PROMOTING POTENTIAL 307However, new alarms are now sounding around the OECD’s new
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ratings. Th e
2013 Education Department report quotes U.S. Secretar y of Education,
Arne Duncan, as concluding that the per for mance of American stu-
dents in the latest PISA evaluation refl ected “a picture of educational
stagnation.” Th e report goes on: “More resources need to be directed
toward disadvantaged students.”^31 So it calls for more resources from
more taxation to fund public elementary and secondary schools and
to improve the quality of teachers available to socially disadvantaged
students. It suggests programs for reducing the impact of socioeco-
nomic background on educational outcomes. Th ese are obviously
based on manipulating the kinds of environmental factors illustrated
above.
Similar mea sures have been urged in the United Kingdom, when
Michael Gove, then education secretary, imposed more testing, inspec-
tions, and league tables on schools and more pressure on teachers. In a
speech in 2011 he voiced concerns that U.K. education has been “plummet-
ing” down international league tables and spoke of the scale of failure
among poor children as “a tragic waste of talent; and an aff ront to social
justice.”^32 He suggested that we need nothing short of radical, large- scale
reform of intervention and testing, in spite of being heavi ly criticized by
teachers and education specialists.
So the war on parents has intensifi ed, too, particularly in the United
Kingdom. Former prime minister Gordon Brown said the prob lem lies
squarely in the backgrounds that (the children) come from. His successor
David Cameron has followed suit, claiming the need to address “what is
keeping people poor— the family breakdown, the failing schools, the fact
that people are stuck on welfare. It’s those things that are keeping people
trapped in poverty and making them poorer.” And Secretary of State for
Work and Pensions Iain Duncan- Smith (Sunday Herald, April 26, 2009)
has more emphatically located our “broken society” in a par tic u lar social
class, with its prob lems of family breakdown, debt, drugs, failed education,
and so on. He says that if we do not deal with these “ causes,” things will
only get worse. And he puzzles over how the free market princi ples he has
supported produce a “strange phenomenon: growing economies and
growing welfare bills.”^33
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