Education Is Big Business
The bottom line is education in Massachusetts , as in the rest of the country, is big business. Management negotiates with unions; school committees approves multimillion dollar budgets; State appointed Boards over see academic results; publishers sell books; food suppliers stock kitchens; testing companies evaluate progress and transportation companies bring our kids back and forth. It is an industrial complex similar to others in the country except that there is no significant customer outrage given its failing results.
Imagine the public outcry if 50% of the rifles or missiles purchased by the military industrial complex failed to fire on the battle field. Or 50% of the jet planes landing at our airports crashed. Or 50% of the patients entering a hospital for care got worse. Maintaining an industry in which a 50% failure rate is acceptable is unheard of. Even after a small plane crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sends a team to investigate, to determine causes and propose, if necessary , corrective actions which the FAA may impose immediately on the industry it regulates. But in education, we have readily accepted a failure rate of 50% or more.
The children most impacted are of course those that have the least amount of representation and voice. The poor, the minorities, the disenfranchised send their kids off to public school ignorant of a fact that is well known but unspoken by many of the more affluent and aware. Each child that walks through the door of a public school building represents a dollar allocation from the state. In one of the more affluent towns such as Andover the average per student expenditure on public school is roughly the same as in the lower income communities of Lawrence and Lowell. But the results are vastly different. Looking at the key measures of high school graduation rates we see that Andover’s respectable rate of 95% far exceeds Lawrence’s rate of 35% and Lowell’s rate of 74%.
If we look at MCAS scores we will see that this disparity starts early in the student’s school life. MCAS passing scores for 4th graders in math for Andover are 74% while in Lawrence and Lowell they are 29%. Many explanations have been suggested which rationalize this disparity including the language barriers inherent in poorer Hispanic and immigrant communities. But further exploration of the data may refute that argument when academic results in the Greenfield district are considered.
