Working for positive change in public education often seems
like poling a flat-bottomed boat through a stagnant swamp; however, some
glimmers of progress have appeared in recent months that, one hopes, are more
than merely swamp gas. As fresh-faced school children head back to classrooms
tidied and buffed over the summer recess, it seems to be an apt moment for
concerned citizens, parents, and educators to rededicate ourselves to two goal
that, if achieved, would be monumental in the future of American public
education.
First, the pushback against mindless mass standardized
testing has begun to gain momentum, and now is the time to push back even
harder. Apart from the wasteful shunting of public money into the coffers of
the corporate testing industry, mass testing demoralizes teachers and students
because it narrows the curriculum and forces rote learning, which displaces
higher-level thinking and the acquisition of true problem-solving skills. Mass
testing codifies compartmentalized, segmented curricular structures that fail
to take into account individual differences and discourage innovative teaching
and learning. Questionable test results and their consequent misuse
artificially segregate students, mischaracterize schools, and
disproportionately affect the disadvantaged in multiple negative ways. The ills
of mass standardized testing are now well documented, and proponents of
continued use of such tests increasingly find themselves challenged to justify
testing beyond the hollow platitudes about preparing students for “college and
careers” and comparing achievement between schools, communities, states, and
countries. The time is now to push for transparency and the reallocation of
public money to support education for the common good, not the corporate good.
Second, the disastrous results of legislative “leadership”
in education are more and more evident with each passing month. Education
determined by political ideology is a weak system, particularly when the
ideology is anti-democratic, anti-public, and anti-common good. It’s time to
get politics out of education because the bottom line is that politics is
driving educators out of schools. States, including Indiana, are suffering from
artificial teacher shortages—artificial because there is no lack of teachers.
Rather, teachers are being driven out of the profession because public
education is under constant attack. Good teachers are fleeing public schools in
the way that any sensible person would flee a war zone. Current conditions are
not likely to encourage newcomers to enter the profession either. While many
school problems can be laid at the statehouse door, local school boards and
administrators are not blameless. Local school boards are communities’
education leaders, elected by local citizens not to be the lapdogs of the state
legislature but, rather, to be the voice of the public school citizenry. The
time is now to urge local officials to stand up for local concerns, to institute
innovations locally that blunt the negative effects of legislative missteps,
and, above all, to listen—not merely nod and smile—and truly respond to local
concerns.
Neither of these goals is at all modest. They are massive.
But they cannot remain unaddressed if we are not only to preserve public
education for our democracy but also to reinvigorate public education for a
brighter future for all.
