I was reading Debbie Meier’s latest piece, Education for What? on the Forum for Democracy and Education. Her take in the piece on the current state of education won’t come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with her pedagogy, but, as always, she’s just wonderful to read:

There’s an old joke which I wish I could tell well. But you probably know it. It’s about the man stumbling around under the street light looking for his keys. A passerby joins him and asks, "Exactly where were you when you lost them?" Our hapless searcher points across the street. "Then why are we looking here?" asks the passerby. "Because this is where the light is." And that’s pretty much the answer I get when I ask why we are using test scores to find out about student achievement. It’s the stuff we have.

So? Get better stuff, I answer. And in the meantime don’t use test scores as a pseudonym for achievement—it’s not accurate and it’s even ludicrous. It’s only cheap. But getting better stuff requires thinking about what we are trying to get evidence about? For example, in the schools I like best the answers have something to do with the kind of society we hope kids will help us nourish and support when they get out of school—which is not merely a question of finding their own job market niches, but shaping the way we design the future, including world of work, the "economy" as well as the social fabric of our lives, and even the future of the planet. Nourishing democracy, for example, requires activity not just rhetoric. It requires judgment, weighing pros and cons, trade-offs. It requires assuming responsibility for ones ideas and practices. Do our graduates show signs of engaging in such work–now? In the schools I’d like my own kids to go to they’d align their practices to such ends. There are schools out there like that. And if my ends aren’t yours? If you’d put more weight on x instead of y? It’s okay as long as you are willing to look kids in the eye and say: these are our expectations, here’s how and why we arrived at them and here’s how we’ll all know if you’ve met them. Within a wide range of possibilities, let there then be choice. Let us try and persuade each other not just by arguing in a vacuum but by example.

Is there really any doubt that she is one of the most powerful, eloquent advocates for public education? She consistantly argues powerfully for a democratic public education that is authentic and relevant. And she knows it doesn’t come cheap, but for her — and for me — there’s no better place for this country to spend its money.