This week seems to be the week when I’ve been critical of those who continue to defend a broken public school system, hoping to fix it while some make money from it.
We covered Rudy Crew and Pedro Noguera and their attempt to leave no child behind by emphasizing reduced class sizes, extended instructional days, professional development, and the like, while falling into the trap so many have fallen into before by thinking the traditional system is going to change.
Then we covered a Harvard education professor and a Yale law professor who have tried to convince us that the last two years of dealing with a world-wide pandemic is the biggest disruption in the history of American education. While promoting that thought, the professors failed to acknowledge our current public school system’s inability to teach many of its students how to read and problem-solve in the years before the pandemic – especially black, brown, and poor students.
Today, we discuss an article written by Anya Kamenetz for The New York Times back in September of this year. Kamenetz is an education reporter who is heard on NPR periodically. Kamenetz’s September column in The Times was startling to me, as it impressed me as an article a public school cheerleader might write. Let’s take a look at some excerpts from Kamenetz’s piece.
Kamenetz writes,
“Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States began to establish truly universal, compulsory education. It was a social compact: The state provides public schools that are free and open to all. And children, for most of their childhood, are required to receive an education. Today, nine out of 10 do so in public schools.”
“To an astonishing degree, one person, Horace Mann, the first state secretary of education forged this reciprocal commitment.”
“An essential part of Mann’s vision was that public schools should be for everyone, and that children of different class backgrounds should learn together. He pushed to draw wealthier students away from private schools, establish ‘normal schools’ to train teachers (primarily women), have the state take over charitable schools and increase taxes to pay for it all.”
Kamenetz continues,
“But Mann’s inclusive vision is under particular threat right now. Extended school closure during the coronavirus pandemic effectively broke the social compact of universal, compulsory schooling.”
“School closures threw our country back into the educational atomization that characterized the pre-Mann era. Wealthy parents hired tutors for their children; others opted for private and religious schools that reopened soon; some had no choice but to leave their children alone in the house all day or send them to work for wages while the schoolhouse doors were closed.”
“Students left public schools at a record rate and are still leaving, particularly in the blue states and cities that kept schools closed longer. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as the Nation’s Report Card) dropped significantly this year: 9-year-olds lost ground in math for the first time since the test came out in the 1970’s, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than three decades. The drop in math was much worse for Black students than for their white peers.”
And then, Kamenetz becomes a cheerleader.
“If we want to renew the benefits that public schools have brought to America, we need to recommit to the vision Mann advocated. Our democracy sprouts in the nursery of public schools – where students grapple together with our messy history and learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Freedom of thought will wilt if schools foist religious doctrine of any kind onto students. And schools need to be enriched places, full of caring adults who have the support and resources they need to teach effectively.”
“Without public education delivered as a public good, the asylum seeker in detention, the teenager in jail, not to mention millions of children growing up in poverty, will have no realistic way to get the instruction they need to participate in democracy or support themselves. And students of privilege will stay confined in their bubbles. Americans will lose the most powerful social innovation that helps us construct a common reality and try, imperfectly, to understand one another.”
Kamenetz concludes by writing,
“If we lose public education, flawed as it is, the foundations of our democracy will slip. Not only the share knowledge base but also the skills of citizenship itself: communication, empathy, and compromise across differences.”
I don’t think we are going to lose public education, but I do think we need to drastically change the way we think about public education moving forward. And Ms. Kamenetz’s glorification of our present system isn’t helping us with growing the courage to change.
If it hasn’t happened already, public school educators are posting Kamenetz’s “cheerleader manifesto” to their teacher lounge bulletin boards. Principals are sharing Kamenetz’s article in their weekly newsletter. Teachers are telling each other what a nice article Kamenetz wrote for The Times.
And this is the problem we face as a nation right now, not only in public education but in other sectors of our lives:
We continue to celebrate things that aren’t that great. Hell, some of the stuff we currently celebrate isn’t even that good.
As long as we have folks like Anya Kamenetz and others making excuses for a low-performing, dysfunctional public school system for just too many kids and their families these days, the less chance we have of improving public schooling moving forward.
I’m not against public schooling.
I just think there is a better way to do it.
Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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