The Civic Importance of Public Education: Valuing What We Take for Granted
How can we learn to value what we take for granted?
Public schools are institutions we have taken for granted for so long that it’s hard to imagine they could disappear. In Cleveland’s saddest neighborhoods, I am jarred every time I drive by an empty lot where I used to see a school that has now been torn down. I still remember the names of each of the elementary schools in my small Montana town. Schools are the institutional anchors by which I define neighborhoods. But when people attack public education, as lots of people do these days, I struggle to know how to put into words my defense of this core civic institution.
One way to learn to appreciate the public schools is to read the philosophies and histories of public education. David Tyack, the education historian, writes: “I believe that public schools represent a special kind of civic space that deserves to be supported by citizens whether they have children or not. The United States would be much impoverished if the public school system went to ruin… The size and inclusiveness of public education is staggering. Almost anywhere a school-age child goes in the nation, she will find a public school she is entitled to attend. Almost one in four Americans work in schools either as students or staff.” (Seeking Common Ground: Public schools in a Diverse Society, p. 182)
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, Harvard economists, share another perspective on the importance of public education in our nation’s history. They identify a set of virtues of public education: “By virtues, we mean a set of characteristics that originated in basic democratic and egalitarian principles and that influenced the educational system. The virtues… include public provision by small, fiscally independent districts; public funding; secular control; gender neutrality; open access; and a forgiving system. These virtuous features are summarized by the word ‘egalitarianism.’ They have held the promise (if not always the reality) of equality of opportunity and a common education for all U.S. children.” (The Race Between Education and Technology, p. 130)
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was designed to hold schools accountable for outcomes. For the purpose of forcing everybody to try harder, No Child Left Behind set utopian and unreachable test score targets. Schools that could not quickly and consistently raise scores every year until all children were deemed proficient by 2014 were labeled “failing.” More and more schools were marked as “failing” every year, and the federal government was finally forced to create waivers for schools from the punishments that were supposed to follow. But the waivers have not diminished the sting of the widespread label of “failure.” These days when people think about public education, their minds are driven by the media to the need for turnaround and accountability. This happens so frequently that I have actually felt compelled to formulate a response: Public schools cannot be perfect, but a system of public education provides society’s best chance for meeting the needs and protecting the rights of all of our children.
Of course, such responses are theoretical; they miss the heart of the matter. There is one book, however, that explores public schools in a very different way. Last week in theWashington Post, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of Possible Lives, Valerie Strauss printed a guest column from its author, Mike Rose, research professor in the UCLA The Civic Importance of Public Education: Valuing What We Take for Granted | janresseger:
