Poor? Don't Say We Didn't Warn You or: Musings on Why Math in Schools Doesn't Add Up

It comes as no surprise to any student, parent, educator, or school budgetary wizards that vocational classes have diminished - if not all but disappeared at many of the nations schools. For those of you who appreciate such things as "data" (I do not count myself among you) the most recent survey from the National Center for Education Statistics - under the US Department of Education - evaluating vocational program offerings in schools reported that "almost 90 percent of U.S. public high schools...were comprehensive high schools rather than vocational schools. The remaining 11 percent of schools were roughly evenly split between area or regional vocational schools... and full-time vocational high schools" (full NCES survey here).

As a teacher in a generic 'under-performing' comprehensive urban high school serving just under two thousand students I believe we offer fewer than five vocational classes. Although much coveted by students vocational class offerings have been cut for a variety of alleged reasons – budget cuts, focus on the 3 R’s, focus on college readiness. I, however, shall divulge the grand secret – the true reason these classes are nearing extinction.

Ready?

Everyone is going to Stanford.

Naturally, if we’re all going to Stanford we don’t need to know how to make jewelry. Personally I find this an ironic decision. You see, I selected for my urban high school experience an institution that offered voc ed specifically to take those classes. This decision was decidedly a result of my bourgie taste, benefiting from white privilege, having a middle class two parent household, and considerable financial aid but, more importantly to my pubescent psyche: the ability to learn skills that would allow me to grow in directions of my own choosing. I graduated high school knowing how to construct a dresser, weld rebar, sandblast, solder, throw clay, and develop photographs. I was giddy. And I had a seat at a 4-year university with my name on it thanks to the rigorous college preparatory academics and extensive college counseling. Voc ed and Stanford – I lived the dream. For the upper strata of the social structure my experience might ring true. For the majority of students mandated to attend public schools college-prep-voc-ed schooling is an anomaly.

My aim is not to praise the merits of vocational education. Like any medium vocational education can and often is a tool to maintain hegemony. Today it’s seen in tracked academies and ‘alternative’ programs. Several decades ago it meant my father had to attend a segregated high school to ensure nobody stepped out of bounds to the brighter ends of the social hierarchy.

I believe that examining the move away from vocational education we are offered one of the clearest windows into the beliefs and functions of current capitalist hegemony. I find this a particularly valuable case study because hegemony, by its nature, is invested in erasing its footprints. It’s a chance to catch oppression in the act.

As a post-American-apartheid society the US question of equal opportunity was brought into crisis. We integrated our schools. We bussed our students. We left no child behind. Rhetoric stressing that racial, sex, and class equality could be reached via education has been popularized. Little Timmy and LaShawn – you too can be president if you do well in elementary school, and middle school, and high school, and college. Just keep your nose to the grindstone for twenty-one years!

Sadly – I don’t jest. The message I have heard from the consummate majority of teachers, principals, politicians, media, and government spending is that opportunity is out there if you have the will to grab it.

(My uncle is nodding in agreement at this.)

Wrong.

It is not possible to change the mass of my thunder thighs by jamming them into smaller pants. The body of hegemony has not changed. It bought a new top at Wal-Mart.

Racism, sexism, and classism all serve to allocate resources differentially. Three generations ago I legally could not have attended my post-secondary alma matter – quaintly wrapping up the avenues available to me professionally, economically, geographically, etc. But it became passé to have laws barring individuals based on physical characteristics, yet resources must be allocated. The US answer to its inability to legally maintain apartheid was to enlist schools as social gatekeepers.

If we believe that no child is to be left behind, that we can all go to Stanford, become doctors, lawyers, and earn six figures, then when people do not do so we as a society can shrug and say, ‘well, we tried and that person mad the choice not to take advantage of their opportunity.’

This belief functions as a means to blame poverty on the poor and not on the system that necessitates it in order to maintain differential resource distribution.


Schools provide attendees with only two things: skills and pass cards (for more on this: Illich). Skills are easy to conceptualize. One example of this is traditional vocational education – drivers ed, building technologies, auto shop, etc. Skill based education in schools also includes learning to read - helpful in such real world situations as ordering food, reading traffic signs, dyeing one’s hair. In biology or health students can hope to learn how to plan pregnancy and avoid STD’s. Another skill is basic math – helpful for fulfilling such life activities as not being cheated when purchasing goods, measuring ingredients in cooking, and calculating how much gas one needs to purchase. I have never had to apply my high school calculus concepts (thankfully also avoiding psychic trauma).

Calculus falls into the latter function of schools: pass cards. Also known as diplomas, certificates, or promotions, pass cards are an expression of legitimacy. A diploma is only a sheet of paper – yet groggy adolescents only wake at 6am because of the power it represents. Pass cards permit individuals to legitimately assume greater shares of resources. Years of schooling and income have a suspicious overall correlation. Coincidence: thy name is hegemony.

The idea of every student attending an Ivy League college is absurd – yet that is the fundamental rhetoric behind our current public education system.

I dare: schools are a false public good.

“Equal obligatory schooling must be recognized as at least economically unfeasible. In Latin America the amount of public money spent on each graduate student is between 350 and 1,500 times the amount spent on the median citizen (that is, the citizen who holds the middle ground between the poorest and the richest). In the United States the discrepancy is smaller, but the discrimination is keener. The richest parents, some 10 percent, can afford private education for their children and help them to benefit from foundation grants. But in addition they obtain ten times the per capita amount of public funds if this is compared with the per capita expenditure made on the children of the 10 percent who are poorest. The principal reasons for this are that rich children stay longer in school, that a year in a university is disproportionately more expensive than a year in high school, and that most private universities depend – at least indirectly – on tax-derived finances.” - Illich, Deschooling Society

Before death comes the taxes that every individual is obliged to pay. That tax money is derived from rich parents, poor parents, and non-parents. It is spent disproportionately on the students that will become richest (and often those students already started out that way). Public education – our great post-civil rights equalizer is still functioning to maintain inequality.

Stripping schools of vocational education is particularly significant not for the loss of skill knowledge, but for the manner that it reinforces inequity via promotion of pass card systems of merit. A student can show merit in math class, but the merit in having an advanced math class for many students enrolled is that it has the right markers for a university. A university degree signals that it has the right markers to entitle an individual to increased earning power – often without any skills attached. My sociology degree really has nothing on earth to do with teaching – yet I was hired as a teacher without any additional skill based assessment toward that end.

In my school district the single most accurate predictor of whether a student will drop out of high school is their passage or failure in algebra. Grade level (distinguished from remedial) high school math standards across states are some of the most bereft of skill applications of any subject required of students. Secondary mathematics education is telling us extraordinarily clearly that schools are a false public good.

Many of the hours required of students are not so they can solve the pressing problems of the world, the nation, or even within their own lives. They are hours earned toward obtaining the seals of legitimacy and the promise of proportionately greater freedoms than their lesser-schooled counterparts. I'm tired of it. I've seen too many students opt out at too high a cost.

I'd argue that my high school - beloved and absolutely abysmal - is not 'under-performing' and in fact is doing just the opposite. It is performing exactly the function it was meant to - and moreover is doing so in a manner that permits hegemonic power structures to keep their hands tidier than in more blatant racist, classist, -ist eras of yesteryear. 'Under-performing' schools are performing their function perfectly: they are distributing resources like money, wealth, and health in a manner that such staggering inequalities and stratification within a single country can seem justified. Schools to the Poor: "Told You So…"

No surprise.


It's capitalism's creation myth. Teachers: the new priests.