Despite the devastation of the pandemic, the American economy has generally demonstrated a remarkable resilience and capacity to bounce back against all odds. In striking contrast, however, a key element of that economy— the education industry, both K-12 and post-secondary— has displayed an alarming acceleration of a decline already years in the making.
One of the most deplorable aspects of Covid 19 has been its intensification of the long-, lamented phenomenon of income inequality, and the attendant upward ratcheting of class conflict.
Nowhere has this social cleavage been more painfully evident than in education, where the highly disparate impact on the Two Americas has been stunning – coping O.K. for the well- resourced affluent and pure havoc for the unresourced non-affluent.
In order to justify the lock-down of K-12 in-person education, the powers that be had to propagate the following myth: “The kids will be just fine with at-home virtual learning supervised by their solicitous parents and seamlessly delivered by ever-efficient technology.”
Really? For millions of our most vulnerable children of poverty and color in the inner cities, this myth was a total fabrication. For the single mom with four children ages 6 to 12 who had to scramble to find a babysitter before heading out to work, in-home supervision was simply a non-starter.
However, don’t look for her story in the style section of the local newspaper. Uh, uh. Move on, nothing to see here. This reality was the truth that could not be told, because it would gravely embarrass too many higher-ups who were busy pursuing other agendas, none more disgracefully than teacher unions who made a good thing out of a national tragedy.
Meanwhile for the leaders of higher education, the real tragedy was the sudden collapse of their revenue streams which induced a reluctant and agonizing reappraisal of their bloated bureaucracies , indefensible tuition levels and increasingly debased product.
The pandemic may have usefully dealt the final blow to America’s totemic belief that a college degree was a sure ticket to prosperity and happiness. The throngs of unemployed or underemployed graduates moving back home with disillusioned parents while groaning under six-figure student loan debts have spelled “goodbye to all that.”
Also greatly undermining the reputation of the “product” has been the transformation of our campuses into something reminiscent of China’s “Cultural Revolution” of the 1970s, complete with suppression of free speech, mandatory group-think, and persecution of dissenters by a zealous new Red Guard.
So, where is the silver lining—if any—in this dystopian landscape, something that might offer hope for stopping the downward performance and financial spiral of an American education establishment that was once the envy of the world?
There are two particular beacons of hope. The first is the public charter school movement, where student enrollment has grown by 62% in the last five years—centered in the inner cities where rescue is most needed.
Despite furious efforts by teacher unions and their political allies to suppress, legislatively block, and misrepresent their consistent record of success, charters have come to be seen by millions of desperate minority parents as a last best hope for their educationally suffering children.
The second beacon of hope is that the entire education system may have hit a financial wall from which there is no escape. As long as the paying clientele remained fairly quiescent, the steady well-above-inflation cost escalation could be explained away or justified by the hypocritical bromide of “we have to do it for the kids.”
Today, however in state after state, the obscene aggregate costs of salaries, benefits, and pension liabilities to support a system now unconcealably approaching total dysfunction has generated a grassroots outrage from an economically battered public who will no longer tolerate politicians daring to say, “We’ll just have to raise your taxes again.”
No society can watch the crumbling of its education sector without shuddering at the horrific price to be paid by future generations. American education’s long-deferred Day of Reckoning is now at hand.
Bill Moloney covers national and international issues for the America blog. He has served as a school superintendent in N.Y. Pa. and Md., and as Colorado’s Commissioner of Education. He was twice appointed by President Clinton to the National Assessment Governing Board which oversees “The Nation’s Report Card”, and has written extensively on issues of national and international education.
