The short answer to this question is that far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools, and we need to give them more homework, because very few of them know what they?re talking about. And a few need some serious detention.
[QUOTEWhat Are We Fighting For?
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. It took campaigns against child labor, crusades for public taxation, struggles against fear and discrimination directed at immigrants, historic movements for civil rights against legally sanctioned separate and unequal schooling, movements for equal rights and educational access for women, and in more recent decades sustained drives for the rights of special education students, gay and lesbian students, bilingual students, and Native American students. These campaigns are all unfinished and the gains they?ve made are uneven and fragile. But they have made public schools one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose.
But the system?s Achilles? heel continues to be acute racial and class inequality, which in fact is the Achilles? heel of the whole society.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have, as noted, made strides in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of communities that have been poorly served by the current system. But their agenda does not represent the real interests or the real desires of these communities:
?It does not include all children and all families.
?It does not include adequate, equitable, and sustainable funding.
?It does not include transparent public accountability.
?It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
?It does not address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
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Because, in the final analysis, what we need to reclaim is not just our schools, but our political process, our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. In short, we don?t only need to fix our schools, we also need to fix our democracy
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For anyone who cares about education -- you may not agree with everything he writes, but I believe he is right on target with the major points.
