GatesGate

During the 1980s, when Japan’s economy was humming like a finely tuned Kawasaki, American business executives looked across the sea in envy. During the next decade, they came out of the Rising Sun‘s shadow. The men and women of corporate America found their mojo by becoming meaner and leaner as their bank accounts grew greener. They closed factories, shipped jobs overseas at $5 per week, and pared down to skeletal payrolls.  Business’ answer to non-working America: retrain (for jobs that they would again lose and once more admonished to retrain). However, don’t blame these good souls for the US fiscal fiasco of the 80s.

Corporate America discovered why America was lagging behind Japan: public schools! No, really. Pandora’s education box was opened—let slip the scapegoaters of war. Kids cannot read. Teachers cannot teach. Our economy was becoming the hand basket in which hell resides because education was failing business and America. Japan’s education was battering ours. An academic version of Little League Baseball’s World Series, in which their kids always beats our kids, teed off like a WWII Japanese mulligan. America fought the Emperor in Surprise Attack 2.0, as the country was caught off its economic guard because of enemy soldiers trained in educational bootcamp. We must whip our teachers into battle shape and get our yearn-to-learn children up to speed. The game’s afoot, to the victor go the global spoils. It was American enterprise’s version of a rival’s sacred custom: saving face.

ast forward to the present time. In the intervening three decades, more people and entities have landed on the educational landscape like so many Neil Armstrongs on the moon. One small thud for kids, one giant step for profiteers. Standards for sale, voucher and tax-credit proponents, teacher training consultants, commercial reading models, charter and for-profit schools, companies like standardized test giant Pearson to Bush family’s Ignite!--sellers clapping their jaws at the education feeder throwing them tax dollars and grant money and foundation underwrites to fill their rapidly swelling bellies. Only public schools were left to ask, like Oliver Twist, “Please, may I have some more?”

 None landed harder on terra educationa than Bill Gates. His divinely wrought Common Core begat high stakes standardized testing and Old Testament rewards and punishments for schools and teachers. He and his acolytes made learning more difficult, less fun, reducing classrooms to teaching-to-the-test bubbles. Once the Spring standardized exams ended, teachers lost all leverage because kids know that nothing matters more. The curriculum loses substance; only filler remains. The meaningful school year has been unofficially shortened because outside of the high achievers and a scattered few, students tell you “Frankly our dear teachers, we just don’t give a damn.”  

Under the sterile culture of Common Core and technology as the ultimate pedagogue, classroom management is more difficult as many students act out as a defense mechanism to deal with their failures of an unnecessarily elitist, complex curricula. Creativity is stifled by conformity and standardization, the effect of a technological society, as French philosopher Jacques Ellul predicted.  Childhood is stolen not by drugs nor family instability nor precocious sex but humorless and humaneless  classrooms devoid of youthful ebullience and professional enthusiasm. Teachers must pair lessons and student assignments with citations more reminiscent of a DA’s charges referencing the federal penal code. This commentary conforms to Standard XIV, Article 7, Section 8.B.4, paragraph 3, line D.5. Hey, buddy, can you spare a rubric?

The political rationale for open season on public education is simple. US schools trail other countries, as international test scores demonstrate; therefore, these failures put America at risk of being unable to compete (there’s an American buzzword if there ever was one) in the global marketplace,as been the case for forty years. Well, let’s look at this…rationally.

Japan’s economy in the golden 80s spurred a panic about our education the way Sputnik did to the nation in the late 50s. Japan’s economy crashed in the 90’s. The following two decades of stagnation and reversal of fortune was called “The Lost Twenty Years”, the bloom was off the Chrysanthemum. The residual effects still permeate their economy.  

n the 1990s, while Japan’s economic light dimmed, the US economy roared back as government policies plus business and labor working together helped spur growth and prosperity. Business congratulated itself on a job well done, and Clinton basked in the credit of wiping out the deficit. Each strata of the economy enriched, as minority businesses made gains and middle-class salaries rose; Wall Street boomed.

Nowhere, however, was praise and a thank you given for the educators, students, and public schools for its contribution to the recovery. The same could be said for the economic recovery begun after business nearly destroyed the world’s wealth in 2008 (let’s not forget the 1986 and 2001 collapses). Until the Covid-19 outbreak, we led the world for ten years in the financial recovery from the 2008 debacle.

So, how could it be that education led to the 1980s Japanese beatdown, but not the recovery of the 90s? How could it be that education was so failing we needed, in addition to other remedies, Common Core to save America’s place in the global marketplace when we, in fact, were the global marketplace?

The Education—Industrial—Political Complex became this century’s multiplier effect —huge amounts of money, personal goals, career ambitions and political agendas became way too important to let reality crash the party with truth and fact. Fake news preceded Trump’s ascendancy. To give education its due in the recoveries would obviate the personal ambitions of people like Gates and threaten everyone else who feared the Goose may have dropped its last golden egg.

Financial-centric, power-driven New York never could resist the seductions of a Bill Gates, bedazzled by his Microsoft history, software genius, and $100 billion. Amazon billionaire Bezos got a sweetheart deal for a headquarters in New York City, but ultimately failed to close. Bloomberg, a communications billionaire, turned the City’s vaunted, ferocious NYC media into mayoral Pavlovian dogs for 12 years --- including a pass on a Putin-like illegal third term suddenly made “legal.”

Schools need a myriad of resources from infra-structure upgrading to a vast reduction in school population to limiting class size to fifteen students. The creation of multiple schools in one building has created logistical nightmares and dangerous situations. Overcrowding is a pedagogical deal breaker for effective learning and teaching. Assessments are, to use an old computer term, garbage in, garbage out. Counselors, psychologists, support staff are needed to fulfill the requirements, policies, and unfunded mandates that make caring for kids or administering discipline next to impossible. We need a common core of community outreach, private and government programs to rebuild inner city neighborhoods, offer kids safe and enjoyable alternatives to the streets. Ipads and condescending white suburban college prep will continue to fail minorities.

Rebuilding schools from the perspective of students and educational professionals is not the direction this partnership of political and financial power will travel. If anything, the fight is defiantly, patronizingly the opposite. Gates bankrolls his MBG Foundation with pockets deeper than the Grand Canyon to satisfy his egolust to remake education in his own image, not those on the front lines.   

Seriously Governor Cuomo, dancing the tech tango at the gates of Bill and Melinda is not tripping the light fantastic; it is falling over your two left feet.

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