Ken Buck, GOP candidate for Senate in Colorado, caught some grief this week for his stream-of-consciousness thoughts on public education, which, considerably boiled down, are that things were great, then the feds got involved and now things are terrible.
In the 1950s, we had the best schools in the world. And the United States government decided to get more involved in federal education. Where are we now, after all those years of federal involvement, are we better or are we worse? So what's the federal government's answer? Well since we've made education worse, we're gonna even get more involved. And what's gonna be the result? It's kinda like health care. We've screwed up health care -- Medicare -- we've screwed up all kinds of other things, so what are we gonna do? We're gonna get even more involved in health care. What are we going to do? We're gonna get more involved in education.
One wonders: What federal government intervention into education took place in the 1950's? Two incidents stand out. The Supreme Court struck down segregation, and President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to enforce it. Is it that to which Ken Buck refers?
In a way, yes. In the 1950's, some things were different. White males were vested with a certain authority simply by virtue of being white males. White male opinion was the "default conventional wisdom" of the entire society.
That, of course, is no longer true. Society has changed in the past fifty years--change, incidentally, that was certainly not led by the government. Most of the time, the government resisted that change, but, over time, has come to be the enforcer of it and, hence, the villain.
Ian Millhiser at Think Progress notes that, in 1957, "less than half of white Americans and fewer than one in five African-Americans graduated from high school." In 2002, 90% of white children and 80% of black children earned their diploma. College graduation rates more than tripled for both whites and blacks over that same course of time.
That's all true, but not quite the point--(and, one might add, a typically liberal response to the question; that is, on-point, absolutely true, and yet strangely tone-deaf to the heart of the question).
Some regard the 1950's as a "golden era" in American life. For them, American education is about the local school marm who teaches reading, writing, and 'rightmetic and also teaches Sunday School at the Methodist church on the weekends. Life was simple, schools were safe.
That world is gone, and gone for many reasons. One of them is simple demographics. Our country is about twice as large in population as it was in 1955. When the number of people doubles in size, its level of organization increases in complexity.
That factor alone will mean that schools are different places than they once were. Just to take one example, if you double the number of students, you likely at least double the number of students with reading disabilities. This may now mean that you need a special program for reading disabilities. It may even be cost effective to do so. Your level of complexity has just increased.
Another reason, of course, is the civil rights and womens' rights movements, which said that there's more opinions around here than just one, and everybody needs to have the opportunity to be heard. Can't we all just get along?
On education, Ken Buck doesn't have a point. On culture, however, he does. Things are different. Whether or not that change represents progress or decline is the cultural issue at the heart of his remarks.
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