As George Orwell warns, political leadership that depends on foolish language leads to foolish thoughts and policies. Education and society suffer under that foolishness as demonstrated in the Obama administration led by Secretary Duncan..

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"It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts," George Orwell warns in his "Politics and the English Language"

Few examples are better for proving Orwell right than political language addressing, ironically, the education of children throughout the U.S. But, as Orwell adds, "If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration."

In his Leading Minds, Howard Gardner examines highly effective leaders and the disturbing dynamics behind their success. The great irony of powerful leadership is that these leaders speak simplistic messages aimed to connect with the simplistic assumptions of the wider public.

If our leaders were somehow always benevolent and wise, this pattern could in a paradoxical way benefit society, but our leaders tend to be as misguided as the populace to whom they speak--and lead.

For example, in the U.S., we are often guided by our misconceptions and our mythologies, regardless of whether or not either is accurate.

Political leaders and the average citizen depend on, for example, a conflating of demonizing terms such as "socialism" and "Marxism" with the acts of totalitarianism. In other words, when we speak against "socialists," we are in fact challenging the oppressive fact of totalitarian government, but we take little time or care with words (as Orwell warns) and thus simply charge any effort to use government as an act of socialism, thus totalitarianism.

As Gardner shows, we allow no room for nuance, and leaders who remain black-and-white (consider George W. Bush's "for us or against us" language after 9/11) are politically successful--although political success is not necessarily what is best for our society.

It is somewhat fully "American" to be skeptical and even cynical of the government. Calls for no government (or at least better government) stretch back to Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience." And this disdain for government is fully reinforced by our mythologies, specifically our trust in rugged individualism, and extends to our contradictory attitudes toward public schools.

So the language used by politicians, echoed in the media, and embraced by the wider public is steeped in misinformation, oversimplification, and a cyclic carelessness that insure we remain essentially fixed in a fruitless pit of our own digging.

And this is where education, public education, comes into play.

Many who champion the power of education--from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey to George Counts to Paulo Freire--have embraced and claimed that education is the causational tool for social reform. This is a compelling myth, as compelling as rugged individualism.

But like rugged individualism, education as social reform proves to be one of the "myths that deform," a warning from Freire himself.

Public schools, in fact, have proven themselves to be both a reflection of our society and burdened by the very worst of our society--thus unable to be the social reform mechanism that many hope they would be.

Yet, in 2010, under the Obama administration (a leader consistently demonized as a "socialist," a big government advocate set to take away our liberties), we are facing educational policies driven by corporatist assumptions--competition, accountability, and measurement--and not ideologies driven by socialism or Marxism, or even the power of collaboration inherent in democracy.

At the center of the federal discourse and policies, promoted by Secretary Arne Duncan, is the not-so-subtle view that schools and teachers are the central flaws with our public schools. And school and teacher reform (including closing bad schools and firing bad teachers) can be achieved through rigorous standards, teacher accountability tied to student achievement, and what Duncan and others are calling "transparency" and even the "truth."

Yet, from Race to the Top (RTTT) to value-added measures of teacher effectiveness to the claim that teachers are the most important element in student achievement to calls for schools to reform the ills of U.S. society, one ignored truth runs through them all: Not a single one of these messages or policies is supported by the weight of evidence.

As Orwell cautions, "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

For nearly three decades, the U.S. has implemented bureaucratic education reform through an accountability model to address historic failures reflected in the schools but created by the social inequities we never name, never acknowledge, and never address.

The harsh reality is that society and schools have a symbiotic relationship that allows inequality to remain because those who win the game always believe the rules are fair--and fear changing the rules since new rules could mean new winners.

Thus, educational reform must come with political reform, and both must be the result of new ways in which we speak about our society and our schools, including the following:

• Poverty is a powerful force in any person's life, but even more so in the lives of children. Childhood poverty is the dominant influence on any child's academic achievement; therefore, society needs to address childhood poverty and also insure that our public schools stop perpetuating inequity in the schools through tracking, teacher assignments, authoritarian discipline practices, and narrow standards-based high-stakes testing.

• "Accountability" must be reframed as a term and as a political message. To hold any free human accountable for behavior chosen and conducted by that human is a fact of "freedom" since "freedom" does not mean "license." As a harsh example, I am free to smoke cigarettes, but not free to impose that smoke on others who choose not to smoke; yet, my choice to smoke carries with it my accountability for the health consequences of my actions. However, the political use of "accountability" in the school reform movement fails to comply with the basic tenants of ethical accountability. Teacher accountability (including the recent move toward value-added measures) ignores that teachers have little or no choice in the standards imposed on their work, the tests used to hold them accountable, and (most significantly) the lives their students live outside of their classrooms. Teacher accountability as it is now being practiced is a political distraction and little more than holding teachers accountable as nonsmokers for the consequences of second-hand smoke.

• The accountability flaw is directly linked to the mixed messages and policies related to teaching as a profession. The political and public charge that teachers must be held accountable as all professions are seems always to call for only part of the conditions for "professional"--accountability. Teachers must be afforded professional autonomy first before professional accountability can be both ethical and potentially productive. Instead of holding teachers accountable for bureaucratic standards and tests not of their making and test scores produced by the students more strongly correlated with those students' lives than anything the teacher can provide, teachers must be allowed to practice their profession while being held accountable for that which they can control--the opportunities to learn in the classes each day. Their content, their lessons, their assessments.

In Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the audience is forced to consider the power of the accusers. John Proctor challenges us with "Is the accuser always holy now?" And in the graphic novel Watchmen, the work is carried by the refrain "Who watches the watchmen?"

And therein lies the power of words.

Political charges against the failure of schools and teachers mask the failure of the accusers. Political calls for accountability of those schools and teachers distract us from holding the politicians themselves accountable.

Politics of the worst kind is an act of distraction and slight of hand known to pickpockets and thieves. As Gardner reveals to us, politicians are effective by being simplistic, by speaking to the assumptions that mindlessly drive us.

The most damning irony of all is that we remain in a cycle of politics that uses education as a scapegoat to distract us from the rules of the game that keep the winners winning and the losers preoccupied. When fueled by the "slovenliness of our language [that] makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts," neither politics nor education can achieve their highest goals of social change for the empowerment of free people.

Authors Bio:
An Associate Professor of Education at Furman University since 2002, Dr. P. L. Thomas taught high school English for 18 years at Woodruff High along with teaching as an adjunct at a number of Upstate colleges. He holds an undergraduate degree in Secondary Education (1983) along with an M. Ed. in Secondary Education (1985) and Ed. D. in Curriculum and Instruction (1998), all from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Thomas has focused throughout his career on writing and the teaching of writing. He has published fiction, poetry, and numerous scholarly works since the early 1980s. Currently, he works closely with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as a column editor for English Journal, Challenging Text, and the SC Council of Teachers of English (SCCTE) as co-editor of South Carolina English Teacher. His major publications include a critique of American education, Numbers Games (2004, Peter Lang); a text on the teaching of writing, Teaching Writing Primer (2005, Peter Lang); and books in a series edited by Thomas, Confronting the Text, Confronting the World--his most recent volume being Reading, Learning, Teaching Ralph Ellison (2008, Peter Lang). He has also co-authored a work with Joe Kincheloe (McGill University), Reading, Writing, and Thinking: The Postformal Basics (2006, Sense Publishers), and Renita Schmidt, 21st Century Literacy: If We Are Scripted Are We Literate? (Springer, 2009). His next books include Parental Choice? (2010, Information Age Publishing) and the first volume in a new series he edits, Challenging Genres: Comics and Graphic Novels (Sense Publishers). His scholarship and teaching deal primarily with critical literacy and social justice. See his work at: http://wrestlingwithwriting.blogspot.com/