To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools | Deborah Meier on Education

To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools | Deborah Meier on Education:

To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools
By Emily Gasoi, Deborah Meier

Who could have imagined that, more than 150 years into this bold project of preparing successive generations for informed citizenship, our system of universal education would be as imperiled as it is today? One of the original ideas behind establishing a system of “common schools”—as one of the early advocates for public education, Horace Mann, referred to them—was not that they would all be mediocre, but that children from different backgrounds, the children of workers and the children of factory owners, would be educated together. As Mann wrote in 1848, “Education … beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”1

Of course, Mann’s own understanding of equality and citizenship was surely limited, as he wrote these words at a time when only white men had the vote, the Emancipation Proclamation was yet to be signed, and the children of workers were more likely to be working in factories themselves than they were to be attending school. And while schools have historically mirrored society’s inequities as much as they have inoculated against them, our public institutions nevertheless have at their foundation the ideals set forth in Mann’s quote and in our most soaring rhetoric about individual freedom and the common good.

And yet, in our current reform climate, our system of public education is often referred to as a “monopoly” rather than a public good. As such, in districts around the country, public schools are being shuttered at an alarming rate, with more than 1,700 schools closed nationwide in 2013 alone.2

Nowhere is this trend more dramatically played out than in Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s home state of Michigan, where entire school districts are losing the battle against unregulated privatization through for-profit charter management entities and voucher programs. And while there is no evidence that school choice alone helps to To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools | Deborah Meier on Education:

My latest books

Posted on March 24, 2018 by debmeier

Emily Gasoi and I published last fall These Schools Belong to You and Me: Beacon Press, and so we have been busy promoting it around the country.

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I will mention again that Matthew Knoester and I had a book published by TC Press last summer:  Beyond Testing: 7 Assessments of Students and Schools More Effective Than Standardized Tests.  And, by the way, more compatible with the purposes of schools.