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.