“Educational research” — consistently worthless but often confused by people with scientific research which can be verified, unlike educational research.

“Closing the achievement gap” –
a ridiculous idea. If one kid enters the first grade able to read at 9th grade level and the other kid enters first grade without a knowledge of the alphabet and both students spend the same number of years in school then the ramifications of the back kid catching up needs to mean the student who started ahead can not progress fully if he/she is to be caught by the student who started way behind.

“Accountability” — if a teacher has 150 kids that they contact daily, and each progresses at different rates, and each gains specifically different knowledge and attitudes from the teacher, as well as several other teachers, then how do you hold a teacher accountable for these changes which you can’t even possibly measure?

“Best practices” — if you can’t do valid educational research then how can you list best practices based upon research?

Nevertheless, there is solid evidence that policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve school performance and student achievement. The persistent failure of policy makers to act on that evidence—in tandem with a school-improvement agenda—is a major reason why the association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement remains so strong.”
Note that some major league progressive and conservatives have signed this statement.

That said, I’d quibble with your belief that “this kind of shaming comes to little.” It’s not shaming. It’s a stark fact that gets hardly any attention at all. The frame I’m using here is the notion of “fair share.” We all have a deep sense of fairness in this country, and we all believe strongly that everyone needs to do his/her part. In reminding people of the fact that a large number of corporations simply are not doing their part in helping kids succeed in school — esp. low-income kids –, we are encouraging them to do so. But, more pointedly, we are encouraging others to encourage them to do so, i.e., applying pressure to them to change.

Lots of corporations would balk at this notion of paying taxes, saying they do enough already by giving people jobs and injecting funds into the economy through a trickle-down effect. They would also say that increasing their tax burden would make it difficult/impossible for them to be in business.

Of course, these arguments are all canards. I’m reminded of the arguments that have always been made against raising the minimum wage, i.e., employers saying they could not afford to pay their workers more. Wages were increased (still not enough), businesses did not go belly up, and the standard of living went up as well (albeit not as much as many of us would like).
Therefore, it’s crucial that we continue to demand that corporations do their fare share by reminding everyone of the key idea of fairness, and to counter their nonsense objections with facts.

Let’s also agree with Joe Hill that a massive reinvestment in the national educational infrastructure is necessary to close the “achievement gap”. That’s undoubtedly true.

But then let’s acknowledge the reality –the prospects for either an increase in corporate taxes or a massive reinvestment in education are virtually nil without –and I can’t emphasize this enough– a radical change in the country’s political leadership.

Neither of the parties in our governing duopoly has the courage to raise even the most innocuous of taxes, let alone taxes on their corporate benefactors. And neither party is likely to abandon its free market allegiance to expand the role of government in education.

Both major parties are infected with a neoliberal outlook. Let the market rule.

In the meantime, there is much the schools can do to enhance the learning of their students.

It begins with empowering teachers to set the educational agenda. Teachers need to be encouraged to pool their resources, their skills and pedagogical strategies. They need to be given the opportunities collaborate and to begin teaching across the arbitrarily imposed subject area boundaries.

In short, teachers need to team up and to integrate instruction.

School and instructional reform won’t cure all ills, but it’s at least a step in the right direction while we wait for our political leaders to see the light.

Campbell is quite right to point out corporations’ flouting of the the law and of the spirit of the law. Still, this kind of shaming comes to little. Corporations are the dominant social institutions of our time, and until one of the major political parties is willing to organize on the principle of seriously limiting their power, or until there is such a widespread popular movement to force them to do so as we have not seen since the late nineteenth century – a movement that failed, let’s not forget – we’re just wringing our hands over monsters we can’t control.

More to the point, I think Campbell underestimates what it would really take to turn around education. Let’s say the situation is ceteris paribus, that is, all things being equal. No universal healthcare, savage inequalities of class, sexism as an indispensable tool of the market economy, racism as the sugar rush of the reptilian hindbrain of body politic. Everything is then as it is now, and we are there.

In that case, I suggest it takes AT LEAST four times as much money as K-12 education has now to even raise the case to make a dent in evening up life chances, which is, after all, our mission. Hope for everybody. Say it without spitting: no child left behind.

We need twice as many schools to achieve a 1 to 12 classroom ratio (1 to 9 or 10 in the most needful situations, 1 to 15 in the best off). The schools we have need their infrastructure almost completely redone – teaching is tremendously difficult as it is, no doctor or judge or corporate executive would tolerate their work being compromised by constantly battling with a copy machine or a shortage of colored markers or books. Teachers need to paid approximately twice as much as they make now – that is about 10% – 15% above the average for a professional masters degree. Teaching positions should be competitive the way that surgical positions are at the Mayo Clinic, or tenured positions at any major research university. Part of that means that teachers will be expected to be MUCH more in control of the material in their field. (Pet peeve: I know too many of us who couldn’t pass the AP exam in their subject area.)

Twice as much? Not going to cut it. Quadrupling the present amount and sticking with that over a couple of decades will get us some actual progress.

We need to stop thinking about filling in potholes and start thinking about something on the scale of the Interstate Highway System . . . without the carbon footprint, of course.