Teaching in the Trump Years (Part 2)
Tax-supported public schools require all children between the ages of five or six to 16 to 18 to attend school. State compulsory attendance laws mean that the state has a legitimate interest in seeing that children and youth become literate, active, and engaged citizens prepared for the work force and contributing to the community. Schools are expected to be non-partisan, committed to socializing all children to community norms, teaching all students the difference between fact and fiction and honoring the importance of evidence in taking positions and making decisions.
Those are expectations for public schools. School boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers are committed to fulfilling those expectations yet in a society divided by race, ethnicity, religion, and social class satisfying those expectations with limited resources, has become a tangle of difficulties past and present. Efforts by U.S. Presidents, federal and state officials to bend schools to one or another direction has been common in the past half-century creating conflict time and again. And that is the case now with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency and his new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.
In Part 1, I laid out the core dilemma that teachers face when deciding what to do about issues roiling the larger society that inexorably enter schools and classrooms labeled as “controversial” (e.g., banning immigrants from predominately Muslim countries, climate change, creationism). Those four choices are denial, privilege, avoidance, and balance.
In this post, I offer an example of a teacher’s lesson taught recently in a largely minority and poor San Francisco high school that went city wide in social and Teaching in the Trump Years (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: