Democracy and Education in an Election Year

This is an election year, a crucial one for public education. Republican control of Congress and in many state legislatures has advanced a longstanding assault on democracy, only partially enacted—though devastatingly for our nation’s young people—through a comprehensive war on the public schools. The war began in the Reagan era of the 1980s and despite intervening Democratic administrations has continued largely without significant interruption to the present. The objectives of this war are privatization and corporatization of education, objectives that have nothing to do with the common good.

In their weakened state, in classrooms underfunded and overburdened, in an era when testing is valued more than teaching, the public schools will be hard pressed to teach children, and perhaps through them, their parents, about the electoral processes that are fundamental to life in a free society. Perhaps it is the pessimist in me, but I fear that teaching about American democracy may become history instead of current events unless public school educators take up this challenge. And the rest of us must support them, especially at the ballot box.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a revolutionary period in American history that saw major cultural strides in civil rights and public education. Those strides did not come easily, and the backlash was deadly. We remember the martyrs: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and many more. President Lyndon Johnson persevered, however, and oversaw two vital pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Both have been attacked over the decades, most vigorously in recent years. 

The Bush era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was a reauthorization of ESEA that perverted many of the positive intentions of the original act and promulgated the current era of test mania that is damaging learning for all children and undermining American democracy. The latest reauthorization, Obama's Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), offers little improvement over NCLB, because it is a watered-down piece of legislation passed by a largely do-nothing Republican Congress.

It is clear that the United States desperately needs a new revolution to move forward a progressive agenda on education and civil rights to counter decades of regression on these issues. Free and fair public education, the only sure guarantor of American democracy, is not a topic that springs to the lips of most candidates, whether at the presidential level or lesser offices, and that is unfortunate. But it is an issue embedded in the very ground of all of today’s candidates’ positions. The choice is clear: a hoped for return to social and cultural progress, a movement we envisioned sixty years ago and only partially realized, or a continuation of the current path toward final destruction of the American experiment in democracy.

It is possible that a populist revolution is brewing in this election year. As a child of the Sixties I can only hope that is the case. It will take nothing less to reclaim America for us, its people, and to save American democracy from the destructive corporatist forces led by the monied elites, who form a burgeoning and unwelcome aristocracy in this land of, admittedly fraught, equality.

Postscript: This is my final post on this blog. Many others write on similar topics with eloquence, and I have decided that I must devote my efforts to other matters at this point in my life. Readers may be interested in two other blogs that I will continue to write: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com/) and Living With...A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com/). During the writing of this blog I have appreciated the support and comments from readers both in the United States and abroad. For this I am truly grateful.

World at War

As I write this on November 13, 2015, the city of Paris is under siege. Several coordinated terrorist attacks—at a stadium, at a restaurant, at a concert hall, and elsewhere—have taken place, and the death toll is mounting. This unfolding tragedy is further evidence, following the recent downing of a Russian airliner, suicide attacks across the Middle East, and other incidents small and large stretching back across years and locales, that we are a world at war. For most Americans, and much of the rest of the world, this new and very different war began with the attacks of 9/11 in the United States.

President George W. Bush on September 20, 2001, used for the first time the phrase, “war on terror.” He could just as well have declared war on abstraction. Terror is a conceptual strategy. It is, as every affected country has found, which includes a large and growing number of countries, notoriously difficult render concrete or specific. Who are the terrorists? Where are they? What end do they seek? It is impossible to attack an abstraction in the manner that wars have traditionally been fought.

The Bush administration and its allies did not fully understand this new concept of war and so pursued a substitute war, a war that could be fought on more or less traditional terms against a substitute enemy, one that turned out to be largely unconnected to the events that sparked America’s bloodlust. Many scholars believe that this action increased the likelihood of future terrorist attacks.

Moreover, on the domestic front these dual wars against abstract and concrete (if mistaken) enemies provided the impetus—excuse?—for limiting and in some cases overriding civil liberties. This is not an unusual consequence of war. However, it is a troubling one, especially as there is no end to the war on terror in sight. The national security versus civil liberties debate has paralleled the war on terror; neither has yet been resolved. Nor is resolution of this debate in sight.

This moment in history seems to be opportune to affirm, once again, the need to educate our citizenry about the nature of democracy, particularly when democracy itself is under fire. In the years since 9/11 the United States has experienced far more threats from domestic terrorists than from foreign terrorists, which conservatives, in particular though not exclusively, have consistently failed to acknowledge or to deal with in any manner other than to institutionalize restrictions on certain civil liberties, while ignoring pro-terrorism factors such as lax gun control. It is not within the scope of public education to school the general populace, but it is a specific responsibility to educate our future adults who will—or will not—defend and extend our democratic way of life.

Deborah Meier, writing some years ago in “Democracy at Risk,”* suggested that such education ought not to consist merely of more civic education classes. Rather, education in democracy should be a pervasive theme in our schools, one that is actively pursued across the educative experience. This will require, Meier avers, designing “all our courses to focus on the habits of mind that we think are most central to an informed and intelligent democratic citizenry, whether it’s math, history, literature, science, or the rules that govern us in our hallways.”

The Paris battles of this ongoing “war on terrorism” should move us to ponder anew the future of our democracy. As President Obama, responding to the situation in Paris, reminded the nation, “This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.

Meier, in her article, wrote of the need for more pervasive civic education: “Democracy is embedded in the work of living in a socially shared space, and it becomes a habit as we go back and forth between living it and studying it, over and over, and then passing on our accumulated wisdom to the young.” The assault on Paris is a piquant reminder that we need to work harder to make democracy a habit.

*Meier, D. (2009). “Democracy at Risk.” Educational Leadership 66(8): 45-49.

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.

Rebooting Public Education

The other day my year-and-a-half-old refrigerator stopped cooling. The lights were on but the compressor wasn’t working. I never actually lived with a true “icebox” but I did live in an apartment with a gas-powered refrigerator once. That was a revelation, that a refrigerator could have a pilot light. But mostly my experience has been with simple electric refrigerators. So when the repairman came and simply unplugged my refrigerator and then plugged it back in and it started working again, I was dumbfounded.

He explained that sometimes the refrigerator’s computer locks up and needs to reboot. A computer in my refrigerator? Wow! Actually, he said, it has three, and he pointed to the various locations. So many things are computer controlled these days. It hadn’t occurred to me that my refrigerator was one of them. But it stands to reason. My desktop computer locks up, I reboot. My iPad goes wacky, I power off and back on. A smartphone app seizes up, I turn off the phone and then turn it back on. Simple reboots usually solve the problems.

Maybe we need to apply this strategy to public education, which is struggling under a national—politically motivated, not educationally motivated—test mania and suffering the consequences of rightwing efforts to privatize and corporatize the schooling of American children, much directly or indirectly intended to further impoverish the poor and enrich the already wealthy. Maybe the best way to move forward would be to reboot.

Imagine simply stopping testing, maybe not forever but for a while, long enough to rethink why and how we might assess student learning and judge the quality of schools and teachers on bases of human social-emotional-intellectual development, rather than political ideology and rightwing economic dogma. Public education is malfunctioning, like a computer app locked up because we’ve tried to do too much too quickly and too confusingly. Time for a reboot.

Time to turn off the craziness of testing, testing, testing. Time to turn off the craziness of so-called standards that are based on political ideology, not human development. Time to turn off the craziness of vouchers, charters, and other efforts to diminish and impoverish public education in favor of privatized, corporatized, elitist schooling. Time to step back and let public schools operate without political interference. Instead, how about letting parents, educators, and students get on with learning on their own, using firsthand knowledge and experience instead of the secondhand ideology and second-guessing by pundits and politicians?

How about a five-year moratorium on all the craziness? Wouldn’t that be a reboot worth trying? It might just fix public education. And it might give us a chance as a nation to repair American democracy, which depends on a robust, fully functioning public education system.

Schools Need an Infusion of Civic Education

In January 2012 the Obama administration released a document, a call to action, titled “Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy.” Has anything changed?

Sadly, the answer is no.

Since the 1980s American democracy—and with it public education—has been hijacked by corporate oligarchs whose bought-and-paid-for “conservative” lawmakers have overrun Congress and many state legislatures. The result has been a deluge of anti-democratic laws and utter stagnation on key concerns upon which the future of the United States turns, such as education and infrastructure, which are suffering at every level.

While gerrymandering and roadblocks to voting have been fostered by rightwing forces, the real stumbling block to progress has been voter apathy. Congress consistently acts contrary to the will of the people because, although many people are willing to answer opinion polls, far fewer are motivated to exercise their right to vote. Voter apathy is an international embarrassment. Some 60% of eligible U.S. voters don’t regularly vote, and among low-income voters the non-voting numbers rise to around 80%. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance ranks the United States 120th in the world for average national turnout.

Voting is fundamental to the maintenance of a democracy. It’s no wonder that American democracy is giving way—some would argue, has already given way—to corporate oligarchy, in which wealth governs regardless of the will of the people. Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has become “government of the poor, by the corrupted, for the rich.” The demise of American democracy cannot be slowed or reversed until the right to vote is seen as an obligation to vote.

Education for democracy at all levels, from kindergarten to the public forum, must be given a central place in our national conversation. And the conversation must lead to action. In the schools, it must become every educator’s role to foster awareness of democratic values, to infuse civic education throughout the curriculum, and to give young people opportunities to exercise democratic values.

Among the steps identified in the “Advancing Civic Learning” report are a couple that merit highlighting:

·      Convene and catalyze schools and postsecondary institutions to increase and enhance high-quality civic learning and engagement.

·      Support civic learning for a well-rounded K-12 curriculum.

We need to ask, not only of our federal government but also our state and local governments, what has been done to accomplish the first of these? And we need to ask our public schools, despite the perversity of the present test mania, where is civic learning for a “well-rounded K-12 curriculum”?

The full “Advancing Civic Learning” report and more can be found at https://www.ed.gov/civic-learning. It is a call to action that must be taken seriously.