Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
Cash for Credits: Education in a Time of Hardship
by Svi Shapiro
An intriguing bit of news from my home state of North Carolina recently made it into the national media: Susie Shepherd, an elementary school principal in the small town of Goldsboro, suggested that as a way to raise much-needed funds for her school, students who brought in twenty dollars would be awarded twenty test credits. Students could apply ten credits each to two tests of their choice.
The notion that a school would actually reward such fundraising efforts with bonus points on classroom tests created, somewhat surprisingly, a storm of disapproval. Within a few days the principal had resigned under pressure from an embarrassed school board. Interestingly many parents rushed to her defense. She was, they said, an excellent and caring educator. And, besides, it was one way to help teachers who, in this city, were forced to purchase basic school supplies out of their own salaries. It is not hard to see their point concerning the latter. With schools under severe budgetary constraints, one might ask what was so bad about trying to give teachers a little extra financial help equipping their classrooms? As Shepherd noted, last year administrators tried to induce students to bring in cash with the reward of chocolates. That didn't work very well. So this year it was time to try a more direct approach -- increasing students' test scores through monetary payments.
This story certainly provided fodder for the scorn of editorial writers who pointed to the educational travesty of the principal's behavior. It also provided material for late-night comics, who got laughs off of the apparent unseemliness of paying for test points, as if school were just another business.
Yet, in the very same week that this event was reported, the New York Times carried a story about the lucrative business of teachers selling their lesson plans on the Internet. According to the article, thousands of teachers "are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare." The article, "Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions," goes on to note that while some of this money is used to buy classroom supplies and books, some of it is used to supplement salaries and pay for mortgages, credit card bills, and food. Tellingly, one critic of this practice, Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, questioned the ownership of these lesson plans and whether districts should be sharing in the proceeds! The money generated from this practice is not negligible. One of the online sites, Teachers Pay Teachers, has more than 200,000 registered users, according to the Times, and has recorded more than $600,000 in sales since it started in 2006. A top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales. A retired teacher in North Carolina earns an average of $750 a month (which has enabled her to remodel her kitchen).
Private Wealth, Public Penury
How should we regard this practice? One professor, Joseph McDonald, decries the way online selling of lesson plans "cheapens what teachers do." It undermines the culture of educators freely exchanging teaching ideas and plans. His point is well taken. Yet again it is hard not to feel compassion for sorely underpaid teachers who, under increasing financial pressure, are attempting to use their knowledge and skill to add something to their monthly income. Which of us may point the finger at these employees in this time of extraordinary economic pain and suggest they have no right to find ways to augment limited salaries? It is hard to be too critical of a behavior that might add a few hundred dollars to teachers' income at a time when the public purse is being used to ensure hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in income for bankers and Wall Street traders. As the expression goes, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Of course here there is hardly any parallel in the likely incomes of teachers or public employees and those on Wall Street. When greed on an unparalleled scale shapes the behavior of those who sit atop our financial institutions, who can begrudge the efforts of the nation's teachers to find a modest increase in their incomes or especially to offset cash-strapped school budgets?
Commodifying Knowledge
Still, for those of us whose interest is education, there are tendencies here that can only add to our sense of disquiet. Cash for test points and the sale of lesson plans on the Internet are surely sadder manifestations of the commodification and vulgarization of education. The "cash nexus," as Marx famously termed it, further frames and insinuates itself into that most sacred and precious experience in which a society seeks to pass to a younger generation its most valued knowledge and understanding. In the examples above we see again how our American society's "bottom line" values ever more starkly detract from education as a vehicle for human emancipation and the quest for a community of meaning, care, and human dignity.
McDonald is correct to criticize the selling of lesson plans because of the way it erodes the community of sharing among teachers. But that is only the tip of this particular iceberg. Our schools are already pervaded by what Elizabeth Gray calls the "culture of separated desks." The hidden curriculum of the classroom is one in which students are taught that learning is always a process of individual effort and achievement, and success inevitably a matter of invidious comparison. From the youngest age, when small children are taught to cover their work and not share their knowledge, the message is always that each individual should see himself or herself as a separate, self-sufficient, and self-interested atom in a universe of disconnected competitors. In selling their lessons online, teachers are acting entirely in the same spirit as the children we teach; they are treating knowledge or skill as the "cultural capital" that could give them an edge in a world of possessive competitors. In such a world, a community of learners in which individual knowledge, skills, insight, and understanding are shared for the betterment of all is alien. The paradigm of self-interest and individual advantage is deeply insinuated into our collective vision of success. Knowledge exists to leverage personal advantage in a society that more and more comes to resemble the competitive marketplace.
We may go from George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" approach to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" method and see that they do not differ much in this regard. For each there is the same understanding that education is about competition, "getting ahead," and the relentless process of ranking and comparisons (with all that implies in terms of the obsessive focus on grades, numbers, and point scores). And, in each, learning and teaching are the means to deploy one's knowledge to individual advantage (or the advantage of the nation vis-à-vis other economies). One looks in vain here for some alternative vision of knowledge and learning as a shared resource for mutual human uplift, or as a vehicle by which we can move toward a loving and interconnected community.
De-Meaning Education
Nor should we be too surprised at the Goldsboro principal's prescription for fundraising at her school. Even educational leaders have come to accept the way that learning is thoroughly implicated in the culture of commodification. School knowledge has become little more than another currency of exchange. What we learn accrues for us the credits and points that are the vehicles through which we may leverage our success via access to college and a place in the job market. The overriding message is a clear one. The value of what we learn is primarily to be found in its extrinsic payoff -- in the way it can be converted into a measurable sum of money. As teachers know all too well, grades, credits, and points become the real aim of learning. "What'd ya get?" is the primary question students ask. If it's not on the test, why bother with it? And if it's not measurable and quantifiable, then it is has no value as an instrument of school accountability or student ranking.
Of course such a view of education increasingly precludes the possibility for classrooms to be places of inspiration, moral concern, and the firing of curiosity, or to be catalysts for imagination, the joy of understanding, or the search for meaning and purpose. All of these speak to the intrinsic purposes of human development and enrichment, and education's contribution to our communal betterment. Simply put, if learning is about acquiring credits or test points, then why not simply go out and buy them? Indeed the Internet is full of opportunities for purchasing term papers and projects that can enable students to short-circuit the inconvenient and time-consuming process of critical and creative thinking. Or as increasing numbers of students do, one can simply cheat to assure the needed currency of school success. For those of us who teach in universities, the pious rhetoric of academia's mission concerning human uplift and liberation is belied by the institution's increasing focus on money and status, as evident in big-time athletics, the hiring of highly paid star professors, the concern with entrepreneurial spin-offs, corporate sponsorships of programs, the focus on receiving grants and contracts, the shopping-mall ambience of the student union, and so on.
Education Beyond the Culture of Consumption
Of course school merely mirrors the larger culture in all of this. The commodification of learning is but one more dimension of a culture in which more and more human activities are measured by their price, not their value to a life of authentic meaning. They have become part of the culture of "having" rather than "being." Increasingly every aspect of human experience and need are subject to the mechanisms and the mystique of the marketplace. Indeed it becomes harder for us to imagine a world in which what we do, desire, or want are not things that can be bought in some part of our shopping mall culture.
Yet, despite this, the struggle for an alternative life continues. We see this in the counter-politics of health care, where there is still a vision of medicine and healing predicated on something other than profit and the actuarial tables of the insurance business. There is a growing desire for food that neither threatens our bodies' well-being nor harms the earth and assaults other life-forms. And in education there is growing disquiet over the narrowly defined, restrictive and debilitating direction of educational policy and practice. Perhaps the furor over the principal offering to exchange cash for test credits indicates some level of awareness, and shame, at such crudely materialistic behavior in the context of public education.
Yet even where a halt is called to the debasement of learning, there is still, sadly, little indication that there is some deeper notion of a different or alternative bottom line for education. For the most part there is an absence of an educational vision for the twenty-first century that links learning to democracy and citizenship in our globally interconnected and interdependent society (a number of states are now suggesting reorienting teacher education around "twenty-first-century skills," but this usually turns out to mean more testing for students and more accountability measures for teachers). Such a vision might have at its center human beings who have developed an ethic of responsibility and care for the well-being of our earth community. It would take seriously the development of those critical and creative capabilities that enable individuals to think beyond the passive memorization and regurgitation of unquestioned assumptions and beliefs that may be destructive to our collective well-being. And it would offer a space in which young people would be challenged to consider how they might live lives of authentic meaning and purpose in a world of growing inequality, violence, and material waste.
Teaching to Remake the World
An alternative vision for education would imply reclaiming schools as what Henry Giroux has called an emancipatory public space. It would mean seeing school neither as a place primarily aimed at individual achievement, success, and social mobility, nor as a vehicle for supplying trained workers to the state or business world, which seems to be a common feature of Democratic and Republican educational platforms. Instead, education would be a site where young people are encouraged and equipped to participate in the making, or remaking, of their world -- a world of more justice, peace, and dignity for all.
This vision is not entirely alien to the American tradition. It echoes what the great American philosopher John Dewey said many years ago -- that education, at root, is about the "making of a world." Education is, or should be, the expression of our best collective aspirations and hopes as a people. It is apparent that such an education is at once a cognitive, ethical, and spiritual task (spiritual in that it touches upon matters of ultimate meaning, value, and purpose). Of course there is here no pretense or illusion of education as a morally neutral field of human activity. Indeed no such education exists. All efforts to teach the young inevitably embody some understanding of the good and the worthwhile -- some vision of what we value in a human life, and what our individual as well as our collective goals and purposes should be. To suggest that educational achievement should be traded for cash implies one such vision -- one that embodies our current educational preoccupations and its debasement into a zone of moral crassness and tawdry meanings. Other things around us -- growing poverty and social injustice, alienation, human suffering, violence, and environmental degradation -- call out to us to offer another vision of why we educate. For the sake of our children, and for the sake of those who teach them, it is time for an education that genuinely responds to the deep crises in our individual and national life. Beyond online sales of lesson plans and cash for credits, what we really need are schools in which a younger generation might begin to envisage how they may help to heal our broken and suffering world.
Svi Shapiro is professor of education and cultural studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he is director of the Ph.D. program. His recent books are Education and Hope in Troubled Times (Routledge), and Losing Heart: the Moral and Spiritual Miseducation of America's Children (Erlbaum).
Shapiro, Svi. 2010. Cash for Credits: Education in a Time of Hardship. Tikkun 25(2):15 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010shapiro
