Dear American college students,
I’m sure you have had a lot of questions about our public education system, especially as you face decisions about whether or not to join the ranks of our nation’s teachers after you leave school. I have seen a lot in a short period of time, but not enough to be anywhere close to an expert. What I offer you below is an overview only!
Let me know if you have follow-up questions on what I share about public education. I will also point you to some resources which would make for good additional reading on subjects I know less about. My general thoughts on public education are that we are in a crisis in the United States in terms of funding and delivering quality education to students in urban and/or minority backgrounds. The big driving forces behind this are:
(1) Increasing socioeconomic inequality in the United States,
(2) Federal and state policies which frequently clash and put students in no man’s land, and
(3) A leadership crisis at the local and district level
While we face serious problems in the integrity of our public education system, our route forward is not clear either. There is a lot of debate and discussion about what factors correlate with improving the quality of public education. I highly recommend keeping track of the following important debates surrounding the education system:
(1) The school choice movement, specifically charter schools
(2) Teacher quality, specifically certification and unionization
(3) The role of technology and innovation in education
Let’s first look at the causes of the problems, and then the debates over the solutions. We are in living in an age of two Americas. One is the privileged middle classes with secure access to food, healthcare, high quality education and part of the 21st century globalized society. Another is trapped beneath the thumb of systems of power like institutional racism, individual prejudice, law enforcement, poor educational opportunities and a broken social structure.
The outcome of inequality rolls across all of American society. While you may be happy to know the American unemployment rate is huddling in the 7-8% range these days, young black men have an unemployment rate of 20.9%. Those are crisis numbers. American median household income has actually declined since 2007, while the rich have gotten richer and avoid tax increases while the less privileged in society flounder. For additional reading on the big picture issues of income inequality, racism and a segregated America, I recommend reading and seeing the following:
- Winner Take All Politics, by Jacob Hacker
- The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
- Fruitvale Station, directed by Ryan Coogler
- How Economic Inequality Harms Societies, a TED Talk by Richard Wilkinson
- Are Droids Taking our Jobs? A TED Talk by Andrew McAfee
Federal and state policies for education change with every administration, and often get sucked into political debates which have little to do with actual outcomes on students. For example, Texas and Georgia have resisted putting their education curriculum in line with national standards in the past year because of fears of a “federal takeover” of education, and teaching “un-American” values in schools. Too many people are concerned with how progressive our curriculum is instead of how students are learning and getting the resources they need. Frankly, whether or not students know Thomas Jefferson was a Christian matters far less to me than if they have equal access to social studies textbooks, clear standards about what they should be taught and the ability to move place to place in our country and learn similar material.
The federal government has also taken on the role of “bully pulpit” recently with education, which has positive and negative effects for the states. For example, we all know what a failure No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was: it funded schools based on improvement in scores if they made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), which caused schools which needed money most to lose it. Instead of eliminating NCLB completely, the government is now holding exemptions from the law over the head of states. In other words, for states to get out of a failed policy, they have to do exactly what the federal government wants in return. This is hardly the way to build consensus about what’s best for our students.
Another difficulty in providing good policy is the ability to fund it. As many Texans remember from summer 2011, the Texas Legislature cut tens of billions of dollars from the public education system which they could not restore until 2013. The Texas property tax system for funding public education was also ruled unconstitutional by a state-level court in spring 2013 for how it disproportionately funds schools in wealthier areas. While tax systems may be fixed and state governments restore funding when they are out of a fiscal pinch, there are still fundamental flaws in how our urban schools receive money. I would recommend looking at the following resources on policy to start:
- The federal government’s Race to the Top program
- Savage Inequalities, by Jonathan Kozol
- The new nationally standardized Common Core curriculum
The unfortunate consequence of these higher level problems is a failure to deliver quality education at the local level. It’s like the whole weight of our country’s shortcomings has to be taken on the backs of school leaders. I thought about this at school this week on Election Day – the small trickle of voters into the precinct in our school cafeteria in the minority-heavy area of Forest Park, GA where I teach reminded me of the big cracks running through our democracy. When you hear local school districts and “corrupt” administrators blamed for problems, remember what put them in such a difficult position in the first place.
I see this personally at school, and realize the crisis of public education might be solved from the bottom up in schools, but there is so much standing in the way. When you put principals and teachers in the tough position of having to increase test scores even though their students sit in class without technology, textbooks, money/transportation for after school clubs, money to comply with the dress code, parents who have literacy skills to help with homework, communities which stop and frisk them on the street just for the color of their skin – how could you not help but make an unethical decision?
I don’t know all the details of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal in which the superintendent Beverly Hall allowed the changing of student test scores to inflate the district’s results, but I know in a perfect world she would not have even had to make the decision in the first place. In Clayton County, GA where I teach, the school district has suffered a loss of accreditation because of the negative relationships between the school board and administrators. They also face serious budget shortfalls, delays in starting construction on my school building (which seriously disrupted our instructional time), and difficulty raising salaries for their teachers to keep up with the rising cost of living in our country.
My question to you, then, middle class American college students, is this: when someone tells you about “failing schools” and “failing teachers,” who do you blame? Why did this happen? Why do we have a public education crisis in the United States? Let me tell you, that while education may be another battleground of the Civil Rights Movement, the same battles of the first Civil Rights Movement are still being fought in and around education. You are not part of a new movement in education, but are young people who are learning about old problems under the guise of a movement. I know because I was in your shoes not too long ago.
Now, I don’t want to pretend to be an expert on the finer details of proposed solutions, but I can at least set you up to see the big debates in public education and how they are connected to the problems I mentioned above. Now that you have a big picture vision for the state of public education in the United States, which route will you take? Let me frame it for you in two big theories about the way forward in education. I want to thank what might have been an article in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper for this perspective:
First, you have the “educational liberalists.” By liberalists, I don’t mean politically liberal but economically and philosophically liberal. You could broadly say people who subscribe to this side of the debate want an opening of American public education. The logic runs that because we have had so many structural problems in education rooted in society/government that rather than tinkering with the system we should toss it out and re-envision education. As far as this breaks down in public education debates, educational liberalists would advocate for:
- School choice: Charter schools as alternatives to neighborhood public schools – allowing concerned parents to make their own charter schools, vouchers to give students financial assistance in leaving public schools for public or private charters, freeing up charters from traditional requirements for achievement to allow them to experiment more with forward thinking educational models.
- Teacher quality: Paying teachers based on how well their students perform in the classroom, preventing teachers’ unions from protecting low-performing teachers, allowing teachers with less training (such as Teach For America Corps Members) to be allowed on alternative ways to be certified, removing tenure-pay systems, evaluating teachers on very rigorous rubrics.
- Technology and innovation: Seeing innovation and 21st century education as being determined by the American business community, allowing corporate donors to modernize classrooms and in return expect loyalty, bringing in business leaders into elected educational positions from school boards to school leadership and producing public education graduates prepared specifically to work in the American private sector as a strong domestic labor force.
Second, you have generally the “educational traditionalists” who would advocate for the opposite side of taking the market mentality out of education. Rather than allow full transparency, competition and private interests into education, the traditionalists want solutions to work within the existing structure of education while also reforming the social issues which put education in the place it is to begin with. For example, if you recruited more from traditional colleges of education, paid teachers better and funded public schools you would see more success.
- School choice: Students should be educated in schools in their neighborhoods, charter schools should not be able to trump the authority of a school district to provide educational services, and public money should go not directly to parents as a stipend to fund their students’ education but directly to public schools to be the vehicles of a quality education.
- Teacher quality: Teachers’ employment should not be held accountable to the limitations of their schools and student populations; teachers should be protected as blue-collar workers in the United States in that they need legal support which allows them to defend themselves when they face accusations of poor performance. Teachers should be drawn almost exclusively from the graduates of four-year colleges of education.
- Technology and innovation: School districts are responsible for receiving grants and curriculum which fit their needs; teachers should use access to the internet and professional networks to introduce new models into their classrooms, and should receive trainings from third party experts on how to make their classrooms adapted to the 21st century. School districts are responsible for preparing students for the workforce, but are also concerned with pushing students to become productive and responsible citizens of their communities.
I hope this was a good introduction to the issues surrounding public education today in the United States. In college we are expected to start taking stances on the big issues of the day. Public education is a particularly popular one now, and we have a right to seek out information independently to inform our own opinions. Consult people you know, ask for advice and think critically about what you do learn. We can’t afford to make mistakes when the education of millions of Americans is at stake!
