Recently I’ve been accused of being anti-public school.
On one hand it’s surprising since I worked 35 years in the public school system, 25 years in a Texas urban school district and 10 more as the leader of an influential educational non-profit committed to improving public schools by working on leadership development and classroom practice. Inside the school district, I worked as a teacher, school leader, and region superintendent.
So it’s not like I don’t have perspective on how schools work, or don’t work for that matter.
On the other hand, it’s predictable that some would think I’m against public schools given my online Monday thru Friday critique of much of what is currently going on inside our educational system. I’ve had past school colleagues, friends, and even family members question why I’ve seemingly given up on our current public school system.
Let me be clear about this – I haven’t given up on public schooling, just public schools.
Before anyone accuses me of just playing around with semantics, let me explain the differences between public schooling and public schools.
The “public” in public schooling isn’t legislatures, state boards of education, or local school boards. The public in public schooling are millions of parents and caretakers of children who have basically been disregarded and discarded when it comes to what type of education their kids will receive.
It didn’t used to be this way. Adult learning leaders weren’t hired by school districts 150 years ago. They were hired by the parents of the children that adult learning leader would serve. Curriculum was not produced by district departments for teachers to use. Curriculum was produced by the adult learning leader themselves, based on the needs of the learner. Although there were places called schools where young learners congregated, the country school was an open-concept classroom where kids of every age worked together to learn what the community felt was important to learn. Although the state had a role back then, its role was to provide the necessary resource to support whatever the adult learning leader, the curriculum, the learning environment, and the community thought was in the best interest of the young learner.
Back in the day, the word “schooling” suggested that learning could and would happen anywhere and anytime. Young learners were given credit for learning whenever and wherever that learning took place, not like today when young learners either demonstrate what they’ve learned during the school day or school year or are prevented from getting credit for that learning.
Today’s public schools suggest a governance system that is led by politicians at mostly the state and local levels. Today’s public schools depend on a geographic location, called a school, where kids report daily and annually, or else truant officers are called out to find out why kids aren’t reporting to these places called schools.
And this is important, everyone seems content with building all our learning expectations around how we currently define “public” and “schools” without giving “public schooling” an opportunity to return to its previous and original significance.
Which is a sad state for us to be in almost 25 years into the 21st century. We now have the technology and the abilities to take learning anywhere and have it occur anytime. We have the power to empower adult learning leaders and young learners to build learning plans together that will demonstrate real skill development in the areas of reading, writing, problem-solving, and character. We now have the ability to build learning relationships between adults and kids that move beyond the constraints of 45 minute classes and 8 hour school days.
We have all this available to us – right now – but most of us choose not to make a commitment to it.
I guess it’s easier to stay pat and enjoy a system that is highly inequitable, dysfunctional, and failing, especially if you come from a black, brown, or poor family.
So when people accuse me of being anti-public school, I say “Guilty”!
But don’t accuse me of being anti-public schooling because you would be wrong.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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