Carrol says, “Schools are not a problem anyhow; there is no problem -- problems are what they have in 6th-grade arithmetic texts with answers in the back of the book. And when there is no problem there is no answer to put in the back of the book or in the last paragraph of an e-mail post. There is a huge complex of social relations, relations that are no one's fault and that can't be changed by finding 'better' people. They can be changed, though to find out how we are going to have to fight one hell of a lot of losing battles.”
This is certainly true. Suppose that there were no standardized tests and that every teacher was a good one (whatever that might mean, but we might reach some sort of consensus). Would capitalist society, much less the capitalist mode of production, change? I doubt it. Yes, fight against standardized testing. Yes, fight for local control of schools. Yes, fight for (and with) teachers as you would fight for any workers. But don’t put special focus on schools, as if you think that if our kids only had good schools and good teachers that this would be a better world. Or that the deplorable inequalities in incomes and wealth would dramatically change. It’s a vast, impersonal, and barbaric system. Individually, we have little to no control over many, many important aspects of our lives. To a large extent, the starting block and chance rule for each of us, no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise.
Also, why think that the schools have failed. According to what? There is no shortage of graduates ready to do the system’s work, both at the top and at the bottom. The education majors I had in my classes were among my very worst students. Suppose they had been the best and brightest. Would they have, as Carrol says, become the system’s gravediggers? It seems funny to me to even ask such a question. The best and the brightest, taught at the best colleges, have managed to fuck most of us over for a very long time.