The Business of Education

Last night, I read this disturbing Editorial in the New York Times on Scholastic's Big Coal Mistake - where they produced a fourth grade lesson packet on energy paid for by the American Coal Foundation. This lesson packet mentioned the benefits of coal but failed to mention things like toxic waste and gee, I don't know, things like Black Lung or the people who we hear about every year or every other year who get trapped inside a coal mine and die.

Last year, Scholastic also encouraged schools to have classroom parties with and to collect labels from the sugary drink, Sunny D.

As I researched pre-schools in my neighborhood, I was relieved to find the school here and there who didn't give the kids juice. My son, like me and many in my family, is a bit sugar sensitive - not that we don't have it, but we use organic free-trade non-bleached good quality sugar (which I have to say has actually increased the quality of my baking) and we eat sweets sparingly. In the past, we've given my son a half a cup of diluted orange juice and he turned into a demon. I know some doctors say that sugar does not contribute to hyperactivity, but I don't think they have children.

Anyway, in reading this editorial yesterday, I added another strike in my list against the public school system. I have a lot of concerns about the schools, education in general, kids getting what they need in the classroom, and so on. I haven't researched education as much as parenting, but almost - and it's slow reading on my part. Mostly because I get depressed. I read the fantastic Diana Ravitch's Life and Death of the Great American School System (which I highly recommend), and while I think she is right about a lot and found it an eye opening read, it left me completely hopeless about the future of education in this country, and even around the world.

This morning I woke up thinking about Scholastic's stunts and thinking that now in addition to having to worry about my son getting too much homework (as I also read yesterday here) in subjects where homework is useless (all of them except math) (for some of us who remember our school experience this may strike us as one of those moments where we say "duh"), or over tested for statewide standardized tests that have nothing to do with the curriculum he's getting in the classroom, or that he could get a really good teacher who loves teaching and loves his/her subject matter, but somehow fails to produce good test results in his/her students and ends up fired, or whatever else, but now I also have to worry about my child being advertised to - not just in school hallways as he walks past vending machines full of junk food, but in his lessons and school books? Great.

By the time I was sipping my coffee,  my head was spinning with the realization of all the vested interests in our so called public education system, from the companies who write the standardized tests and textbooks and compete for school districts and teachers' attentions, to school lunches, city and state governments, teachers unions, school buses (dare we dream of the hybrid bus or would that threaten oil interests?), and well, the list goes on.

I started to ask myself, who really is teaching our children? Can we begin to see why the interests of our kids has gotten lost, when public schools are now as much a business as anything else in the marketplace?

I see stacks of library books, new research topics and a new series of blog posts in my future as I think about untangling this knot.