Free More Money Than Brains by Laura Penny

the examples they know – a “lawyers are assholes but mine is fine” thing. For forty years Phi Beta Kappa has commissioned a yearly Gallup poll of Americans’ attitudes towards public schools, and they’ve found that “the closer the public gets to its local schools, the more it likes them.” 2
    Parents consistently give big, broad categories such as “the national schools” and “the schools in my community” middling to bad grades, and they say that schools in Europe and Asia are better. But they also tend to be positive about local schools: the ones their children attend. In 2008, 72 per cent of respondents gave their kid’s school a grade of A or B. This is the most positive rating that public schools have received infifteen years. To grade the grade, three-quarters represents a C-plus or B-minus, but that result is still much better than the speeches, coverage, and op eds lead us to believe.
    The school crisis rhetoric is milder up north, but the grades are comparable. One poll, conducted by the Canadian Education Association in 2007, found that 42 per cent of the respondents gave the schools B’s, and 33 per cent a gentleman’s C. 3 A 2008 CBC poll had similar results. Only 8 per cent said that the schools were excellent, but 49 per cent, an overwhelming majority, said they were good, and 28 per cent thought they were adequate. Moreover, the number of parents who gave schools the lowest possible ratings – poor and very poor – decreased substantially from the 1990s, dropping from 25 per cent to 14 per cent. 4
    Asking parents how much they like their kids’ schools is only one measure of the school system, though. Schools do not merely serve parents, and sometimes parental needs and public needs clash. For example, some parents might gripe about social promotion and every student getting gold stars, only to quickly change their tune when their son or daughter flunks. Easy A’s might look great stuck on the family fridge, but they don’t help create a competent workforce, informed citizenry, or civil society.
    Other measures of school performance are less encouraging. Millions of North American high-school graduates are functionally illiterate and innumerate, and woefully ignorant of basic history and science. The collegiate
crème de la crème
that I see are literate-ish at best. Some can be quite intellectually timid and unwilling to think for themselves.
    The passivity, nervousness, and heartbreaking inarticulacy of some of my students is evidence that the school system is not doing a super job teaching kids to read, write, and think. Sometimes I read work by students whose grammar is practically feral – utterly untutored. They claim their teachers never taught them about the niceties of sentence structure; instead they did quizzes and got to watch movies in English class. Students can pass English without the fuss and bother of comprehending its basic concepts, and I have no reason to believe that things are any better in the math, science, or history departments. This suggests that some of the worries about schools may well be justified.
    At the same time, though, a lot of the crisis-in-the-schools rhetoric comes from some bad political ideas, ideas that have been setting the tone for public policy and discourse for more than twenty years, ideas that are partly responsible for the mess we’re in now. Decrying the evil socialist gub’mint monopoly on schools is an example of the demonization of all things public. Anti-school rants quickly slide into anti-union ranting, since “unions R bad” is another one of our modern, plutocrat-friendly articles of faith.
    This is one of the reasons why charter schools are oft mentioned in debates about the state of the schools. Conservatives favour charter schools because they offer an end run around the teachers’ unions, more scope for hiring, firing, and unpaid overtime, and greater curricular freedom. But there are very lefty charter schools too,