Page 61 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

4 Toward Awakening Consciousness: A Response to EcoJustice Education 37

our public schools’ long history of resource deprivation. The “No Child Left Behind”
(NCLB) program of the Bush administration (a bipartisan project) has been an
unfunded mandate, left to the states and localities to pay for and implement
(Association of California School Administrators 2008).
In fact, there is little evidence NCLB has improved American education: scores
on standardized tests in the USA have shown no discernible change in student
achievement for the last 5 decades, despite it (Baines 2007, p. 100). With many
accepting the view that “what can be measured matters,” misconceptions are com-
mon about the status of US student achievement as well as about how they stand
among the world’s children (Bracey 2009).
Unfortunately, President Obama’s new “Race to the Top” program is little more
than an expansion on NCLB that would likely make matters worse, moving from
state to national standards and linking teacher pay to the test performance of stu-
dents. “Race to the Top” also compels state governments to shift funding from
established public schools to charter schools.
The Obama “reform” adopts a corporatist ideology and identifies as its primary
goal to create a more productive workforce. This perspective includes blaming the
problems of public education on “bad” teachers. “Race to the Top” features a $4.3
billion “competition” among the states for federal grants that would be awarded to
only a few states that implement these charter-school and merit-pay “innovations”
(“Obama’s Race” 2009). Schools whose students underperform on tests would have
their principal and staff replaced or they would be turned into a charter school man-
aged by a nonprofit agency and funded by parents and civic groups, possibly reli-
gious groups. “Race to the Top” will give money to states and school districts to
“change the school culture” and encourage a punitive atmosphere in firing teachers
and principals who fail to raise student test scores.
In the USA, public school funding remains primarily based on local property
taxes and thus our system is segregated by affluence: children who live in the sub-
urbs and areas of wealth have well-equipped schools and well-paid teachers, while
those in the inner cities and in many rural areas go to underfunded schools. Yet,
instead of a program to equalize resources, Obama’s plan continues to shift funding
away from the most needy schools and thus further entrenches our class-based
education system.
Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, comes to the cabinet position
with a business approach to education, as a proponent of expanding charter schools
and of the corporate model for reform. Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross (2009)
make a good case for the connection between this model of change, classism, and
the current wars on “terrorism” – what they call the “core issue” of our time: “the
interaction of rising inequality and mass, class-conscious, resistance” (p. 41).
“Obama’s education plan,” they write, “is based on the same rhetoric (fear monger-
ing) and reasoning that produced the educationally disastrous NCLB. … Like his
predecessors, Obama misrepresents public education performance as a scare tactic
and to open the door for the privatization (of public education)” (pp. 39–40).
With a concentration of power that enables the elite to pursue a global empire,
America’s “corporatocracy” – a term coined by Perkins (2004) to describe the form