High School Students Stand Up for Press Freedom and Public Education
A society’s public institutions reflect the strengths and also the faults and sins of the culture they embody. For this reason, America’s public schools that serve over 50 million children in every kind of community will never be perfect. There will be instances of mediocrity and examples of poor school administration and poor teaching. There will be schools stuck in the past and schools where there is sexism and racism—schools where poor children aren’t served up the kind of curriculum that rich children are offered—schools where families persist in segregating their children from others who are “not like them.” We must expose the problems in our schools and surely, as a society, we are obligated to address our schools’ faults and problems.
But something else has happened in America as we have permitted advocates for privatization to capture our national imagination. How did so many come to view public schools as a problem? How did we accept the terms “failing schools” and “failing teachers”? How did we allow policymakers in our very unequal society to extol privately operated schools as a solution? The education writer and UCLA professor of education, Mike Rose, demands that we be more discerning as we confront the “failing schools” conventional wisdom: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of the public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter.” (Why School? p. 203)
After he spent four years visiting public school classrooms across the United States—urban schools, rural schools, Midwestern, Eastern, Western, Southern and border schools, and after observing hundreds of public school teachers from place to place, Rose celebrated the schools he had visited in a wonderful book, Possible Lives: “One tangible resource for me evolved from the journey through America’s public school classrooms. Out of the thousands of events of classroom life that I witnessed, out of the details of the work done there—a language began to develop about what’s possible in America’s public sphere.” In the book’s preface, Rose reflects on the learning moments he witnessed during his journey: “The public school gives rise to these moments in a common space, supports them, commits to them as a public good, CONTINUE READING: High School Students Stand Up for Press Freedom and Public Education | janresseger
