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It may well be that next to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, America’s most valuable contribution to civilization is its public school system and the concept of public school teachers as professionals. Yet even as the world has marveled at America’s education system and immigrants continue to stream into this country to take advantage of it, America itself seems more inclined to bury its public education system than to praise it.
Of those who helped to found America, it was Thomas Jefferson who best understood the importance of public education for our democracy. Jefferson knew that without a citizenry that had the ability to master what I term the three A’s–the ability to access, analyze and apply information–the nation could not survive. That is why he considered his greatest achievement the founding of the University of Virginia, not his role in writing the Declaration of Independence, his many writings and even his achievements as President.
In 1786 he wrote George Wythe:
I think by far the most important bill in our whole code, is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness… The tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.
Jefferson also would be firmly opposed to current plans to privatize education. In his Sixth Annual Message he stated:
Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation.
Nowhere has the Republican Counterrevolution so concentrated its efforts than in its dismantling of public education. Throw in any other issue you wish–tax cuts for the rich, Iraq, environmental degradation–and put them all together and they still pale beside the GOP’s attempts to “privatize” education.
Under the cover of vouchers and the soiled banner of markets and competition, the Republican Party, particularly its allies from the religious right, has sought to replace our public schools with private schools that would become America’s equivalent to the Ayatollah Academies of Iran–that is, schools whose prime mission is to beat into students a particular religious ideology.
Aiding the religious right in this effort have been the former Dixiecrats who helped to engineer the GOP’s Southern Strategy which traded Southern votes not only for Supreme Court appointments but also for looking the other way as the South, in reaction to Brown v. Board created a dual system of public/private education–private schools for whites and public schools for African Americans. Finally added to the Counterrevolutionary effort to dismantle public education have been those modern Social Darwinists who fault public schools, particularly institutions of higher education, as being “too liberal.”
Make no mistake about it, a war is taking place in the corridors of America’s public schools. On the one side are those who believe education should be about propagandizing youth in their particular ideology while on the other side are those who still believe in Jefferson’s ideals, particularly the notion that how our schools are run should be a democratic, not a dictatorial process.
Late in his life Jefferson wrote Joseph Cabell:
I now think it would be better for every ward to choose its own resident visitor, whose business it would be to keep a teacher in the ward, to superintend the school, and to call meetings of the ward for all purposes relating to it; their accounts to be settled, and wards laid off by the courts. I think ward elections better for many reasons, one of which is sufficient, that it will keep elementary education out of the hands of fanaticizing preachers, who, in county elections, would be universally chosen, and the predominant sect of the county would possess itself of all its schools.
Jefferson was also firmly against religious instruction in public schools, a position he stated several times. In one letter he advocated:
The want of instruction in the various creeds of religious faith existing among our citizens presents… a chasm in a general institution of the useful sciences. But it was thought that this want, and the entrustment to each society of instruction in its own doctrine, were evils of less danger than a permission to the public authorities to dictate modes or principles of religious instruction, or than opportunities furnished them by giving countenance or ascendancy to any one sect over another.
The sad thing about this concerted attack on public education has been that, as with so much, the Counterrevolution has nibbled away at public education with the assent of the party Thomas Jefferson founded. Instead of trying to improve public education or vigorously defending the ideas of the founder of their Party, they have triangulated public education into a storm that threatens to sink the entire system.
At the center of the dispute over public education lies what I term America’s educational apartheid. In a three-part series last year, I contrasted the situation in an inner city and rich suburban district. I still consider that series one of the more important essays I have written on this blog. The suburban system had the finest resources their considerable tax base could buy from state-of-the-art athletic facilities that would be the envy of many colleges to the latest technological and curricular innovations to a well-paid teaching force, many of whom hold doctorates. The inner city system has bathrooms that often don’t work, dog-eared textbooks with pages missing and a teaching force with far less training.
Gary Orfield on the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, has charged:
The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades. The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at a level lower than in any year since 1968.
The term educational apartheid is not my own, but borrowed from one of America’s best education writers, Jonathan Kozol, who for decades has been trying to make Americans aware of educational inequality, mostly to deaf ears. In an article and book about educational apartheid Kozol notes:
Black school officials in these situations have sometimes conveyed to me a bitter and clear-sighted recognition that they’re being asked, essentially, to mediate and render functional an uncontested separation between children of their race and children of white people living sometimes in a distant section of their town and sometimes in almost their own immediate communities.
Critics of educational apartheid often note that the per pupil expenses of both the inner city and suburban systems are not that different, but what they fail to recognize is that just to bring the inner city school’s resources up to the level of the rich suburban district would require for a city like Chicago or Philadelphia something on the order of a billion dollars.
Because it emanated from our nation’s capital, perhaps the most pessimistic evidence I encountered came from the Washington Post‘s lengthy investigative series on the deplorable state of the Washington, D.C. public schools. With article titles like “Stolen Dreams,” “The Breakdown,” and “The Price of Neglect” it detailed a system with buildings beyond repair, administrators charging strip club visits to fundraising accounts, Congressional representatives earmarking money for programs the district did not need or want, teachers who were assaulted and left lying unconscious in the hallways, and students who had given up on themselves and the system. On sentence summed up the series:
[These] stories… illustrate how a struggling urban school system often fails to shepherd its students and set them on a promising path to adulthood
In one installment, “The Price of Neglect,” the Post details the costs of fixing the D.C. schools deteriorating heating and cooling systems. A chart notes that since 2000 the D.C. schools have spent $116 million to replace heating and colling systems that still do not work. Last year they finally ordered new boilers that are expected to cost half a million to install.
Repairing our inner city schools of course leaves out the teachers and their wildly different salaries and qualifications. In the series last fall I proposed a “prince and the pauper” thought experiment based on the famous Mark Twain story in which a young nobleman and a commoner trade places. What I proposed was for rich suburban students to trade places with inner city pupils. Maybe there is an idea for a reality show in this.
At the beginning of this series on the Democratic Party Platform, I proposed that the Party needed to reaffirm principles. Of those principles none is more important than public education, so if the platform writers are listening here is what I suggest:
1) Reaffirm a commitment to public education and disown vouchers in loud, clear, and unequivocal language.
2) Repeal No Child Left Behind and its emphasis on standardized tests and rote learning and make a commitment to teaching the three A’s and others skills outlined two decades ago in the SCANS report.
3) Create the equivalent of a domestic Marshall plan to rebuild America. As part of this include the rebuilding of both inner city and rural schools that are sorely in need of resources.
4) Affirm a commitment to an educational funding mechanism based on time not money or people. I have spelled this out elsewhere, so I won’t go into detail here.
5) End the inequities in higher education that create a “brain drain” by saddling low-income and middle-income students with outrageous loan debts.
6) Make a specific list of what is necessary for educational equity including technology, classrooms, activities and faculty. What is the minimum level that is acceptable for any school?
7) End the funding disparity that gives rich districts an unfair advantage of less wealthy ones.
8) Most of all, say again and again, that every child in this country deserves an equal education; that where someone is born should not decide the type of education they receive.
I end this essay as I ended the chapter on education in The Strange Death of Liberal America:
Wandering through that suburban garage sale with its piles of children’s clothes and toys puts a special exclamation point on the battle over education. The issue facing this country could not be plainer: do we want every community to go through what Littleton experienced? Do we want an educational system like Iran’s or one that prepares our students to be participating citizens in a 21st century democracy? The garage sale has it right, for it is above all about our children. Contrary to what some believe, education has always been about inculcating values in the young. What makes the Counterrevolution’s take on this so insidious comes from the nature of the values it seeks to force feed young minds. We have moved from a time when values came with words Martin Luther King preached-values like economic justice, voting rights, equal education–to an era when values have become thought of as Thou Shalt Nots preached by Jerry Falwell. Do we want our children to grow up in the world envisioned by Thomas DeLay or Thomas Jefferson? That people do not raise this question more forcefully should cause us all to wonder what the Era of Bad Feelings has done to America.
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