Oprah's school fix not all it's cracked up to be

As so many programs on education have done before this one, Oprah’s show Aug. 7 revealed much, but proposed little of value. All of us who teach are aware of the myriad of problems that mitigate our providing children with the education they need, but a unified approach to dealing with any of these issues is sorely lacking. Now the Gates family wants to throw some money at the issue. Like most previous solutions, this commendable effort will do some good somewhere, but falls short of addressing the overall problem, even when the diagnosis is correct.

As impressive as the Gates’ $51 billion dollar fortune is, it hardly justifies their superficial understanding of the issue.

Hardly surprising, then, that a corporate executive would identify a media-based problem, state plausible causation that removes corporate responsibility, then propose a costly remedy that the government is unlikely to adequately fund.

Like so many theoreticians and talk show hosts seeking audiences, blame was delivered as scattershot in fog, blindly aimed and only occasionally on target. The deplorable District of Columbia model of public school dilapidation was presented by CNN’s indignant Anderson Cooper (Vanderbilt family scion and former host of Whittle Communications’ Channel One). The decaying infrastructure of one of the nation’s best publicly funded school systems (its $12,000 per-pupil expenditure exceeds the national norm by some $4,000), indicate the problem may not be purely financial. As one student put it, “the school looks good on the outside, but the inside it is crumbling.”

The basic problems with education are addressed daily, but sporadically. Those with workable solutions are largely unrecognized and scattered about the country. Those in charge of the educational apparatus are largely the result of academic semi-competence, political manipulations, non-competitive pay, and public apathy. The resulting scholastic bureaucracies tend to encourage uniform mediocrity while discouraging personal initiative.

Only in passing is the educational deficit attributed to an overall lack of reading emphasis in our schools. Most telling was the “Kid Swap” episode in which several students from inner city Chicago’s low income Harper High School traded places with their affluent cohorts at suburban Naperville’s Neuqua Valley High School which “graduates 99 percent of its students” the program gushed, while Harper “graduates just 40 percent of its 1,500 students.” Another example of the common educational tool of comparison and contrast meant to display inequitable results buried something less obvious: “At Neuqua Valley, 78 percent of students meet Illinois' reading standards, 76 percent meet the science standards, and 77 percent meet the math standards. At Harper, 16 percent meet the reading standards, 1.5 percent meet the science standards and just .5 percent meet the math standards.”

That only 76 percent of the students in the $65 million school met Illinois reading standards should be cause for alarm. Houston’s KIPP Academy which has a mostly low-income student body similar to Harper’s boasts a passing rate on the Texas TAKS test of nearly 100%. It would seem that either the TAKS is far easier or KIPP’s adherence to stern measures is incredibly effective.

What we have, instead, is an expensive glossing-over of the true literacy issue. Immerse these richer kids with enough expensive media and entertaining instructors and something is bound to soak in. That “something” however, still leaves us far behind our European cohorts and many of our schoolchildren will likely stand by as we’re exceeded by several rising third-world countries who understand the shortcut to a good education---well, there is none. It’s hard work, something our over-mediated, over-medicated, overindulged, overweight, and over-schooled students cannot be made to understand.

Public schools cannot fix what’s wrong with American students because ultimately, they’re beholden to the driving force in this country, corporate consumerism. Unrealistically high expectations, fueled by a never-ending flood of overly optimistic ads and adult pandering has given us a predictable “product,” the fruits of our “affluenza.”

We get what we pay for, and in the case of education, we suffer because of it. Intrinsic motivation to read and learn cannot be bought; reluctant youngsters must be prodded and pushed, for when the “light” comes on in their heads—usually around 10^th grade—that education is the key to future achievement and collegiate success, they must have enough of the basics to convert that knowledge into critical thinking—something not actively taught in public schools despite protestations to the contrary.

The service industry, for which most of our public school students are groomed, neither need nor desire most of their workers to be able to do much more than show up and follow instructions. Since the tenets of Marxism are only rarely a scholastic discussion, the ugly realities on which it is based must be experienced by the workers before they even discover the need to revolt. By then, the lack of unions and other organizational skills leaves them prey to unscrupulous employers whose knowledge of union-busting and unrest suppression is buttressed by the better-educated private school graduates. Class privilege then becomes the de facto marker of the ever-increasing wage and income gap; immigrant (or outsourced) labor becomes its tool.

Send Immigrants home?

Would we ever deport 12 million Mexicans just because they living in this country illegally? Not a chance. Whenever ICE initiates raids here in Houston looking for undocumented workers, nearly every Mexican restaurant (and a bunch of others) shiver.

Author and TV star Anthony Bourdain is one of the few chefs who's been willing to speak frankly on the issue. He says the American restaurant industry would be in big trouble if all the illegal immigrants in this country were rounded up and deported. "The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board," Bourdain told me. "Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable...I know very few chefs who've even heard of a U.S.-born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job. Until that happens, let's at least try to be honest when discussing this issue."

It's convenient to blame "Congress" or the "Guvmint" when in actuality it is we whose ambivalence clouds this issue. Yeah, we like low food prices that result from low-wage pickers and building costs kept low by "don't ask, don't tell" subcontractors, but we detest the idea that anyone who has done such menial work for decades be granted the same citizenship status as we who are lucky enough to have be born into affluence.

The work ethic that these people embody is often lost on our youth. Too lazy to pick up a few bucks mowing neighborhood lawns or bagging groceries, their insistence that "Mexicans are taking our jobs" elicits little sympathy. How many high schoolers really want to wash dishes all through high school and/or college?

Certainly, these immigrants put a strain on our profit-dominated health care system that shoves the uninsured onto the public health care system. Their nonresident status means that they are inclined to go to the more expensive Emergency Rooms that cannot turn them away than the much cheaper clinics that can. If a publicly-funded clinic tried to deal with these people, local talk show blabbers would have a field day "exposing" them while doing nothing for the problem except kept costs high. Lou Dobbs and other demagogues neither explore the problem in any kind of sympathetic depth nor provide a workable solution other than bigger fences.

The contradiction between blatant profiteering and xenophobic electioneering in the formerly Republican majority is made clear when the President's former business partner while with the Major League Baseball's Rangers, Tom Hicks, scandalously employs Central American immigrant groups to his Swift Packing plants.

Today Salcido is a plaintiff in two separate class-action lawsuits against Swift. One alleges that the company wrongly terminated dozens of injured workers to save on workers' compensation costs, slashing them from $6 million in 2002 to just $600,000 two years later, and another claims the company deliberately and systematically replaced native workers with illegal Guatemalan immigrants in a scheme to depress wages. While Swift acknowledges that it fired employees who'd been on injury-related restrictions for more than six months, it denies any wrongdoing. The company also says it did its best to obey immigration laws during hiring.

Right. They probably just thought all these folks were from some big Guatamalan clan that lived near Nacodoches for the last century, but hadn't bothered to teach its children English.

Perhaps the best thing about immigrants is that they reflect so vividly what is wrong with us. We say we want democracy, yet are unwilling to participate in it; we want "universal" medical care, but only for those rich enough to afford it; we want justice, but only for the folks we like. If another country treated our citizens as badly as we do--allowed as many children to be undernourished, unsupervised, undereducated, and medically ignored--we'd declare war on them. Instead, we single out those least able to defend themselves and scream "wrong!"

I realize this is an overused quote, but the irony of blaming others when so often we fail to accept the consequences of our own actions/inactions cannot be ignored.

"We have met the enemy and he is US!" - Pogo

Failure to act when the consequences are minor lead to the overheated media events that surrounding the Jo Horn shooting. Much of the uproar had to do with the shooting victims' undocumented status.