The commodification of education: Why we need grades in school as ‘exchange value’

Paying students for grades

The commodification of education and learning reach deep into the pockets and psychic recesses of everyday life.  With testing regimes placing ‘grades’ as the gold index for success in and out of schools, it is little wonder that paying students for grades is on the advance.  Holding out crass material rewards in the form of greenbacks for these trinkets they call ‘grades’ is now just a form of currency exchange.  In fact, with education itself having little more than ‘exchange value’ for most participants, the new ‘Gold/Grade’ standard was inevitable.

In June of 2009 in New York, according to the New York Post:

“About two-thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program — which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments — improved their scores since last year’s state tests by margins above the citywide average.  The gains at some schools approached 40 percentage points” (LEARN- &-EARN PLAN PAYS OFF SCORES SOAR AT CASH-FOR-KIDS SCHOOLS

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_Ciw4CQ7x8j0tM8yUOdZ35I;jsessionid=2A1FB30BA6C6F096AE9149AC1F52DD36#ixzz0hgZQcK2l)

(http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_Ciw4CQ7x8j0tM8yUOdZ35I;jsessionid=2A1FB30BA6C6F096AE9149AC1F52DD36#ixzz0hgZ72HtQ)

(lynn.bonner@newsobserver.com)

More than 8,000 kids have collectively earned $1.25 million since September of 2008 in the two years the privately funded pilot program has been in place.  Another version of Race to the Top through good old fashioned cold cash!

The pay-for-grades initiative, created by Harvard University economist Roland Fryer, is run out of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Educational Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs), which is conducting similar cash-for-kids trials in Chicago and Washington, DC. (ibid).

According to their website EdLabs says its mission is:

“transforming education through the power of the scientific method (http://www.edlabs.harvard.edu/).

They go on to announce:

The most important medical innovation of the 21^st century was the randomized clinical trial: a method for getting at effective solutions.  Education has not yet followed suit.  It is time for education to adopt the scientific method and, like the medical field, immerse itself in path breaking research and development.  The pharmaceutical industry alones spend $40 billion per year on R and D to find new solutions to medical problems.  Education spends essentially $0.  We believe that applying an  R&D model to education will provide a way to unearth root causes of performance gaps, effectively evaluate options for reform, and achieve effective and transparent solutions” (ibid).

One would think that with this ‘evidence based’ model EdLab would be conducting research on chimpanzees or lab rats.  No, not this time, this time the experiment is aimed directly at the population; our kids as guinea pigs for the lab-coated research teams.  Evidently part of the science is based on Pavlovian theory and the method is to see, if life canines, students will salivate at the thought of a commercial transaction for learning.  If they do, this is evidence they learn; if they don’t then it is not.  Simple, right?

But the whole scam, wrapped up in scientism, hardly science, is really a statement about the approach, that in this case Harvard is asking us to use when we try to understand student performance in school.  The underlying assumption is that motivation is the culprit and only money can cure this.  CEOs use raises, bonuses and stock options as carrots to get workers to excel, right.  So why not apply the lesson to kids.  Poverty, undernourishment, homelessness, lack of affordable housing, delinquency, racism lack of jobs, lack of relevance in education, testing regimes that reduce learning to facts to be memorized along broken families or families struggling with two jobs to even stay afloat have nothing to do with EdLabs ‘novel’ approach nor in their mind motivational factors and learning.

A look at EdLabs partners find the usual suspects we find when we turn the earth to discover who is actually promoting these pernicious programs.  KIPP charter schools is one.  Teach for America and the Sesameworkshop are the two others. All three are strong players in the educational privatization efforts sweeping the nation and darlings of Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education.  However, these groups seem to have turned to actual mind control with their Sparks program.

One student in New York, Alize Cancel, a 13-year-old at IS 286, spent some of the $180 she has earned this year on school supplies and shoes.

“It’s all we talk about. Every day we ask our teachers, ‘Did we pass? When do we get paid?  It made me study more because I was getting paid” (ibid).

So much for the love of learning and critical discourse.

According to a September 2008 article in USA Today:

“As children settle in for the 2008-09 school year, business interests are lining up behind pay-for-grades initiatives at schools in Atlanta, Baltimore, New York and elsewhere. The most ambitious project, funded by the foundations of ExxonMobil, Bill Gates and Michael Dell, will pay students at 67 high schools in seven states $100 to $200 for scores on advanced-placement (AP) college-prep exams that are high enough to earn college credit. It also awards teachers for getting the right training to teach AP classes and pays them bonuses for each successful student” (Jones, Del., CEOs split on paying for good grades September 12, 2008 http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2008-09-10-pay-for-grades_N.htm)

Gates and Dell are notorious for not paying their workers when they can get away with it and of course they opt to outsource American jobs to third world countries where the cost of labor is cheaper, thus hollowing out communities.  As to Exxon, they don’t even pay taxes, so a few bucks for grades is chicken scratch to the predators.  Never mind that, they’re philanthropists, right?  Arne Duncan seems to think so.

When student performance is numerically calcified and institutionalized within education then we see the true hidden curriculum: that is to teach kids that all human activity must be compensated for in the form of cash.  The ethics behind programs like these that inculcate such gross ideas like crass materialism, go it alone learning and compensation-based learning are premised on the monetarization of consciousness through external reward systems; they are capitalist social engineering programs that encourage the embracement of wage-slavery and consumerism, both psychically and socially, through the colonization  of subjectivity.  This is the real educational lesson that is being passed on in the name of educational efficacy.  “Get good grades, get good money.  Get good money; get good stuff.”

Using grades to close and then privatize schools

The earning and rewarding of grades is not just being used to monetarize learning and commodify education, it is also a scheme used by the privatizers and their managerial courtesans to close schools under No Child Left Behind for not making steady ‘annual yearly progress’ (AYP) on standardized tests.  When this happens, as in the case of Rhode Island to use just one example, the grades can then be used as ‘evidence’ to justify the closing of public schools and then subsequently turning them over to the new privatized makeover artists like charter school educational maintenance organizations (EMO’s) (the same people who support EdLab!).  Thus, grades are not only the currency of the masters to dangle in front of the hoi poloi, the students; they are also the raison de’etre, the ‘scientific tool’ that the privatizers use to condone school closures, denying many children education while forging new opportunities for investors.

When the numerologists designed NCLB, under both the democratic and republican party leadership, they knew they now had a powerful weapon they could yield to attack public education and public unions.  With ‘measurable outcomes’ the new logic of the irrational, the ‘scientific method’ could now argue for the school closures.  Never mind that the tests themselves evaluate little or no critical thinking or learning; they are not supposed to do this — they are inauthentic underachievement devices utilized for everything but assessing learning.

They are designed to classify, categorize and sort students in a social engineering fantasy of assuring who enters the corridors of power, and also who will be placed on dead-end vocational tracks or low-paid service work in the corridors or exploitation.  In other words, they are not only used to track kids, as predators have a tendency to do, but they operate as upper level entry conveyor belts for those whose prodigy is seen wedded to the inauthentic tests.

Other uses of grades: The Case of North Carolina where if you can’t pay students for grades, charge them for grades!

However, a new and interesting twist arose in North Carolina in 2009 when it came to the use of test scores as ‘exchange value’.  In Goldsboro, a middle school in North Carolina, evidently cookie and bake sales were not able to bring in the necessary revenue the school needs now that they are facing fiscal budget cuts and rising deficits.  So the school, Rosewood School, and Susie Shepherd, the principal, said a parent advisory council came up with an innovative idea and Shepherd endorsed it as a new way to raise money.  What was it?  Selling grades themselves.  That’s right, forget about paying kids to do well on tests, why not just sell grades to kids as if they were commodities like gold or silver.  Principal Shepherd commended the idea commenting that:

“Last year they did chocolates, and it didn’t generate anything,” (District nixes cash-for-grades fundraiser, November 11, 2009 http://www.newsobserver.com/2009/11/11/185460/district-nixes-cash-for-grades.html).

So, instead of relying on chocolates and bake sales Shepherd went ahead and instigated the “pay for play”.

A $20 ‘donation’ to ROSEwood Middle School by a student would have gotten a student a 20 test points — 10 extra points on two tests of the student’s choosing.  That could raise a ‘B’ to an ‘A’, or a failing grade to a ‘D’ (ibid).  That is until Wayne County, North Carolina school administrators stopped the fundraiser on November 11th 2009, issuing the following statement:

“Yesterday afternoon, the district administration met with [Rosewood Middle School principal] Mrs. Shepherd and directed the the following actions be taken: (1) the fundraiser will be immediately stopped; (2) no extra grade credit will be issued that may have resulted from donations; and (3) beginning November 12, all donations will be returned” (ibid).

Shepherd balked and rejected the suggestion that the school is selling grades.  She was quick to respond:

“Extra points on two tests won’t make a difference in a student’s final grade. It’s wrong to think that “one particular grade could change the entire focus of nine weeks” (ibid).

Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for the state Department of Public Instruction retorted:

“If a student in college were to approach a professor to buy a grade, we would be frowning on that. It might even be a reason for dismissal. We’re teaching kids something that if they were to do it later, they could get in trouble for” (ibid).

Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics and an ethicist at Clemson University hopes Rosewood reconsiders its fundraising strategy:

“To my mind, it’s the integrity of the educational enterprise that’s at stake here” (ibid).

Carmen Zepp, a Raleigh parent, said there should be policies against offering students test credit for anything other than what they’ve learned.  Zepp objected this year when her daughter’s social studies teacher at Knightdale High School had students bring to school tissues and hand sanitizer. The supplies counted for 25 percent of a “supply check” grade.  According to Zepp:

“It’s awful.  It’s indicative of the fact that our schools don’t have enough money. They can’t get tissues or hand sanitizer or whatever without bribery. And that’s pretty sad” (ibid)

Wait!  What about the ‘free market’?  Some would argue that under unregulated capitalism, where everything is reduced to an exchange value and a commodity, this is just perfectly fine!  After all, it is keeping with the ethic of fundamental free market capitalism that says everything, no matter what it is, must be commodified and has a price.  If students expect to succeed in the downsized Empire, shouldn’t they be able to learn the rules of the market?  After all, Eli Broad buys schools, Bill Gates buys workers and educational policy, the Walton Family buys associates, and corporations are now free to pay as much as they wish in the form of free speech to buy their own coin operated politicians and public policy.  Shouldn’t grades be allowed to be bought and sold as well?

Isn’t this the lesson we really want to teach kids that anything is for sale, from body parts, politicians, weapons, public policy to grades?  That under capitalism we will not only pay you for your grades and use your grades to pay you back by closing your schools, but you too can buy grades under the notion of ‘choice’ on the educational stock exchange for as little as $20.00; the cost of two dime bags of dope on the street.  And if you can’t afford the cost of the grades, there will not doubt be a Pay Day Loan outfit near your school that will front you the cash at 456% interest.  Such a deal!

Making the grade: “Loose Change” we can believe in!

All of the current efforts aimed at educational reform, be they Race to the Top, charter schools, compensation pay for students, closing schools under No Child Left Behind, merit pay for teachers are all based on the sordid ethical conceptions of competition as the motivating factor in learning to become an educated person.  This should be no surprise.  In an era of deception, insipid individualism and covetous acquisition, all hall marks of the capitalist economy, children are to learn early that their success in life will be defined by their status in life.  They are taught that wealth is money, when in fact wealth is community, friendships and family.

In order to understand education, it is increasingly obvious to more and more people that one must understand the pressure cooker in which education reigns, and this pressure cooker is capitalism.  As long as the ethic and material conditions that state that profits come before people, we will see not only grades commodified but the actual commodification of childhood, which if you’ve noticed, has gone unabated for at least thirty years.

Perhaps a ‘Grade Market’, much like the stock market is needed; a place where children can buy and sell grades as ‘futures’ or ‘derivatives’ or ‘hedge’ their bets in the grade market.  Certainly a career on Wall Street will require a familiarity with toxic assets and in education there is no greater toxic asset than grades.