This blog is dedicated to sharing ideas and resources that can advance learning and democracy in the United States and elsewhere.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Citizen New Year's Resolutions


It’s a new year and so it seems to be a good time to make some resolutions with regard to education and a citizen’s responsibilities. In a free society parents with children in school are not the only stakeholders in education. Every citizen is a participant—and must be an active participant—in ensuring that our future citizens receive an education that empowers them to maintain our democratic way of life. Thomas Jefferson said as much in several ways, notably, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

To this end I would propose five citizen resolutions for education in 2016. As citizens we should resolve:

To uphold and advance our national commitment to effective, freely and fairly available public education. The public schools remain the best safeguard of democracy, and efforts to undermine public education, such as underfunding public schools and shunting public money into private education and corporate endeavors, must be viewed fundamentally as attacks on American democracy.

To ensure that all children, adolescents, and young adults are provided with educative experiences that enlarge their knowledge and understanding in ways that resonate both with the needs of our free society and with their individual interests, talents, and abilities. Narrowly defined, overly prescribed curricula inhibit personal development and should be anathema to free public education that is not solely in service to the state but, rather, is conceived to accommodate diversity in all dimensions as befits a fully developed nation.

To advocate for and work toward true safety for the nation’s young people, which means addressing safety issues across many dimensions, such as working for effective gun control to reverse the gun violence that has plagued the United States in recent years and working to establish and maintain learning spaces in which students are safe from prejudicial mistreatment and bullying related to racism, homophobia, or other detrimental conditions.

To strive through active engagement in democratic processes to ensure that elected officials at every level of government understand the importance of effective public education and work to craft laws and policies that commit resources, both real and philosophical, to the advancement of the public schools. Concomitant in this work must be real commitment by our elected officials to listen to the public they represent and to strive to act in a manner consistent with the public’s desires.

Finally, to work toward more appropriate use of standardized and other forms of testing, uses that truly contribute to the improvement of education. Mindless, mandated, mass testing, which has become rampant, is a misuse of instructional time and diminishes the educative experience. Moreover, the misuse of test results unfairly characterizes students, educators, families, neighborhoods, and communities and is a state-sponsored means to sort and select that often disadvantages the already disadvantaged, such as racial minorities and the poor.

None of these resolutions will be easy to keep or easy to accomplish. But the effort to enact these resolutions is worth making.