Yesterday, the Huff Post published a piece by Timothy Slekar titled "Public Schools Are Not Negotiable". In it, he describes the direction in which current reform efforts, including some of those surrounding the abolishment of standardized testing, are taking public education in America: privatization. The piece begins with Slekar's rationale for opting children out of standardized testing. According to Slekar, by choosing to opt his kids out of testing, "[He's] saying NO! You will not use my kids in your attack on public schools. You will not use my kids to dismantle the entire public school system."
Why bother? Is the public school system worth saving? Why not dismantle it, and build a newer, fancier, private one in its place? There are certainly many wealthy donors out there who are up for the job. Slekar: "Market-based reforms being pushed by a crowd of people unfamiliar with teaching and learning are trying to destroy the American public school system. And if they succeed democracy will soon follow."
Without free, high-quality public education in America, the poor will be totally ignored, shunned, left out of society. People who already struggle to become functionally literate will have even fewer opportunities to learn skill vital to joining the work force, and will therefore be less qualified for what jobs are available.
This is a critical time for our country to question what we value not as individuals, but as a society. Will we help the poor or condemn them to an eternity of suffering? Will we rejuvenate the middle class or allow it to disappear into oblivion? Until social values enter the conversations taking place at every level of our democracy we can consider ourselves complicit in the injustices that are sure to follow this movement of so-called education "reform."
One of the things I find confusing about this is how many privileged people there are who believe in social justice in theory, but when push comes to shoving the kids out the door with a backpack loaded with school supplies, they choose private school over public. I did this myself. There are a lot of ways to justify this move - sure, my step-daughter's mother has lots of dough and insisted on private high school for the daughter we were raising together - but the fact is that we could (sort of) afford it also, and if you can afford it, who wouldn't want smaller class sizes and loads of extra resources for their kids, giving them a better chance of going to college and being successful there? This makes the argument for charter schools a pseudo-no-brainer: smaller class sizes, "innovative" teaching, more rigor...right? But as many education pundits arguing against charters have pointed out, this model will eventually leave the poorest kids in the dust, and lull rich people with their heads up their asses into thinking that the problem of ineffective public schools is being addressed.
ReplyDeleteWhat needs to happen is for America's "haves" to see that ignoring poverty will not make it go away, and our obsession with making teachers solely accountable is doing just that. Allowing billionaire reformers to shape our education policy, like so many wolves dressed as sheep, is bound to blow up in our faces. The question is, will we wake up before our nation's poor take to the streets?