Public education is not failing, but political spin doctors want you to think so
Blog posts which begin like this one make me ill:
As failing socialized education once more is cutting teachers and looking to pour federal tax paid money to save salaries of some of them, why not do something different: cut textbook costs by delivering learning content using mobiles. Roughly speaking, one teacher’s salary of $100,000 could provide 100 students with a smart phone for each and an access plan for each lasting many months.
I am a firm believer that we need to improve all our schools and work to provide more differentiated, customized educational experiences for ALL children, regardless of background or context. We also need to thoughtfully and appropriately embrace the use of digital media to support those goals. We should NOT, however, believe the pundits in the mainstream media and blogosphere who portray the entire enterprise of public education as a failure which needs to be scrapped. Free public education is a cornerstone of our democracy, economy and culture. We should strive to improve and transform public education, but NOT destroy it.
On these themes, Mike Rose writes the following on page 6 of his 2009 book, "Why School?"
Playing in and out of all the above are our beliefs about public obligation, about what the public school should support. We have been living in a time of disenchantment with public institutions and public programs. At least since the Reagan years, there has a been a sustained and savvy effort by conservative writers and politicians to redefine social responsibility, to shrink it and redirect it toward the private sector. This book's final chapters affirm a robust notion of the public as embodied in the nation's central democratic institution, the common public school.We have a strong tendency in our segmented, siloed world to consider separately social topics that should be considered together. We put into place a testing program without thinking ahead to how it might redefine teaching or about the model of mind that's implied in it. We also believe that the testing program alone will correct political and bureaucratic stagnation and compensate for the need for teacher development or for the burdens poor kids bring to school.
Remember NCLB was created to discredit schools and define them (and us as public educators) as "failures." The harmful effects of NCLB continue to seen in most of our public schools today. When bloggers and mainstream media writers claim "socialized education in the United States is failing" we should view that opinion in it's proper context. That frame or perspective should then guide us to act appropriately in response to the realities in our schools.
Education can and should empower us to act on the world. We should not dismantle public education. We should transform it. To do that, more than handheld mobile devices we need
Watched by school principal Ben Keefer, left, Capt. Michael Shults of the Multnomah County Sheriff's office reads a statement from the family about the search for missing 7-year-old Kyron Horman, at Brooks Hill Historical church across from Skyline Elementary School in Portland, Ore. on Wednesday, June 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Greg Wahl-Stephens)
