Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had one of those high concept PBS interviews with Gwen Ifill the other day. What struck me is how the reactionaries have seized the narrative, taken over the points of arguments that we -- progressive teachers, social justice activists and critical students -- developed in the first place.
For example: Nothing was more irritating in a faculty meeting than to hear the old-line, do-nothing elitists declare that they could not make African-American and Latino urban students succeed. It was, after all, a problem of the home, of poverty, of broader problems than we could deal with. These arguments, and their barely disguised racism, were proffered as a reason we should do nothing. After all, they seemed to say, we simply need to find the "talented" and "smart" kids, the ones like ourselves, and work with them. Ugh.
We would fight back. No, school does not have to be a sorting mechanism, it does not have to reproduce class and racial stratification. We can teach all kids and can make them successful -- but we have to rethink curriculum, we have to build community, we have to change our whole approach to school structure. As Michelle Fine argued, schools are the one place where the