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Education for Liberation - Pt II |
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Jul 4th, 2003 by Rootsie True democracy must be a repository of trust. We have these 'no big government' republicans dictating education policy from Washington DC through Montpelier,VT to little Bristol VT, pop.3000. I sit at staff meetings and receive the latest command to draw up a new set of goals, of criteria, of priorities. I am to 'align' to 'standards', standards numerous and unwieldy and prosaic, someone's attempt to say what a good teacher does natural as breath. 'But some teachers are not good. Their feet need to be held to the fire. Accountability. Rigor. Personalization.' Is this how to improve teaching? For the first time in my 15 years of teaching, veteran teachers who are passionate about their work tell me they are taking early retirement because they see things going in an ominous direction. They are less and less able to feel that they, much less the institution they work within, are serving the needs of children, let alone the needs of a democracy, which is the ostensible purpose of our educational system. I can't think of another group of professionals who are treated with such disrespect. Other countries treasure their teachers; here they are prey to every political breeze that blows across the landscape. The current caveat is 'standardization' in service of 'closing the learning gap' between rich and poor, black and white. You'd think in such a situation we might be wanting to talk about race, about class, but no. The closest we get is 'diversity', which is a way of NOT talking about the impossibility of true democracy if large segments of the population are excluded. Instead of talking about the issues specific to African American children, or poor children, or non-english speaking students, we 'celebrate' some kind of generic 'diversity', and the real issues get lost in the soup. The new wave of 'high stakes testing' reveals nothing about educational disparities that any teacher could not tell you Teaching is for a feeling person an often-heartbreaking enterprise. The injustice of poverty, the injustice of a poor child coming to school every day to a mouldering building, understaffed and underfunded and overcrowded is hard to have to ponder every day. It's funny, because at the same time that the public is being whipped up into a frenzy by 'failing schools' and 'social promotion' and disparate test scores, there has never been less 'local control' over what goes on in schools. What is a democratic educational system? Why can't the eight thousand or so people tucked in the hills around Bristol Vermont be invested with the trust of building a little school system that reflects the aims and values and yes the idiosyncracies of their community? Yeah right you say, but what of Meridien Mississippi or Provo Utah? Guess what. Democracy is messy and transformative. In New England the same towns that were burning wirches and tarring and feathering Quakers and killing Indians in 1700 were giving birth to democratic ideals and the movement to abolish slavery and give civil rights to women one hundred years later. The dropout rates are rising, not falling, in states that embraced the standards-mania early. We have a hundred-tentacled special education system that relegates African American boys in particular to an educational ghetto which one school psychologist described as a 'pre-jail program.' Staffs all over the country are being 'developed' right out of our minds, to the tune of millions and millions of dollars that would be better spent on xerox paper, for chrissakes! Communities are not trusted to make the sorts of schools they want, teachers are not trusted to find ways to teach and reach their children, and children are not being trusted to have a hunger for growing in ways unique to each in the context of a learning community. Millions of teenagers, mostly poor or colored or both, are functionally illiterate when they leave school. Literacy-reading, writing, speaking effectively, are minimum requirements for responsive citizenship. Add basic numeracy to that. Parents have the right to expect that their kids will learn how to read and write and add and subtract in school. Is 'standardization' getting us there?   Copyright © 2003 rootsie.com |
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