Third World America - Arianna Huffington [66]
We also have to put an end to our obsession with testing, which was supposed to be a way of assessing reform but is now treated as actual reform. It’s as if the powers-that-be all decided that a checkup was as good as a cure. This focus on testing reduces teachers to drill sergeants and effectively eliminates from the school schedule anything not likely to appear on a standardized test—things such as art, music, and class discussions.
And cash-strapped states inevitably end up relying on multiple-choice questions instead of essays, which are up to one thousand times more expensive to score.17 So it’s good-bye analytical thinking, hello rote memorization and educated guessing. Our all-out embrace of testing has given us the standardization of education, the destruction of critical thinking, and the categorization of millions of our children as failures.
So what can we do to turn around this sorry state of affairs?
For starters, we have to start looking at things in daring and different ways. To paraphrase Einstein, you can’t solve a problem using the same type of thinking that created it. Unfortunately, in our current political climate, it’s nearly impossible to get people to stop protecting their little parcels of partisan turf and start thinking on a different level, allowing them to connect the dots and see the possibilities that might lie on the other side of the mountain.
And what I see on the other side of that mountain is a single-payer system of education.
Single payer never made it out of the gate when it came to health-care reform. But we should bring it into education reform.
In a single-payer health-care plan, the federal government provides coverage for all U.S. citizens and legal residents. Patients don’t go to a government doctor—they just have the government pay the bill. And that’s how it would work with education. In a single-payer education plan, the federal government, in conjunction with the states, would provide an education allotment for every parent of a K–12 child. Parents would then be free to enroll their child in the school of their choice.
In a single-payer health-care plan, all citizens would be free to select the physician and hospital of their choice. And, unlike in our education system, no one backing single-payer health care ever suggested that patients can see only a doctor in their own district or can be operated on only at the hospital down the street. If we don’t hold our health hostage to the value of our property, why do we do this with our children’s education? The annual educational cost per child—equalized for urban and suburban school districts across each state—would come from current education funding sources.
When it comes to quality control, in health care the guidelines incorporated by Medicare are used to manage the quality of health-care services. In education, the government would be responsible for accrediting the schools from which parents could choose.
It’s simple, sensible, and, above all, just. And maybe instead of calling for an exorcist any time the words “competition,” “choice,” or “freedom” are used in connection with education, we can start singing hosannas for an idea that preserves what is truly public in public education—the government, that is, the public, paying for it—while allowing creativity, innovation, and parental empowerment to flourish.
IT’S THE JOBS, STUPID!
In January 2010, during his State of the Union speech, President Obama declared, “Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010.”18 This was followed by a round of applause—but very little action. What else is new?
Everybody is in such total agreement we need “more jobs” that the words are in danger of becoming meaningless, of going from tangible policy to talking point. In Washington, saying you’re for jobs has become just another obligatory, perfunctory throat-clearing preamble.
But we need to move beyond the lofty rhetoric and the desultory statistics and focus on the fact that every lost job is a social calamity.19 Child abuse and neglect, divorce, crime, poor health,