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Enough Tinkering. To Improve Education for All, Attack Inequity Not Teachers or Public Schools [1]

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Date: 2023-08-08  

“All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...” Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Government support for charter schools and vouchers fosters an out-for-yourself destiny rather than one of mutual benefit. Personal choice as a governing principle for an education system promotes escape from a network of mutuality, setting people against one another in a divisive winner-and-loser competition.

Only an unequivocal explicit rejection of the ideology of privatization will stop the erosion of democracy and the advance of inequity, resegregation, and divisiveness. More transparency and the banning of for-profit charter schools are insufficient. Neither is evidence of less-than-stellar achievement results for charter schools and voucher-funded private schools. Fewer, but still consequential, state-level tests, are not enough. None of those measures will turn around the wrong turn of bipartisan education policy of the last several decades because they all fail to challenge and replace underlying inequitable anti-democratic principles.

Across the nation, Republican-majority state legislators and governors fund the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. Legislatures are enact speech and book bans to hide the dark past of slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, anti-immigrant legislation, and genocide of Native Peoples. They intend to transform America’s schools from a democratically governed, public-good-for-everyone system into a privatized everyone-out-for-themselves disordered dystopia. The ill-concealed goals are to protect existing privilege, reduce taxes for the wealthy, suppress unions and dissent, resegregate schools, advance LGTBQ+ bigotry, and impose Christian nationalist ideology. Republicans know most Americans do not share these goals, so they obfuscate with seemingly attractive terms such as choice and accountability.

Americans are cognizant that their public schools should do better. However, just as surely, they know that the wealthy use elite private schools to ensure that parents' privileges are passed along to their children. Advocates for charter schools and vouchers want us to give up hope for collective improvement of public education. They want us to cede our democratic power. In its place, they offer the illusion of a shot at those privileges without challenging a rigid class system enabled in large part by divisive racism.

With substantial funding support from libertarian billionaires and foundations, Republicans waged a four-decade campaign to undermine confidence in public schools. It only sort of worked. The people most in the know–the parents of school-aged children–still think their schools are doing a good job. Overall, support for teacher unions is up. Enthusiasm for test-based accountability has waned. On the other hand, folks without direct experience with schools aren’t so sure. Nasty, pitched local battles at school board meetings are on the rise. Most significantly, inequity persists, while curricula have narrowed and student and educator stress has increased dramatically, impeding educator retention and recruitment.

It did not have to come to this. It does not have to continue. In education policy, Democratic leaders from Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama paved the way by embracing deeply conservative ideas and language. I purposely did not write, “unwittingly embrace,” because back at least to Ronald Reagan, the Republicans’ intent has been crystal clear. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was designed from the outset with unattainable proficiency goals to blame public schools for planned failure. NCLB was a pact with the devil. It would have been more honestly named, the Leave All Public Schools Behind Act. That was abundantly clear in 2008 when Barack Obama assumed the presidency. Nonetheless, his Race-to-the-Top education regime pushed NCLB ideas and policies on steroids. During a financial crisis, schools were bribed to continue test-score blame, institute merit pay for teachers, and increase the number of privately governed charter schools. While demanding “evidence-based” practices from schools seeking grants, state education departments and the U.S. Department of Education, demanded fealty to practices purported to improve equity and learning outcomes that were contraindicated by available evidence.

The effects of poverty on children and their families and inequitable local real estate taxes to fund education cause divergent achievement across students and schools. As a result, our public school system tends to reproduce existing economic, social, and political inequity. Of course, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and leadership practices can always be improved. Of course, school cultures that foster a climate for learning and professional collaboration can be advanced. These measures, in concert with attending to students' social and emotional well-being, will partially mediate the effects of social and economic inequity and racism on achievement, but they will not fundamentally alter it. Only combatting basic causes will do that. Everything else is tinkering.

Until voters demand that Democrats reject the tinkering, the must-do– addressing poverty, inequity, and orchestrated scarcity–will remain off the table as the solutions to what ails American education. Competition, disunity, and corrosive resentment will surely continue to follow as night always succeeds day.

Voters, demand that politicians stop tinkering and instead:

Support policies to improve family life and limit insecurity, including a living wage, universal healthcare, government support for housing everyone can afford, and free pre-school and public post-secondary education.

End test-based accountability that primarily measure familial inequity and replace it with system accountability for sufficient resources for education for all.

Fund schools with fair, increased state and federal income, capital gains, and corporate taxes rather than local property tax so that lower-wealth schools are resourced at the level of higher-wealth communities.

Arthur taught and led science professional learning and curriculum and assessment development projects for 50 yrs. He writes about education and social justice. He loves spending time with friends and family, hiking, and gardening.

Follow him:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/arthurcamins

Substack: https://arthurhcamins.substack.com/

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