That's not my title. I borrowed it from this piece in Rethinking Schools by Stan Karp. I did so because Stan's piece is cogent, and is something that puts together so much of what is happening in our discussions about educational policy.
Stan begins like this:
The short answer to this question is that far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools, and we need to give them more homework, because very few of them know what they’re talking about. And a few need some serious detention.
But the longer answer is that the bashing is coming from different places for different reasons. And to respond effectively to the very real attacks that our schools, our profession, and our communities face, it’s important to pay attention to these differences.
Stan makes a real distinction between those who are directly concerned with children, often their own, and those who have other motivations. His explanation of this is important, because too often the former have been coopted by the latter, which makes things difficult.
If you will take the time to read Stan's piece, this posting will have accomplished its primary task.
In case I have not as of yet convinced you, please continue reading as I offer a few more selections and some commentary of my own.
As Karp puts it bluntly in the beginning of a section with the title What's at Stake,
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed institutions and policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist, and a policy advocate. But these days I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, sometimes literally, it should be blown up. Because the increasingly polarized national debate around education policy is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of budget cuts in a society that has its priorities seriously upside down.
It’s really not even about the hot-button reform issues like merit pay or charter schools. What’s ultimately at stake is more basic. It’s whether the right to a free public education for all children is going to survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions, collectively owned and democratically managed—however imperfectly—by all of us as citizens. Or will they be privatized and commercialized by the corporate interests that increasingly dominate all aspects of our society?
Please look carefully at that last sentence: Or will they be privatized and commercialized by the corporate interests that increasingly dominate all aspects of our society? Those paying attention know that this is a phenomenon not limited to schools. In Virginia we saw an attempt to build and operate a private toll road - the Dulles Greenway, by an organization headed by a man named Ralph Stanley who in the Reagan administration headed the Urban Mass Transit Authority (and that should make clear what the real agenda of the Reaganauts was), only that effort failed and the Commonwealth had to step in and take it over. Still, the Indiana Toll Road was sold to foreign interests. Water supplies here - and around the world - are being privatized. Many key functions that support our military were already privatized, as far too many found out in Iraq, where for example shoddily constructed shower facilities led to deaths by electrocution.
But schools represent something potentially huge. The annual cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. There are those who view this as yet another opportunity for their private profiting, just as they similarly want to convert Social Security into private accounts based on Wall Street for the commissions they can earn.
In the paragraph before what I just quoted, Karp writes about his home state of New Jersey, where there is a hedge fund manager named David Tepper, who made $4 billion dollars last year, an amount "equal to the salaries of 60 percent of the state’s teachers, who educate 850,000 students." This is in a state where Gov Christie' eliminated taxes on the wealthy and then cut $1 billion from state funding from education - and while Karp does not say so, Christie's argument was that the state could not afford it, not dissimilar from the approach of Walker in Wisconsin. The final sentence of that paragraph is appropriate: It’s not only impossible to sustain a successful public school system with such policies, it’s also impossible to sustain anything resembling a democracy for very long.
Maintaining a democracy - that is why I am a PUBLIC SCHOOL teacher. We should have an obligation to ALL our students, and not just to prepare them to be workers for the corporatocracy. We should be preparing them to think critically, to be functioning citizens, not merely employees.
Karp reminds us that there are Democrats who are complicit in this:
Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans to build on the test-and-punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home to me when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying, “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
And woe unto those who might mention that the Emperor has no clothes.
I have a good friend, Anthony Cody, a highly visible blogging educator who like me is a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, and who organized Teachers Letters to Obama and is leading the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action effort. He noted in a post picked up by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post that President Obama had made remarks that seemed contradictory to the policies of his own Department of Education. All hell has broken loose, from both the Department and the White House Press Office.
(Here note parenthetically that recently Anthony arranged for Stan and for Bob Peterson, another of the leaders of Rethinking Schools, to spend more than an hour in a webinar with the leaders of the Save Our Schools effort, because we so respect what Rethinking Schools has done over the years.)
Like many of us in public schools, Stan Karp has at times been highly critical of much of our traditional approach to schooling. But our criticisms are intended to improve the schools for the benefit of the students, not just as cogs in an economic machine, but for the benefit of what ASCD reminds us is the Whole Child.
It is hard to do justice to Stan's piece by selective quotation. He covers all of the hot button issues, in some cases deconstructing them very effectively. You will read his remarks about charters, about our reliance on tests, on the movement towards value-added assessments, etc.
I am going to push fair use, because Stan's message is so important.
And I know he would not mind, because he wants this message out there. The piece has been distributed in its entirety through Common Dreams.
So let me end as he does, with his concluding material. By itself this is powerful. Read at the end of the entire piece, it is even more so. And let me say right here, as we Quakers often do in Meetings for Worship with an attention to Business, when someone has put something as well as it can be put, this Friend speaks my mind
What Are We Fighting For?
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. It took campaigns against child labor, crusades for public taxation, struggles against fear and discrimination directed at immigrants, historic movements for civil rights against legally sanctioned separate and unequal schooling, movements for equal rights and educational access for women, and in more recent decades sustained drives for the rights of special education students, gay and lesbian students, bilingual students, and Native American students. These campaigns are all unfinished and the gains they’ve made are uneven and fragile. But they have made public schools one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose.
But the system’s Achilles’ heel continues to be acute racial and class inequality, which in fact is the Achilles’ heel of the whole society.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have, as noted, made strides in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of communities that have been poorly served by the current system. But their agenda does not represent the real interests or the real desires of these communities:
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It does not include all children and all families.
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It does not include adequate, equitable, and sustainable funding.
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It does not include transparent public accountability.
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It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
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It does not address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to reinvent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.
Because, in the final analysis, what we need to reclaim is not just our schools, but our political process, our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. In short, we don’t only need to fix our schools, we also need to fix our democracy.
This IS about so much more than public schools. It is about the future of this nation, what kind of nation we are becoming.