Public Enemy

There is no question that today’s charter schools are not doing what charters originally, in the 1970s and 1980s, were intended to do. The original idea was that charter schools would be public schools but would not be subject to all of the rules and regulations of the traditional public school bureacracy and therefore free to experiment, hopefully to come up with more effective teaching and learning strategies. They would be generators of true education reform.

It is well known that this lofty goal has not been reached. Charter schools usually have proven to be no better than their public school counterparts, and some are considerably worse. Moreover, lack of accountability has made the charter movement suspect in terms of educational efficacy on any level. They have become, like vouchers, a way to move public money to private corporations. Rather than being a lever to improve public schools, they have become yet another tool with which rightwing conservatives can undermine public education across the nation.

The public schools themselves must share culpability for the movement to privatize public education. Part of the impetus for charters in the first place was the rigidity and unresponsiveness of many public schools to the people of the communities in which they operate. The notion that charters would be freer from bureaucratic constraints should have been a motivating factor for public schools to examine their own assumptions and operational structures. Instead, public school leaders opted out of self-examination and reflection.

No public school system is incapable of reforming itself, rather than turning to an “innovator”—in the case of most charters, at least nowadays—a private corporation that promises big results and delivers, at best, a trickle of difference, often in an elitist setting that ill serves the community public schools for which it purports to provide a model of innovation and educational success.

The issue is one of will. School leaders too often view themselves as vassals of the state rather than as servants of their local community, as cogs in the bureaucracy of government rather than elected local representatives. With many states shunting more and more public money to private enterprises, local school officials need to stop twiddling their collective thumbs and set about the difficult work of improving how local schools respond to local needs and interests.

Ignoring the frustrations of parents and hiding behind rules and regulations will continue to feed the radical conservative movement to privatize public education at the expense of the common good—at the expense, ultimately, of American democracy.

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.

Free-Range Childhood

A number of forces have converged to make us, as a national community, fearful and distrustful. The consequences have negatively affected on our children, both socially and educationally. We now make them fearful in our own image, and that degrades their learning.

In the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush administration ramped up national fears, which gave the federal government relatively free reign to suppress citizens’ rights to privacy and to engage in two costly, as yet unpaid for, and unnecessary wars, which in turn fomented an uptick in the opposition’s virulent radicalism. Conservative state governments have followed suit. Our national culture of fear serves radical conservative interests and helps keep them in power. We have not heeded FDR’s timeless warning that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear suppresses our humanity.

But fear has been abetted by loss of trustful community through other means, such as the absence of parental adults at home. As the income/wealth gap has widened, more families require income generated by all adults to sustain themselves, leaving neighborhoods empty and unsafe for children on their own. Neighbors often no longer know one another, and the notion of a “parental village,” in which all parents look out for all children, has fallen away with the decline of a meaningful, universal sense of community.

Finally, another key factor has been the push to “improve” education by ever-earlier emphasis on “academics,” a failure to recognize that play, for the young, is real learning. In a Scholastic Instructor article titled “What Happened to Kindergarten?” the author quotes a kindergarten teacher who says, “While young students’ reading and math scores are soaring, there is little assessment of the effect of the intensified academic focus on kids’ motivation to learn, creativity, motor skills, social skills, or self-esteem. The risk is children who are already burned out on school by the time they reach third grade,” says Stoudt, the kindergarten teacher. “Play is how children learn. There should be more of it in the upper grades, not less in the lower.”

I was fortunate to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s at a time when childhood could best be characterized as free-range. As a sixth-grader living in a U.S. military community in Germany, I was fortunate to live near a forest that offered unlimited possibilities. It was crisscrossed with paths and traversed by a raised Roman road that passed near the ruins of a small Roman bath and a wooden Roman watchtower recreated by the local residents. One memorable day some of my fellow sixth-graders and I set out to explore these woods. Our method of navigation was to pause whenever paths crossed. One of us would then take out a pocket knife (something no sixth-grade boy would be without), open it, and toss it into the air. Whichever way it pointed on landing was the direction we took.

Hours later we emerged from the woods near another village, from whence we made our way back home using the German road signs to guide us. Incidentally, none of us spoke German, but it didn’t matter. We were adventurous kids, confident in ourselves and our burgeoning ability to navigate the world and have fun doing so. Our parents supported this freedom. On such adventures we discovered things about the world around us but also about ourselves. We were learning free-range, gaining independence that would make us socially and intellectually strong.

Today, we rob our children of these kinds of learning adventures. Sixth-graders with knives? What if they cut themselves or stabbed another person? And bringing a pocket knife to school? Out of the question! Fear. Four or five twelve-year-old boys roaming unfamiliar woods in a foreign country? What if they get lost? What if someone takes them or hurts them? Fear. Sixth-graders walking from one foreign village to another, not even knowing the language? And out of touch? No cell phones? No way to check in for hours at a time? What if…? Fear.

I am reminded of a character in Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune, who says, “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” So long as we allow ourselves to operate as a society based in a culture of fear, that fear will obliterate childhood learning that is natural, open, and leads to fulfillment in adulthood. We desperately need to recreate the free-range childhood—for the sake of our children, for the sake of our national future.

Opt-Out Movement Growing

The opt-out movement is gaining strength as more and more parents recognize that over-use of standardized testing is damaging their children’s education and psychologically harming their children in the process. In New York State, for example, more than 183,000 of some 1.1 million students refused to take a recent English exam, more than triple the number last year.

Opting out is going to continue to gain momentum. It’s not, as some have asserted, about labor unions disputing with legislators because over-testing looks a lot like union-busting, though that would certainly be another reason to opt out. Boycotting tests is a grassroots action by increasingly better informed parents and students to stop a harmful, time-wasting, money-wasting, and educationally useless practice, namely, testing for the sake of testing—and for the sake of enriching testing corporations with public tax dollars. That’s the bottom line.

Of course, there is push-back from those in power whose corporate overlords don’t take kindly to even a modest damming of the money flowing into testing corporations—or their long-term objective to bust unions, lower wages, and control education workers, those folks we used to call teachers who now mainly function as test preppers and proctors. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the federal government will be “obligated to intervene” if too many students opt out and states don’t reach their testing quotas.

By “intervene” Duncan means cut federal funding, which as most people know, flows mainly to programs that assist low-income students. In the way of the world—or at least the way of the United States in recent years—punishment will be meted out to those who are most vulnerable. Underfunding education, a consistent pattern of abuse of education that increasingly happens at all levels of government, is a way to destroy public education and thus complete the transformation of the United States into a third world oligarchy.

Some states are already ahead of others in the race to the bottom. In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback’s failed financial policies and radical tax cuts are causing school districts to shut down early this year because the state’s education coffers have been depleted. This and similar problems are not the result of grassroots movements by parents and students to push for better education. They are the consequence of bad government, of government that has ceased to be by the people or for the people but is, instead, by the few for the few—those few being the corporate elites for whom destruction of public education is a fundamental objective in their war for wealth and power.