Quick Fixes Fail to Solve Schools’ Problems

In 1948, George Orwell looked around at the post-World War II world and didn’t like what he saw happening in either the East or the West. So he wrote his most famous novel, a dystopian vision of the future in which he warned us about what would happen if certain political tendencies weren’t challenged. To determine the year in which his dark predictions might come true, he simply reversed the last two digits in the year in which wrote his tale. He also made that year his novel’s title. That’s right, it was “1984.”

As I read all of the proposals coming down these days with their quick fixes for California’s public education problems, I am prompted to see what year of dark omen would turn up if I reversed the last two digits in the current year and, sure enough, I find a date.

It’s 1999.

So consider this a sketch of an ominous but perhaps not-so-distant future.

As the clock struck 13, 1999 began with the announcement that California’s fourth-grade readers once again ranked among the lowest in the nation. Immediately, the Ministry of Education (widely known as Mini-Ed) announced that it had a solution to the problem. Students couldn’t read, it argued, because they had to take classes from bad teachers. So from now on “good” teachers would be financially compensated according to the numbers of students who wanted to be in their classes.

The plan was abandoned when a couple of teachers at an overcrowded Los Angeles-area elementary school (they looked remarkably like Ally McBeal and Brad Pitt) saw their annual incomes go from $30,000 to $3 million, while the rest of the faculty was forced to retire due to inadequate enrollments.

The next pronouncement from Mini-Ed dictated that every teacher would now be held accountable for the performance of his or her students on a new standardized test that would be given immediately to every fourth-grader in the state. However, thanks to an extraordinarily cold winter in northern Europe that year, 70% of the students in California’s schools were now the children of Norwegian immigrants. When a small group of teachers tried to point out that they’d need some time to teach their students the language in which the tests were given, they were invited to a “retreat” and were never heard from again. The tests, in due course, were administered in English, and when the results were tallied, the entire state teaching force was held accountable and fired.

This seemed to be the perfect solution to the problem, until someone noticed that there were now no teachers teaching in California’s classrooms. A special task force at Mini-Ed huddled and devised a solution: All California schoolchildren would learn to read from the Internet.

When a group of principals who hadn’t been fired yet objected that in order to learn from the Internet, a child had to know how to read, they were invited to a “retreat” to discuss the problem and were never heard from again.

When, at midyear, California’s fourth-graders scored the lowest possible score on the national reading test and weren’t even able to fill out their names on the exam forms, the rest of the principals were fired and a Blue Ribbon committee was formed to assess the problem.

After a few months, the Blue Ribbon committee reported back and announced that the solution was to privatize public education. Parents would find private-school education coupons in specially marked boxes of breakfast cereal and could use those to pay for their children’s educations.

When a group of parents complained that the coupons were not nearly enough to pay the tuition at a reputable school, they were invited to a “retreat” and were never heard from again.

By the end of the year, most of California’s schoolchildren were enrolled in a low-cost private school system run by a franchise calling itself “Commodified Education Ltd.” At Commodified Ed. schools (also known as Com-Edy), students learned to read in the same way that they had learned to order hamburgers: by going to a Com-Edy drive-thru and giving their order to a minimum-wage clerk in a paper hat who would serve up their pre-prepared education for the day (kept fresh under heat lamps) along with a side order of fries.

When at the end of the year California’s fourth-graders all missed the national reading test because they couldn’t read the instructions telling them where to take it, Com-Edy renamed itself Diploma Mill University Inc. as the Ministry of Education was closed down and absorbed into the Ministry of Freedom (also known as Mini-Jails).

Which solved the problem.