Truth Teaching

An ugly truth about American public education is that Truth, writ large, has become an endangered subject. Schools have always had to battle censors and would-be censors, from the library to the classroom to the computer lab. Overprotective parents, bureaucrats, politicians, and others have long sought to control what students learn, often by denying teachers and students access to factual information. Free speech has never been free in school. The problem is getting worse, not better.

Let’s talk racism, for example. It’s a big example because racism touches every aspect of our social fabric and therefore every aspect of the school curriculum, ranging from underrepresentation—of authors of color in literature anthologies or libraries and lack of attention to historic figures who didn’t happen to be white—to outright misrepresentation. An example of the latter is a recent Texas decision, as reported in the Washington Post:

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

Furthermore, Texas school children are supposed to be taught that slavery was a “side issue” to the Civil War.

It’s easy to pick on subjects like literature and social studies where Truth has gone missing. But consider the compulsory over-testing of English and math skills that has pushed other subjects to the curricular fringe or over the edge entirely, such as music, art, civic education, and any sort of practical training—what we called in olden times home ec and shop. The truth is that the world of work, the world of human endeavor, does not rely merely on the ability to bubble in correct answers about standard prose and basic arithmetic. Turning our young into test-taking automatons is hardly an effective strategy for reaching the vaunted goal of “college and career readiness,” the latest in a legion of empty education reform mantras.

Racism is largely absent because it is, to use Al Gore’s pet phrase, inconvenient truth. Moreover it is a truth that is as plain as the nose on your face, to pile on another cliché. But it is a truth that must be ignored if we are to keep our future citizens in ignorance. And that is precisely what the rising rightwing proto-fascists (to borrow Henry Giroux’s term*) want in order to solidify and expand much of the political power they have already grabbed.

The threads of racism run through the social fabric of our country: in the wealth gap, in voter suppression, in subtle and not so subtle redlining and sundowning, in the grading of schools to reinforce the negative effects of poverty, in police brutality directed against blacks, in the over-population of our prisons with nonwhite inmates, and so much more. If we cannot teach this inconvenient truth, then we can never hope to change.

Writing in a recent article** Henry Giroux commented, “The United States has become a country that is proud of what it should be ashamed of.” That sentence calls to mind all of the recent waving of the Confederate battle flag by “patriots” hiding behind “heritage” to flaunt their fundamental racism.

Truth. How inconvenient.

Where are the rebels in our classrooms, our administrative offices, our school board meetings, our parent associations, our legislative bodies, who are willing to speak truth not merely to power, but to our children who deserve it most?

*Henry A. Giroux. Proto-Fascism in America: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy, 2004.

**Henry A. Giroux. “The Racist Killing Fields in the U.S.: The Death of Sandra Bland.” TruthOut, July 19, 2015.

Public Enemy

There is no question that today’s charter schools are not doing what charters originally, in the 1970s and 1980s, were intended to do. The original idea was that charter schools would be public schools but would not be subject to all of the rules and regulations of the traditional public school bureacracy and therefore free to experiment, hopefully to come up with more effective teaching and learning strategies. They would be generators of true education reform.

It is well known that this lofty goal has not been reached. Charter schools usually have proven to be no better than their public school counterparts, and some are considerably worse. Moreover, lack of accountability has made the charter movement suspect in terms of educational efficacy on any level. They have become, like vouchers, a way to move public money to private corporations. Rather than being a lever to improve public schools, they have become yet another tool with which rightwing conservatives can undermine public education across the nation.

The public schools themselves must share culpability for the movement to privatize public education. Part of the impetus for charters in the first place was the rigidity and unresponsiveness of many public schools to the people of the communities in which they operate. The notion that charters would be freer from bureaucratic constraints should have been a motivating factor for public schools to examine their own assumptions and operational structures. Instead, public school leaders opted out of self-examination and reflection.

No public school system is incapable of reforming itself, rather than turning to an “innovator”—in the case of most charters, at least nowadays—a private corporation that promises big results and delivers, at best, a trickle of difference, often in an elitist setting that ill serves the community public schools for which it purports to provide a model of innovation and educational success.

The issue is one of will. School leaders too often view themselves as vassals of the state rather than as servants of their local community, as cogs in the bureaucracy of government rather than elected local representatives. With many states shunting more and more public money to private enterprises, local school officials need to stop twiddling their collective thumbs and set about the difficult work of improving how local schools respond to local needs and interests.

Ignoring the frustrations of parents and hiding behind rules and regulations will continue to feed the radical conservative movement to privatize public education at the expense of the common good—at the expense, ultimately, of American democracy.