Two Goals for the New School Year

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.