I know that the best medicine for my old driveway is a complete replacement because the underlying structure lacks integrity. Instead, I fill the cracks and potholes and periodically reseal the surface. The driveway looks a bit better and then deteriorates each time. However, patching is what I can afford to avoid complete disintegration. It is my private driveway, so I put up with it.
That is not the case with our government's obligation to support education and health for all. The Covid-19 pandemic and the persistence of achievement gaps across race and family wealth are the kinds of complex social problems that cannot be solved privately on an individual level. Repeated attempts to solve systemic issues through piecemeal surface treatment of symptoms always fail, promoting self-defeating reliance on individual rather than social solutions. The United States has chosen to do the equivalent of filling potholes. As a result, nothing ever gets solved. Putting up with that should not be the default option. That approach wastes money and breeds cynicism, divisiveness, and loss of confidence in democratic processes.
In both areas, the United States is the victim of a combination of forty years of skepticism of government solutions and acceptance of “let’s be realistic about what we can accomplish” thinking.
For example, for decades scattershot treatments of outcomes have characterized bi-partisan education improvement efforts with little to nothing to show for it except undermined public education and stress. The driving causes of inequitable outcomes, systemic inequity, its enabler, racism, and resultant precarious lives remain rampant and unaddressed.
Instead, the dominant education interventions have been to push or blame individuals. These include rewards and punishments for educators or students based on standardized test scores; rigid discipline regimes; and, more recently, a focus on developing grit to work through, put up with, or overcome rather than eliminate challenging social and economic conditions.
Equally, if not more, insidious is you-can't-save-everyone solutions, such as escape hatches for some kids through charter schools and vouchers, most of which are no better than local public schools. More broadly, the lack of universal health care and inequitable funding of schools through local real estate yield the same help-a-few result.
Of course, school systems should provide additional direct support to students who struggle to learn. Of course, we should feed children whose parents struggle to provide adequate nutrition. We have attempted to fill the cracks in the education system. However, these measures are insufficient because they fail to address causes comprehensively. That would include jobs (including green infrastructure to combat climate change) for parents at living wages and beyond, universal health care that included mental health support, and affordable housing. It would include funding all schools at the level expected in well-resourced upper-middle-class public schools, mostly likely through progressive income, capital gains, and corporate taxes, rather than local property tax. That would enable time and resources for small glass size and professional growth and collaboration for teachers.
I can hear the get-realistic crowd's condescending dismissal: "Another progressive wish list." But that's the thing about systemic problems. Patching never works.
We are all now all too familiar with the symptoms of Covid-19 infection caused by variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: cough, sore throat, fever, fatigue, loss of taste and smell, muscle aches. It is a disease that attacks multiple interacting body systems. Of course, doctors treat the symptoms. Cough medicine and ibuprofen may ease pain, but they don't prevent the disease or transmission. Newly approved antiviral drugs and ventilators save lives–sometimes. However, the scientific and medical consensus is a systemic focus on prevention, including vaccination, masking, social distancing, testing, and quarantine–and, not just one measure, but all in combination.
However, two years into the pandemic full funding for prevention and enforcement mandates remain woefully inadequate. That is a system problem. Our fragmented health care system and poverty continue to exacerbate the pandemic’s impact. As a society, we refuse to invest in changing either. That is a choice.
For the most part, viruses arise in nature beyond our control. Not so, the poverty that undermines health and education. That is an intentional human creation. For some viruses such as smallpox, if we inoculate enough people, we can eliminate the disease for everyone on the planet. However, there is no personal mask or vaccination for poverty’s effect on the health and education of the population. We have been filling cracks and potholes–and not even all of them. The pandemic accelerated the rot below. We are falling into a sinkhole.
In 2022 it is clear. Treating symptoms piecemeal and ignoring systemic causes is a failed deadly strategy.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education and social justice. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arthurcamins