Tomorrows Trust – A Review of Catholic Education » Blog Archive » Conflicted thinking on the ‘standards movement’

Conflicted thinking on the ‘standards movement’

Written by Ted Schmidt on November 13, 2006 – 1:49 am

# 6 in a series of 15

by Ted Schmidt

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment…would result in the demolition of society.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation 1944

Numbers can organize. Numbers can explicate-but numbers cannot make us cry. Sterilization by this process is now an intellectual obsession.
Jonathan Kozol

Over coffee one morning a wise Catholic pastor once said to me, “The Catholic priests have no social analysis.” He was shaking his head at the generally poor understanding of the social reality in which we are all embedded. If this indeed were the case, how one might ask can one effectively minister to God’s people? Without understanding the hidden forces operative in society how can one then make sense of terms like “salvation”, “redemption” etc. Saved from what? Redeemed from what?

We have always needed those brilliant “masters of suspicion” around to tell us what is really going on beneath the surface. Marx, Freud, Nietsche, McLuhan, Antonio Gramsci, Noam Chomsky,Susan B.Anthony Joan Chittister jump immediately to mind as friends of the human community, men and women who probed beneath the surface only to reveal the inadequacy of conventional wisdom.

Within religious traditions we have had our prophets rail against unjust structures and the hidden assumptions by which we were operating-the power games being played, the manipulation and propaganda taking place. Within the Catholic tradition one can point to Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Mary Ward, the Berrigan brothers as Spirit filled people who attempted to wake us from our national slumber and our warped priorities. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. reiterated the comments of the Galilean that “this generation has ears that do not hear, eyes which do not see.” They need to “awake.”
Catholic education, represented in the public realm by trustees, in my judgment has had few of these prophetic voices especially in the last twenty years. There appeared to be a lack of critical acumen when dealing with public Catholic education within a neoliberal global context. Almost always Catholic boards were woefully behind their public counterparts in understanding what was really transpiring. They had no “social analysis”. They did not see, much less understand the extraordinary assault of transnational and corporate power on public institutions in this epoch of laissez faire turbocapitalism.

Before one can understand the “standards movement”, one must locate it within the phenomenal rise and power of transnational corporations in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Massive, free floating, profit maximizing capital demanding deregulation and privatization has been busy attempting to liquidate social practices and institutions no matter how crucial they are to our communities. The social contract which used to link business and community has been under relentless attack. The extraordinary Canadian consensus so painstakingly built by generations of trade unionists, social gospellers, the common good tradition of Roman Catholicism and the necessity of a huge northern nation to construct a society bound by ligaments of compassion and solidarity means little to global capital which has no homeland or no conscience.

Education now must respond to the whims of transnational capital of the new lean and mean economy. In this Darwinian world, the market metaphor reigns. It demands conformity, competition, ruthless efficiency, consumption and long range planning. It values humans who can produce, conform and compete. It demands an educational system which will sacrifice to this Moloch, no questions asked.

Catholic social teaching: a counter narrative

Catholic social tradition stands in stark contrast to the above. It counters with another narrative where we insist on the primacy of persons over things, labour over capital. In this world view, the needs of the poor come before the wants of the rich. We insist that the market economy must be governed by justice and oriented to the common good. As the late pope, John Paul II stated in Centissimus Annus, “Some common goods like the environment, or health care can not be left to the market for the market can not speak to justice human life or dignity.”

The standards movement accompanied by incessant testing is the corporate response to corporate dominated globalization. Needing less workers because of the phenomenon of computer mediated work processes and the information revolution, the corporate world looks to the educational system for new blood to fill its ranks. Baptized and non-baptized need apply. While always speaking in reverential tones of ‘the value of education”, corporations simply want the best and do not care what happens to the rest-and there are a lot of “the rest” in a global economy. The International Labour Organization tells us that 30% (1 billion) of the world’s work force is unemployed. Business needs a steady stream of symbol analysts to supply new oxygen for their companies. The rest of the school age population-the average kids, the physically and mentally challenged, the poor- hey, it’s a jungle out there. At any rate they are not our problem.

This new drive in education with Catholic school boards slavishly keeping up with the public schools is totally at odds with gospel priorities. Education is no longer a social right with a long tradition of preparing the young for life, critical thinking and citizenship as well as literacy and numeracy. Now it is consumer driven and education seems to have simply become the handmaiden of corporate production. The Harris years in Ontario were a perfect laboratory for this redefinition. We saw “purchasers” and “clients” who bought a service from a “front line service provider. Schools became adjuncts of business. See how efficient our Catholic schools are! Look at our test scores! Why it’s up on our website. Please come to our schools. Business is lining up for our grads. We are market efficient!

Accountability, bench marks and outcomes became the new rallying cry. Standards are the mantra. Previous generations, it was assumed, had no standards. Test obsession became the order of the day giving students dyspepsia and teachers migraines. Humanities were disparaged, disciplines which added beauty and joy to the human experience (music, art etc) fell into decline. Those remarkable people (drama and music teachers in particular) whose magic had inspired and fired imaginations for generations were now fighting to justify their sacred callings. The most creative ended up sacrificing challenging and imaginative curriculum shaped around students’ interests and needs. Now they would “teach to the test” for weeks at a time so the schools would not be embarrassed by those test scores. Prep those kids, cram more info into those tiny heads. Grades and test scores, dullness personified replaced the education of the total person, turned off the more academic kids and frustrated the rest. The complex evaluation of students became short circuited in such a crude model.

The “living spirit” (Einstein) which had sought universal justice and earth reverence succumbed to skills mania. A narrow technocratic training began replacing the person-centred humanist curriculum. Awe, wonder, reverence and justice apparently were not in high demand any more.

This pernicious trend denigrates the unique development of each child and raises competition to unworthy levels. In all school systems this is abusive. In Catholic schools it borders on blasphemy. One would have thought that we would champion human dignity, would have resisted this attack on children more forcibly; one would have thought that educated Catholics, taught to think critically would have had the tools to unpack the corporate attack on the living ikons of God.

Maybe the canary in the coal mine which forces us to rethink the standards movement was the massive failure rate (45% in the grade 10 test in Ontario) in the early testing period. Was this simply getting kids ready to accept their roles in the new low wage economy? The real failure is the economy’s inability to use our talented people. Their hopes need to be dashed and expectations downsized. The “talented tenth” will reap the rewards. And what of the rest?

The standards movement and the testing mania need to be seen for what they are—an attempt to adjust the human person to the exigencies of the “new economy.” Another purpose of course is to open up the formerly “public” system to the voracious demands of private business. There is huge money to be made by hi-tech companies in the education “business”. Curriculum outsourcing , the standardizing of curriculum to fit software, the hardware and software purchases, online courses, distance education, virtual education are all part of this attempt to pry open a public good. However worrisome this trend is, it does not compare to the almost total acceptance of the “standards movement’. We should have known better. My best guess as to why we acquiesced so quickly is that too many Catholics owe their ultimate allegiance to the market. It should be placed elsewhere.