The Popular Capitalist View

In my last column, I discussed education through the filter of the perennial New Jersey political theme of property taxes.  There I had slain the dragon, at least to my own satisfaction, so that I can return to the subject again without further acknowledgment of what remains a pressing issue for politicians who do not bother to read the Johnsonville Press despite my pointing them to it on numerous occasions.  This column is therefore directed to those of us who find more to education than the uninteresting problem of how to pay for it.  That most of the readership, being draw from the ranks of current college students and recent graduates, is interested in education itself goes without saying.  It may not be as apparent why I should address it in this column.  To clear up this confusion, I describe my motivation as a popular capitalist and, in so doing, set the direction and focus of the rest of this piece.

The popular capitalist interest in this matter is primarily in moving beyond mere necessities to the dreams toward which capital can be applied and rewarded.  If a dream is to become a venture and then a successful one, there needs to be an understanding of the field which is best and most often gained through study and reflection which, in turn, usually has some strong basis in the prior results taught in schools.  This understanding needs to be present not only in the entrepreneur possessing the dream but in the cadre of skilled workers assisting in its implementation.  Secondarily, popular capitalism is also concerned with training for public service in crisis management, justice, medicine and, reflexively, education.  For both purposes, the key is to not only disseminate knowledge but to verify that an individual understands it.  No less for the investor than for the employer is it important to check the credentials of an applicant to be sure that they know whereof they speak.  Yet it is precisely in this task that our current educational system is woefully deficient, indeed misdirected.

This error can be most plainly seen in the focus of our evaluations.  We accredit institutions and judge the way they teach, sometimes leniently and sometimes harshly depending on whether individual cases of failure make it to the press.  This is folly.  For the purpose stated above, we are accrediting the wrong things.  Instead of accrediting schools, we should be accrediting students.  And in accrediting students, it is not how the students are taught but that the students are taught that is important.  It is fundamentally a matter of diplomas and degrees and not the circumstances under which they are earned.  All of the effort that goes into the school accreditation process, and it is substantial, would thus be better spent in designing and administering the student accreditation process.

This important distinction can be seen in a farcical situation that has made news at various points in the past year or so.  This involved a superintendent of a school district who received a doctorate from what has been called a “diploma mill” and insisted that he be called “Doctor” in addition to receiving additional income and compensation for what he spent at the institution of higher degree giving.  What struck me about this case is that it called to mind the observation that academia was rife when I went to college, and probably still is, with aspersions towards institutions which were more worthy than Breyer State.  Even in the modest, unassuming Midwest, I frequently heard the assertion “If you can’t go college, go to Coe”.  Most likely, Coe College was passed that dubious mantle among Iowa colleges from the old Parsons College, traditional home of Ivy League dropouts, which had closed its doors only to re-open as Maharishi U. and thus became too easy and obvious an object of derision.  At some point, all of these institutions were accredited, making degrees valid in one year but invalid in the next for those who lost their accreditation.  Others among the maligned retained their accreditation, but their graduates were and are deemed less equal than graduates from Grinnell or Princeton.  Yet there are likely graduates of the worst schools and even from among the receivers of “life experience” degrees from the “diploma mills” who are as knowledgeable in their fields as some Ivy League graduates.  And who are we to say that the good “Call Me Doctor” superintendent is not among them?  Truth be told, without an independent accreditation process for the students, we can’t say that he is or is not qualified.

The problem worsens when we apply this lesson to the case of “failing” high schools.  Some students maintain much higher standards than their schools offer and have their reputations ruined because their school failed by some measure.  In my town, we have a case of the entire student body of Edison High School being maligned by a “failing school” label because the State determined that its special education students did not meet some targets.  By every other measure, Edison High students ranked among the top students in the state.  Thus, what should have been a call for additional help for a few students resulted in a blot on hundreds of students, a silly exercise of transfers to J. P. Stevens and back and no help at all for the students needing it.  Clearly, school accreditation and evaluation is not only ineffective, but haphazard and destructive as well.

The program of student accreditation which I have proposed is just as clearly an improvement on all fronts.  With a course-based curriculum and accreditation through statewide course exams, the good student from a “failing” school is given the same credit and acquires the same good reputation as their counterpart in a “successful” school for the courses on which they receive the same grade.  When a student has trouble and fails a course exam, whether “special” or not, additional help can be given so that they learn the material and can pass the exam at the end of the next trimester.  Lastly and probably least, we can definitively say whether “Call Me Doctor” should be called doctor, though only after he satisfies through the course exams the requirements for the bachelors and masters degrees and then enters a real doctoral program in public administration and writes and defends a real doctoral thesis before a real doctoral thesis committee.

More importantly than the particular case of a superintendent is the flexibility the separate course exam accreditation gives to students with varying backgrounds and responsibilities.  If you have to go to a maligned school or earn a living instead of going to college because you are poor and underestimated, you have the same opportunity to study a course and take a certifying exam on it as a wealthy or more conspicuously talented student.  These real opportunities then crowd out the temptations for the underprivileged of the “diploma mills”, whose product is more explicitly useless.  If diplomas and degrees are issued by the state based on uniform standards, masquerading as a high school or college granting a diploma or degree is an easily exposed deception.

One more improvement of note is the effect that moving the responsibility for degree granting to the state has on colleges and universities: the ability for them to focus on the critical thinking and new research that has been the traditional strength of academia.  There is no reason for institutions of higher learning to be devoting so much of their time and energy on remedial education or, for that matter, high school level courses such as calculus.  Indeed, as learning progresses, we should expect that more advanced courses should find their way into the public schools to be taught at earlier and earlier ages as colleges and universities become once again engines of new ideas.

In closing, let me point out the obvious extension to the federal level of this program of an independent standard of student accreditation through course exams.  Embarking on such a task would be of great benefit for colleges considering the qualifications of out-of-state students and for employers considering applicants from across the country.  It would also redeem the promise of the Federal Department of Education, which has floundered in the haze since its inception under President Carter, by giving it the kind of task to which government bureaucracies are particularly well suited: creating standards in exhaustive and minute detail.