The message of the College Admissions Scandal is not that there is cheating in college admissions.  As one commentator put it: “This Just In: Rich People Game College Admissions for Their Kids (Stop the Presses!)  . . .Are we shocked—shocked?”

This scandal, like each of the innumerable articles about helicopter parents, shows how desperate parents are to protect their kids from the vast inequities of the educational system (and what comes afterward).  The real scandal is that the college admissions game really matters.  So the main message isn’t about Harvard, it’s about PUBLIC education.

This country used to care about public education.   It created the GI bill.  It vastly expanded the state university systems.  It showed the rest of the world what broad access to education could do for prosperity of a country.

Then, as a conscious goal of the Koch organization and the new Republican Party, we lost it.   Education has been a major victim of the drive for lower taxes on the rich, and the 2008 crash brought this to crisis levels.  Funding for schools has never recovered.  Rises in state tuition fed the student loan debt crisis.  K-12 school funding collapsed to the point of nationwide teacher strikes.  We even have Koch-funded propaganda attacking the whole idea of mass education.  Trump’s first State of the Union address pointedly talked only about welders and vocation education.

Public education needs to be first-rate.   We didn’t achieve it for everyone in the 60’s, but we showed it could be done more broadly that ever before.  Other countries, following our lead, are now well ahead of us for both education and (as a consequence) upward mobility.

Fixing education is not a trivial matter, but it mostly depends on a commitment to doing the whole job.  There are a number of aspects:

– Money

Money doesn’t solve things all by itself, but we’ve got to stop believing it doesn’t matter.  Raising tuition and fees defeats the whole purpose.

– Value teachers

Teachers, rather than consultants and administrators, should be prime contributors to the direction of the system.

– Common core

There need to be clear national standards of what we are trying to achieve.  However, that should still leave room individual teacher creativity.

– Graduation rates

We need to understand and counteract the current declines.

– Full range of institutions

All types of student objectives should be supported with traditional universities, community colleges, and vocational institutions.

Above all we need to fight the current ethos of superheroes and losers, and recognize that the strength of the country is in providing everyone access to the tools to succeed.  That’s why education matters.