RE: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade

[Harry Pollard]

Bob,   What a nice letter.   Good to meet you!   The issue is not private or public education, but how to provide better education. In fact, here it is not even that. It is how to provide adequate education.   As I pointed out with my poor arithmetic, six teachers teaching a syllabus to 6 classes would have almost $1.5 to handle the task – at present levels of funding. They could double their salaries and have more than plenty to handle the expenses.   I lived in La Jolla (San Diego) for a few months on arriving from Canada and the kids went to La Jolla High School. La Jolla is about as upscale as you can get (I was lent a house).   The Canadian schooled kids were a year ahead of the local students. I hope this situation is still true of Canadian education. I was sorry to see that Grade 13 was ended in Canadian High Schools.   However “the neighborhood we lived in” didn’t provide a super educational opportunity. It was certainly better than an central city area with gunshots in the night, but the education was no better than fair, I would say.   To provide black kids with a better school opportunity, LA installed wide scale busing of minorities to white suburban schools. It’s probably not always true, but there seemed to be not an increase in minority erudition, but rather a downgrading of the school.   In the course of my job I would visit hundreds of schools across the country. Yet, I remember most the comment from an ultra-liberal teacher friend in the San Fernando Valley – a very active lady in everything. She said of her Junior High:   “I must say I haven’t felt safe in school since busing began.”   And we looked around the segregated campus, for the blacks stayed together and the whites stayed together. Maybe things have changed now.   When the working class are given a proper choice, they vote for vouchers, as was evidenced in a northern state – was it Minnesota? There, minority voters wanted vouchers, much to the annoyance of the teachers’ union – which jealously guards the students against anything that might be better than what they are getting.   Give working people a choice between free education and expensive education and their choice is obvious. I would choose free education every time. Yet, they are trapped into the free education. As I’ve said often, the best thing we could do for American education is to make it voluntary.   The somewhat whiney reply I get to that suggestion is that then kids wouldn’t come to school but would create mischief in the streets.   This seems to imply that schools are simply warehouse to store children during the day where they won’t do any harm.   Secondly, we have separated parent responsibility from their kid’s misdeeds. If their wages were garnisheed to pay for kiddy-damage, perhaps parents would start acting like guardians should act.   On the plus side, if parents make sure the kids attend school, it would follow that if they misbehaved and the teacher kicked them out of class, the parents would be in trouble. So, there would be great incentive to do what isn’t done now – take care of their kids education.   So, why can’t the teacher toss them out now?   Well, there is this $7,000 the district gets for each attending kid. Much of that goes to pay bureaucratic salaries and pensions so there is great incentive to keep a nasty kid in school at all costs – even to providing a separate classroom for the recalcitrants.   I was walking through an upper class district high school with a teacher friend. The principal went by: “Janet, you are doing a great job with the H Group” he said.   The H Group was the recalcitrant class. Janet said: “He has never visited the class. What he means is that there’s been no trouble.”   This was a Tustin, Orange County, high school, where (quite seriously) the working class cannot afford to live. They travel for an hour or two out to their homes in San Bernardino County and beyond.   Ask them whether they want to pay for their kids’ education or get it free and they will choose the obvious. If they can get financial help to go private, that’s a different matter. The minority parents who care about their kids’ education seem to choose it.   Incidentally, there was a program of voluntary busing in LA. Minority parents who cared, would get their kids to school and support their education. Then came cut-backs in the busing program. Guess which program was cut first? Of course the bastards cut out the voluntary system – the one  bright spot in the busing program.   You said:   “The social capital of the Welfare State, after World War 11, and the ideology of equal opportunity, allowed me to get an education.”   I managed to get a reasonable education in England before the war. Any economist worth his salt – perhaps any social scientist – looks for non-obvious evidence.   With my pre-war education I was reading well at 6 and would sit on the step changing “Tuppenny Bloods” with my friends. We were all poor so we would swap a lot. “Tuppenny Bloods  were “blood and thunder” publications for kids. They were full of war stories, adventure stories, space stories, school stories, and they were called Adventure, Wizard, Champion, Hotspur, and suchlike.   We avidly read about such heroes as the “Wolf of Kabul” a turbaned English adventurer with his Indian buddy whose name I can’t remember. I do remember Click-a-Bar his weapon. It was a cricket bat bound with brass wire which made it a mighty weapon. With it he would crack heads with abandon.   Unbelievably politically incorrect stuff, but it didn’t seem to do us any harm.   Almost no drawings in them – just pages and pages of text.   In 1973, we made our first return trip to England. In Victoria station was a W. H. Smith piled high with newspapers and books – including a selection of “Tuppenny Bloods”.   I picked them up and found – comics. The only text were captions – and simple ones at that.   What does that say about modern English education?   I want neither public, nor private education – I want the best education. To get it, we need competition in education. I want parents to be able to choose better schools over poorer schools for their kids. There is probably no other way to raise standards – which are low.   In the free market competition raises quality and lowers costs. It should be allowed to do the same for education. Unless you have a better idea.   Harry   ******************************************** Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655  Tujunga  CA  91042 Tel: 818 352-4141  --  Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net ********************************************   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert E. Bowd Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 12:31 PM To: Harry Pollard; Keith Hudson Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade   Hi Keith and Harry,   With the utmost respect for the both of you, I submit the following.  I consider my working class roots to be as impeccable as yours.  Like you, I share a strong work ethic, an innate survival instinct, and a passion for a society better than the one into which I was born.   My father came to Canada as child labour, as a Barnardo home boy, from England.  Until he was 16 he was effectively free farm labour, separated from his biological family in Cambridgeshire, and marginalized by the Canadian family whom he served.  He suffered emotional and physical abuse, was not allowed to eat with them, and was denied an education beyond the second grade.  Shame characterized his life as he wandered the back streets, away from a public gaze, and tended the gardens of the rich, in my hometown.  My mother was crippled by polio, from the time she was 4 years old.  She had many side illnesses in pre-Medicare Canada.  I was raised in poverty and knew about hunger and class marginalization as a child and bear that psychological imprint as an adult.   The social capital of the Welfare State, after World War 11, and the ideology of equal opportunity, allowed me to get an education.  It was the luck of context, however, not any special merit on my part.  I suspect it is similar with the two of you, respectively.  In a family of five, I am the only one who finished high school and went on to university education.  There are many, many bright working class youth as capable as I am, and as you are.  However, current educational reforms are limiting the kinds of opportunities we were able to partake of.    I became a teacher and went many, many rounds, with a class stratified school system, on behalf of my working class students.  As an educational researcher, my only interest has been in what happens to working class children in essentially middle class schools.  My current project, "Whose Standards?: Performance Standards, Globalization, and the Restructuring of School Knowledge" is part of my attempt to understand what is happening to working class kids under the current school reforms in relation to the paradigm shift in the way kid's achievment and teacher accountability is benchmarked using high stakes testing.  The project has been supported by SSHRC funding and several scholarships.  I have had lots of contact with powerful and wealthy people.  I have been a political activist and president of the riding association of a former Ontario Finance Minister.  But who cares?  I don't think it has anything to do with what I contribute to this list.  Rightly, or wrongly, I see this list as a place for me to learn from some very smart people, exchange views, and get information, a lot of which I keep for use in my work.   My view is that the working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal reforms, despite the rhetoric of equity.  Failure rates and drop out rates are increasing.  The savage inequalities that have injured the working class and minorities still exist.   I can assure you that to imply that there is a correlation between being working class and supporting private education is absolutely spurious.  I worked for several years on large scale surveys of public attitudes towards education in Ontario and we found no evidence that working class respondents, in significant numbers, were supportive of this kind of change.  In fact, most working class activists see private education as a threat to working class opportunity.     Studies of working class resistance indicate that some working class youth internalize the meritocratic myths of middle class schooling and thrive within them.  Paul Willis's classic study of working class resistance called such kids "ear'oles."  But many resist the class cultural agenda, that often includes the belittlement of working class work and working class identities and engage in cultural resistance.  You and Harry may well be examples of the former, but I am an example of the latter.  High school was a cultural dead space, for me.  You support private education.  I differ and support public education.  Vouchers and charter schools do not help working class kids.   The research is pretty clear that the best predictor of success, in schooling, is the neighborhood you live in.  Taking only the matter of reading scores, the higher your parent's socio-economic status, the higher your reading level.  High stakes testing is producing similar correlations.   No personal disrespect is intended towards either you, Keith, or Harry, and I will state unequivocally my respect for you both.  If I have written anything that has offended you, I offer my most deepfelt apologies for doing so.   Respectfully submitted, Bob   Keith wrote:   It is strange, is it not, that you and I, both working class, and who know what it's all about at every level of society from top to bottom, should be the ones (the only ones on this list as far as I can make out) who are calling for private schools. IT IS BECAUSE THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION, DUMBING DOWN FOR THE PAST CENTURY AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY, IS THE GREATEST INJUSTICE THAT HAS BEING DONE TO MOST ORDINARY WORKING PEOPLE'S CHILDREN BECAUSE BASIC SKILLS ARE NO LONGER TAUGHT. They are now being left defenceless just at the time when we should be vastly upgrading our skills.     --- Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.552 / Virus Database: 344 - Release Date: 12/15/2003 --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.552 / Virus Database: 344 - Release Date: 12/15/2003