First, They Came for the Schools

                In 1983, the Carnegie Commission issued a report entitled, A Nation at Risk.  That report accelerated an all- out war on public education.  It turned schools into outlets of the textbook and testing industry and helped kick-start a war on teachers.  The report used data from tests that have since been challenged as unreliable and invalid.  It compiled test scores without reference to age, income, race or gender and concluded that schools were failing, although there was little objective evidence to support that conclusion.  Three and a half decades later, America’s schools have been reduced to detention centers, drug providers and failed technical training centers.  In the bargain, we’ve lost faith in education and see it as merely a means to employment.

                After more than 70 years of mass education through high school, economic inequality is either as bad as it’s ever been or the worst it’s ever been.  Democracy in America has been hijacked by political parties addicted to dark money and less than half of the people eligible to vote do so.  Whatever lofty goals the nation had for our schools coming out of WWII, it’s time to admit that we haven’t been able to reach them.  In fact, it’s time to admit that things are worse.  If there is going to be another chapter of American Democracy, that narrative is going to have include in it an alternative and radically reconfigured idea of school.

                First, we have to face the fact that schools cannot function equally or effectively when the country fails to address the social and economic disparity in our society.  It is ludicrous and beyond cynical to send children who are homeless, malnourished, without parents who live in violent settings to school and expect an underpaid and under supported teacher to perform a magic trick.  Schools are not the corrective to our cultural problems, they are a reflection of them.  If we want, and I don’t think we really do, an equal and fair quality education for all of our children, then we have to address the conditions those children live in away from school.  What we have done instead is to create a text book and testing industry that sucks resources out of our schools and funnels them to companies that produce tests and curricula that replicate the economic and social divides in our country.  If you want your child to do well on the standardized tests their being force fed, you better make enough money to move to a nice neighborhood and nice school.

                Second, we have to stop blaming teachers for everything that’s wrong with schools.  Education might be the only example where ‘capitalists’ have decided that paying less and reducing benefits is the best way to improve performance.  Teaching should be an attractive profession that is able to keep motivated teachers from leaving.  The opposite is true.  In too many cases, we have taken away the ability to teach and replaced it with test monitoring.  Tests mean nothing if the things being tested lack value in the real world.  Teachers are only part of the education puzzle.  They have to be supported and allowed to use their intelligence and creativity.  If you don’t think they possess those characteristics, they shouldn’t be teaching.

                Most importantly, we need to rethink what we think an education is.  Is it just the mastery of some random, socially contextualized facts?  Is it only about memory and recall?  A dogmatic education only works in a culture where change is minimal.  Ours is not that kind of culture.  Children are going to need the ability to imagine and connect with other people.  They are going to have to create or at least recreate a world that is livable and sustainable.  Sure, they need skills and knowledge, but they also need to participate in making that knowledge.  They need teachers able to lead and support them and communities that protect and nourish them.

                The easiest way to dismantle a democracy is to attack the way its children are educated.  In the last 35 years we’ve done just that.  There are smart and well-intentioned people in education, but it’s impossible to ignore what a mess they’ve created.  The influence of politicians and dark money has only added to the problem.  Thinking of schools as these nice little factory buildings where we house kids during the day is not a model for going forward.  We need to radically rethink what it means to learn around an ethic of participation and not one of passive transmission.  We have no idea what our kids are going to need to know to rebuild what we’ve destroyed.  The least we could do is to stop acting like we have the answers and get the hell out of the way.