Want to ‘Fix’ Public Education? Then Fix the Economy!
I was raised to believe in public schools. My parents taught me that good public schools both improve and unite their communities.** Moreover, they said, great teachers transform children’s lives by unlocking their potential, which allows them to cast off whatever shackles they had been born into and rise into the middle class and beyond. Education was liberation, they said, and I embraced the view that schools did not simply ratify the social status a child was born into.
Now, however, I realize that our economic system is so sharply tilted in favor of the privileged that even the best efforts of teachers are not enough to open the doors of opportunity to significant numbers of poor and underprivileged students.
What’s to be done? Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, politicians in Florida and elsewhere, many Republicans, and ‘Corporate Democrats’ like Cory Booker want to change the way we go to school–by providing vouchers or opening more charter schools. This approach, which they call ‘choice,’ will not even begin to touch the inequity that pervades education. In fact, I believe these changes would weaken an already endangered system.
It may be helpful to look back to how things were just over a half century ago. As it happens, things have not always been so unfair.
After finishing college in 1964, I taught for two years in a public high school just CONTINUE READING: Want to ‘Fix’ Public Education? Then Fix the Economy! | The Merrow Report
