Author’s Note: There was one spark of good news in the mail today. Some good people may have helped get an Afghan translator and family out of th disaster that has a lot of Veterans pensive about the collapse of a nation. And Education…this is not a polemic, just an attempt to describe a system that is doing something different than it used to. And on which we are being asked (or told) to spend a lot of taxpayer dollars. No problem with that, it is clearly important, but shouldn’t we know what it is?
– Vic

(This chart is from a New Jersey group and based on information from the government and interpreted by CATO Institute folks like Andrew Coulson. Everything these days has a taste of partisan struggle in it somewhere, but generally I accept the ratios. I liked it because it includes a start point just after my completion of the K-12 process that existed at the time. I recall some of the minor fights about curriculum and direction prevalent at the time, and the direction things began to take while my own children were growing. The current state of the education system my grandchildren are just starting is remarkably different.)

Mom was a teacher. She believed in work, and she believed in education. It got her out of the Depression-era Ohio River Valley and into the concrete canyons of Manhattan. On the stone that marks her last place I had the mason carve “educator,” not realizing some future observer might note it mean she was a labor leader of some sort. She was anything but that, and the term referred to what she thought of her career. She valued that when limited family finances during wartime caused her to adopt- against her university’s policy- the three-year degree program designed to produce men in uniform for the big war overseas.

She did her bit for Texaco’s war production, met Dad, married and started a family. Edging back to work after stabilizing three kids, she turned to teaching, a career that generally accommodated the needs of her family. She was responsible for teaching English, at least in the beginning, but evolved through her long tenure to teaching the Bible as Literature. I cannot attribute her evolution in coursework to anything practiced at home. She ensured we had a familiarity with the book on which much of our civilization was based, but that study did not entail any particular devotional aspect. We learned to hyphenate early to keep the churches straight.

A working knowledge and context for tradition was her motive. She was that kind of educator, and her insight about how “education’ worked also involved the motivation of groups of people employed by the city. That was shared with us at home in a personal way the dynamics of Dad’s office could not.

Back then, membership in the teacher’s union was a condition of employment. It is still that way in many places today. Dues were collected from paychecks without choice. During one tense time in our Western Michigan town, a strike loomed. She got a note instructing her to appear on a picket line and I remember her reaction to this day. She tore it up and put it in the trash.

My then-wife followed the same course with our family, edging back into the working world after getting our kids started on their paths through the system by stints of substitute teaching. She was surprised one day to be confronted by some of the regular staff who promised to get her materials not approved by the School District, but more in keeping with someone else’s truth. It was troubling at the time, but more as a curiosity about what was happening at our school than a depiction of a battle actually in progress.

At that point in my accidental career I was entrusted with managing a small staff of budget professionals. Our little playpen contained a little less than $4 Billion a year, though we sometimes counted it as the whole amount in the five-year Defense program so it sounded more impressive. In self-preservation, the staff forced me to understand a bit about money, how it flows and where it goes. It was fun. But now there are things happening that makes old-fashioned words like “colossal” seem a bit trite. Even the language has to be changed to accommodate the size and scope of what is being proposed.

“Human Infrastructure” is a real thing, of course. It just doesn’t mean what the words suggest. It is like saying “Solyndra’s $500 million renewable energy grant was shovel-ready,” which is only true in the reverse meaning. It is a word salad, delicious or toxic, depending on taste. Don’t make me call the Footnote Intern to explain that we understand human needs and systems. We do. We are just not sure we want to give $200 Billion to a system that traditionally has been funded by the communities it serves with oversight by a Department that didn’t exist until May of 1980.

The other evening I tried to account for what was contained in the $3.5 Trillion second Infrastructure Bill, the one advertised to solve the problems arguably created by the government itself. This is not some polemic about whether or not community college should be free, or whether we need a national pre-K system or expanded Medicare services. I just tried to add up what they are telling us is in a piece of legislation that will receive only cursory comment on its way to becoming permanent law and entitlement.

I counted the numbers that are available on some of the big issues. It is a lot of cash, but I could only find top line figures for some of the initiatives in bold print. I got to a figure on the calculator that read $1.54 Trillion dollars. Now, I realize that is just the outline of something else, but it also meant there were twice the size of the numbers I could find. “Cui Bono?” I said, remembering the high school Latin. Who benefits? Shaking my head in wonder, I slid the calculator back on the table and went to bed.

In the course of something else the next day, I heard a number that caused me to search again. The plain statement that caused me to look was a statement about $200 Billion to “Education.” You can see the issues. Did that number include the hundred billion also advertised as part of the total, for pre-K or Community college? The numbers I saw were about half that. The rest must be going to things on the chart the CATO people put together, or something else entirely.

I think there is general agreement that whatever it is we are doing in many places isn’t working. Better said, it is working in a way that many people- and parents- don’t appreciate. We hear some of that from school districts that spend a lot of cash on “students,” but have announced that high school kids who have been advanced in grades with “D” averages will be permitted to graduate with diplomas.

That is accompanied by a common strand of thought that says things like math are hegemonic instruments of oppression, since they apply objective standards of “truth” to something that should be more subjective to a higher reality of experiential oppression.

Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon is part of that. She just signed a bill- privately- ending the requirement for the Beaver State’s high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation.

This may be why free community college is necessary. Many regular colleges are now teaching residual classes to enable their students to read and write. There was no publicity about the passage of her state’s Senate Bill 744. I am not waving my hands in alarm, just saying it reflects there is something radically different about what schools are doing.

The Footnote Interns were alarmed by the fact that the Writer’s Section at Socotra House noticed it. We assured them that we would not start a big deal about whether the entire point of “public education” had somehow changed to something else. We have heard what that is, not as a proposal, but simply as a matter of fact.

The COVID shutdowns revealed concern by some in the education business that they are actually running a public daycare system to permit parents to work the two or more jobs they need to survive. Or that the results of education are subjective representations of oppressive systems of inequity. Or the point of it all is to provide necessary indoctrination into things that do not appear to make much sense.

If Mom was alive to look at the chart, she would probably smile and shake her head. The number of students hasn’t changed very much, nor have scores on testing standards that once seemed to provide objective assessment of agreed outcomes. What we do have is a startling increase in the number of people we are paying to manage the enterprise. And contribute, as organizations, to the candidacies of the people who appropriated the money to what was “education” but now is something else.

To avoid alarm in our Internship cadre, we will leave it at that, since they haven’t graduated yet. I think Mom would see this as an opportunity. She would get some of the great teachers she knew together and start teaching some other way. If they did it the way she got through college, we might have taxpayers a lot longer.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com