created an unfair playing field for Americans from other ethnic groups, had nothing to do with why our schools weren't scoring so good on the PISA. It was all the sex the kids were having, the temptation of drugs or the lack of a hard-work ethic, or lack of respect for traditional values and institutions.
That was the problem. Conservatives took on the holier-than-thou position using terms like "Say No to Drugs" or "traditional marriage." Reagan's solution was to scare the crap out of Americans by putting out A Nation at Risk, a study that explained how if schools didn't do better, the U.S. economy and America's international standing would falter, nay—collapse, entirely. Zombies would walk the streets. Terrorists would rape your sisters. Mind you, the economy was just barely sputtering in the early 80s (before it jumped up the mountain later in the decade), so he was also able to blame schools for the economy he couldn't jump start. The Reagan Republicans put the blame for our lack of international competitiveness…on the schools.
Technically, it was under the Clinton Administration that the American impulse to standardize education, which began some 60 years earlier, took flight. The Goals 2000: Educate America Act basically funded the creation and implementation of academic standards across all public education systems in just about every state.
I started my career as a 6-12 grade educator right before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era (2001-2014) so my entire in-classroom experience and about a 1/3 of my experience as an Administrator took place during those ridiculous years. It's when the word accountability1 was introduced into the American vernacular. Bottom line: NCLB raised the tide for students with special needs and English learners. When reviewed over the span the law was in effect, those subgroups benefited from rising scores (albeit not very much). However, it also hardened the opinion that poverty, disability, and racism weren't the reasons for student's inability to achieve in more significant ways.
The thinking was that the reason those students were failing was that…they just weren't trying hard enough (referred to today as 'grit').
“If Johnny and Suzie can do it, so can Armando and Tyrone.”
“My grandparents were immigrants too. They turned out fine.”
“Anyone can grow up to be POTUS. ANYONE!”
“America is the land of opportunity!
The dominant ethnic group of the country had engrained within themselves the notion that the reason they were happier and more successful than other ethnicities was purely because they worked more and better, came up with more clever mousetraps, and were #blessed by god, so to speak. That is, they are more comfortable and more successful because they have more merit2; more value.
The Ideology of Merit
Cultural assumptions lead to cultural ideologies. But ideologies like those that purport the meritocratic nature of America constrain society and schools from realizing their democratic possibilities. From the get-go, from the Colonial Period to today, we Americans have been proud of how we, unlike Europeans, forged a "fair" culture in which individual ability and determination (not wealth or personal connections) are the way to success and progress. Right?
It's impossible to square up the central dilemma of our wealth and privilege disparities because the ideology and myth of meritorious achievement has been woven into what we think of as American principles. It's in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Merit has even been granted moral legitimacy to actions or conditions that could be unfair, illegitimate, and anti-democratic.
Now look, it's not that commitment and ambition don't matter if one is successful. It's just that inequity should matter too. Public schooling is one of the better ways for social mobility; and I agree, for the most part. We educate our youth so they can make a better life for their family than their parents did for theirs. But for every Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, millions of Americans end up nearly exactly where their parents did, or even worse. Because although there's truth to the notion that if you give it your all, you'll go far. But that assumes everyone starts out evenly.
So the American tradition of meritocracy has actually solidified classism, racism, and inequity by pretending they just don't exist. But you and I know, dear reader, our America is wrought with inequalities and disparities. Adequate health care, housing, clean/cool environments, natural foods, and school resources are not doled out evenly in this country.
The hard truth is that meritocracy is an ideology that appears virtuous for all, but only favors the privileged, dominant class.
In fact, the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty of the 70s were borne to repair the failures of our meritocratic and increasingly ethnically diverse society. I believe they were successful, in large part. But they didn't finish the job. Yes, life was better for Americans of African descent and immigrants after those large social movements. But the ideologies instilled in our society, those of meritocracy and rugged individualism, the culprits that maintained structural and systemic inequalities, played possum. They stayed put and quiet. In fact, after Nixon got canned, the White supremacist and religious bigots of America hatched their 40-year plan, the Contract with America; part of which was to deepen individual responsibility so employers, churches, landlords, schools, civil services, health organizations, etc. couldn't be blamed for America's woes.
Failure and distress brought about by socially corrupt institutions were the individual's problem here in the land of the free, the home of the brave.
In context, “accountability” was just a way of averting real leadership by blaming low achieving students themselves for not doing better—not the teachers, administrators, parents, social institutions, school boards, special business interests, special religious interests, systemic racism, Capitalism. No. It’s the individual’s fault. You know, the 10-year old 5th grader who just emigrated from Panama. It’s his fault that our scores were lower on international rankings. Sure, he can’t speak English. But, in the eyes of NCLB, that seems like the child’s problem. Yes. That’s much easier.
In the eyes of the Lord? As in the “chosen people”? Sheesh!