Scapegoating in Education (written 13th July 2012)

Recently Tory MP Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, endorsed the views of a ‘US education expert’ Michelle Rhee¹. Her views are neither new, nor will they raise standards, but they are likely to be adopted by Mr Gove apparently in order to “transform [disadvantaged] schools”. Let’s investigate why.

                The context of these ‘reforms’ (counter-reforms) is of course a British government with over a trillion pounds worth of debt (£1,000,000,000,000), a stalling economy which is likely to enter into a recession soon (down 0.2% Q1 year-on-year), rising unemployment (8.2% of work-force) and a tremendous budget deficit (8.2% GDP or £140,000,000,000)². These objective conditions call for a government committed to capitalism, which of course the coalition is, to implement draconian cuts so these debts don’t spiral out of control.

                Assuming the government borrowed money at an annual rate of 5%, which is a reasonable assumption, each year they will have to pay back £50,000,000,000 to their creditors just to cover the interest. That is approximately 3% of the whole GDP of Britain!! Furthermore, since there is a significant budget deficit, the debt is growing rapidly. This is clearly unsustainable. Therefore since substantial growth on a capitalist basis is ruled out in Britain in the foreseeable future, any government without a militant socialist programme must implement tremendous cuts to reduce their spending.

This explains why the Coalition government, led by the Tories, have implemented cuts in all parts of the public sector and welfare state. Recently, even the police were tempted to strike, and the doctors actually did strike, much to the chagrin of the government. This was because these workers, traditionally quite conservative workers, understood that the government proposals would only damage the quality of service provided and their quality of life so the Government’s finances could be improved. Teachers went on strike recently too for the same reason.

In education the coalition has already, among other things, reduced spending on schools and universities, frozen wages of workers (real term cuts), increased the retirement age and decreased pension payments. These changes result in a poorer education for students and a worse quality of life for teachers.

In education less money means at least one, if not all, of the following changes: less books, less stationary, less equipment, worse technology, poorer food, worse buildings, poorer furniture, less qualified teachers and increased class sizes. Fortunately for the ministers, they are paid such a wage that they can afford to protect their children from such unpleasantness and send them to private schools.

 However, the public demand an explanation for these declining standards and a worsening quality of provision. The government cannot admit that since it is committed to saving the banks, as their parties have destroyed all other major sections of the British economy over the last thirty years, that they are not prepared to re-open the latter, and that they have and will spend any amount of the tax payer’s money on the banks, students and teachers in schools have to suffer. Someone else must take the blame.

In steps Michelle Rhee who has ‘earned a reputation as a "witchfinder general of the classroom" in the US, identifying under-performing teachers and forcing them out of the profession’¹. The primary problem in education in her opinion, and in Michael Gove’s, is not the cuts, not the increasing class-sizes, lack of text books, paper and pens, but the teachers. Conveniently this solution costs essentially nothing, just the cost of employing a group of ‘experts’ to ‘inspect’ (bully and harass) teachers who are performing relatively worse than others, in terms of statistics, and force them out of the profession. Moreover, it helps to perpetuate the Tory myth that public sector workers are lazy and incompetent. Brilliant!

However, ignoring the fact that comparatively there will always be better and worse teachers, and that therefore the poorest performing, relatively speaking,  will be living in perpetual fear of losing their jobs every day, even if they are doing a good job in an absolute sense; ignoring the fact that this will result in many competent teachers leaving the profession by choice or otherwise and will scare many potentially excellent teachers away from education; ignoring the fact that this will increase the stress of the work-force tremendously, increasing the number of staff on sick-leave and decrease the quality of teaching; ignoring the fact that not everything a teacher does can be measured by statistics and conveniently made into a number, there is one small problem with the proposal: it totally ignores the damage done by the government to education which is the primary cause of regression in standards today!

In other words, even if such a monstrous scheme were to be implemented effectively, which is impossible, the quality of education will be most significantly affected by government cuts and the net effect will be a poorer quality of education overall.

In this epoch, a commitment to capitalism is a commitment to cuts and to lowering the standards of state provision. This is the primary cause of declining standards in education today, not ‘under-performing’ teachers. Only a genuine socialist government with a genuine socialist program can reverse such a trend. Anything else is just smoke and mirrors.