Ohanian Comment: Gerald Coles speaks truth to power and ticks off commentors at the Ed Week website. Coles offers a tough message. It IS on target. I understand that many teachers are still reluctant to hear it. They still buy into the message if they just work harder. . . .
I read Gerald Coles' fine commentary after reading the spring edition of Friends of Fern Creek newsletter, which gives an account of the ongoing program at Fern Creek Elementary School in Orlando, where staff and volunteers work hard to make sure children have a food pack to take home for the weekend. Each Snack Pack includes:
1 applesauce
1 cereal
1 granola/cereal bar
1 fruit cup/fruits snack
2 proteins (can beans, tuna, chicken, singles serving Mac & cheese, soup with meat, and pasta with meat)
2 extras (anything above or any canned item)
I first hear about Fern Creek through a Michael Winerip column. He cared about the poor as few media do. Yes, my name is on the list of donors in the newsletter. I'm proud to see 5 subscribers to my website announcements there too.
While the affluent are going to DisneyWorld, teachers and volunteers at nearby Fern Creek are trying to make sure children have food for the weekend. How is it that in a nation as wealthy as ours, these Snack Packs are necessary? As Gerald Coles points out, in corporate America, spending money to provide U.S. poor children with adequate food, clothing, healthcare and other basics of life, along with the full funding needed to educate them is deemed a waste of money.
P. L. Thomas uses Coles' piece as a jumping off point for BEWARE: Corporate Consumerism Culture and the Rise of the National Curriculum.
Why Bother Educating the Poor?
by Gerald Coles
In 1970, Sidney Willhelm's book "Who Needs the Negro?" (the latter word had currency at the time) argued that with the rise of automation within a capitalist economic system, African-American workers were transformed from being exploited to becoming "useless" from the viewpoint of those who controlled the economy and the automated productive processes emerging within it. Because of the racism of U.S. business interests, the workforce that automation would require could and would be largely white. Yes, business would continue to hire a number of blacks, but as much as the cloaked face of racism within companies would allow, black workers would become productively "unneeded." If black people disappeared tomorrow, Willhelm maintained, for capital they "would hardly be missed."
Willhelm's assessment is now truer than ever for both poor blacks and many whites who constitute part of the potential U.S. workforce within global capitalism. Were he to update his book, the title would likely be "Who Needs the Poor and Much of What Had Been Called the Middle-Class?" Since overseas labor is less costly, fewer U.S. workers are needed for the jobs that are and will be available in this country. Why spend money to provide U.S. poor children with adequate food, clothing, healthcare and other basics of life, along with the full funding needed to educate them? For business needs it would be a waste of money.
Of course some unskilled, low paid workers will continue to be required as part of the U.S. labor force, but the remainder won't. This leaves the "1%" with a problem: what to do as more and more U.S. poor become extraneous for production and profit? Certainly the 1% will not redistribute wealth on their own and provide the full means for educating poor children or for creating socially useful work that could employ the poor. However, neither can the 1% appear wholly indifferent. Thus their answer: fall back on the one path that has a long historical record of "success": blame the fate of the poor on their weak education. Then, under the guise that the poor matter to them, the oh-so-concerned rich concoct educational "reforms" purportedly aimed at preventing poor children from becoming poor adults. However, the reforms invariably ensure that poor children will become poor adults.
Hence, whether today's educational "reform" consists of relentless standardized testing, common core standards, stricter teacher evaluations, No Child Left Behind, "scientifically-based reading instruction," "no excuses" schools, intensive phonics, Race to the Top competition, etc., these and similar policy measures are paraded as solutions. In reality, however, they are illusions that require minimum allocation of resources and by the damage they inflict both to teaching and learning, these illusions prevent the introduction of genuine solutions. Each seemingly well-intentioned but failed "reform" adds another monument to the row of monuments symbolizing the best of intentions: "we try and try but poor children continue to fail educationally and then grow into poor adults who have no place or minimal place in the productive economic system and can't find work that provides adequate income."
Meanwhile, along the way, business interests have realized that while pretending to create educational answers for poor children, profit could be accumulated by destroying public schools, privatizing education, and creating another version of "corporate socialism," i.e., public money going into private hands. However, while it is important to combat this additional funneling of money upward, Willhelm's insight explains the chief engine driving one educational charade after another: the poor have little economic value to the rich. If most of today's more than 15 million poor children were suddenly to disappear, business leaders and the politicians who serve them would respond with initial expressions of pain and sadness, then quickly add: "but doesn't this mean we can now further reduce domestic spending?"
Without social activism that will confront and change the economic system that has generated one educational reform charade after another, continued generations of poor children will be doomed to wretched adulthood.
What do you think? Are education reforms making a difference in the lives of poor students? Or are they a charade?
Gerald Coles is a full-time researcher, writer, and lecturer on the psychology and politics of literacy and education. He is the author of several books, including Reading the Naked Truth: Literacy, Legislation, and Lies, as well as numerous articles in education, psychology and psychiatry journals. Before devoting himself to full-time research and writing, he was on the faculties of the Department of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester. His chapter, "Reading Policy: Evidence Vs. Power," will appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (Sage). He is an active member of the Coalition for Justice in Education in Rochester, NY. He can be reached at geraldcoles@rochester.rr.com
— Gerald Coles
Living in Dialogue blog
2012-06-27
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/06/gerald_coles_why_bother_educat.html?qs=Gerald+Coles
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