A piece of Xtranormal satire on the current education debate and what those of us who are trying to make this argument from the grassroots level are up against. Frustratingly accurate, I’m afraid.
(Hat tip to @DianeRavitch who tweeted out the link.)
A View From the Schoolhouse
A piece of Xtranormal satire on the current education debate and what those of us who are trying to make this argument from the grassroots level are up against. Frustratingly accurate, I’m afraid.
(Hat tip to @DianeRavitch who tweeted out the link.)
I spent the past several days in Lynchburg, VA where my wife grew up. We saw a bunch of her old friends from (public) high school, and what struck me was that not one of them send their children to public school. These were middle and upper-middle class families who were all the products of public school. All of them spoke well of the education they received in Lynchburg public schools, and all of them spoke of the difficulty of the decision to send their children to private schools. We heard several reasons, and among them were:
These were not hippy, lefty, progressives. These were professionals in Lynchburg, VA. And they were all families who would have sent their kids to public schools in the past. And none of them were, mostly because of policy decisions our nation has made about public schools in the past decade. And what’s so scary is that perception has become reality. Despite the fact that every parent I spoke to had a positive experience in the very school system where they would send their child (often at the same school they were zoned for), they didn’t send their kids there. Perception had become reality. Because the US has created a narrative that says their schools weren’t good, families who have the financial ability to make other choices, chose not to send their kids to the public schools, despite their own positive experiences with public school.
And it struck me – how long does this last? If more and more families who can, choose to opt out of the public system, how long will be have one? With so many families making major financial decisions to send their children to private schools and so many more families sending their children to charter schools that do not typically think of themselves as "public school families," how long will we have a public school system that educates the majority of Americans?
It is why I think we will see more and more legislation for voucher programs in the coming years, and while they have mostly been focused at the state level, I think we will see federal legislation for vouchers within the next couple of years. And sadly, I cannot imagine a better way to move Americans toward wanting one than the current national dialogue about school.
We have undermined support for one of the longest standing public institutions we have, and I worry that we are on the verge of replacing it with a franchise model of education where Americans will take their tax credits and shop them to whomever will accept their child. Families of means will take their credit and happily subsidize their children’s private education. Families who cannot will take the monies – minus the necessary cut for oversight of this new system – and find the best schools they can. And the best of the democratic ideals that our public schools were built on will be further eroded in favor of "the market."
Caveat emptor.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Shawnee,United States
[I was telling this story to an SLA parent this week as we talked about teenage drug use and how to deal with it. She said, "That would make an amazing post for your blog." So here it is.]
In my high school and college years, I had a "live and let live" attitude toward pot. I knew kids who smoked with their parents. I knew students at Penn who got busted over summer break, and aside from some community service hours, it didn’t seem like a big deal. And I knew a kid at the "stoner" frat who was a 3.8 Pre-Med major – a GPA much higher than my goody-two-shoes English major could muster. I also knew the most talented writer in my high school had dropped out of college because he had apparently spent much of the first year of college high, and I knew that some of my friends were not as coherent as they used to be, but mostly, the kids I knew who were using drugs kept it together. It seemed to me to be a personal choice that people made, and I didn’t think much of it one way or another.
In my own life, I was raised with my father’s voice always in my head with the phrase, "If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime," and that was a powerful deterrent for me. Also, I had (and have) a healthy fear about drugs in general, mostly because I always thought I would have been "that guy" – the Len Bias story petrified me, for example. I was convinced (and still sort of am) that I’d be the kid who would have wrecked his brain the first time he ever did anything dangerous with drugs… and I kind of like my brain. But those were personal choices… I didn’t really think about it much beyond that.
Then I student-taught at A. P. Randolph in Harlem.
I student-taught an 11th grade English class that was over 95% black and Hispanic, and today, the school is 75% free or reduced lunch, and I’d imagine it was roughly similar then. I loved teaching that class… and it was one of those student-teaching experiences where the cooperating teacher was more than happy to have an extra prep period, so I had the chance to really teach the kids.
Juan was a student in that class who lived in Spanish Harlem. He didn’t get along with the cooperating teacher at all, but he and I got along. He was a really good writer, and I really liked working with him. Then one Monday morning, he wasn’t in school and his classmates told me that he got caught with marijuana on him by the police. He was out for a couple of days, and when he came back, he and I had a long talk. He was distraught that his chances for college were over. I told him that he would be o.k.. I was thinking about all the kids I knew in high school and college who were generally unaffected when they got caught with drugs, but later, when I talked to a teacher at the school who I really respected, she confirmed for Juan – first generation college, minority, poor – she was afraid it would really affect his college process. I was naive enough back then to be surprised by that.
That weekend, I was at a party that one of my grad school classmates hosted, and some of my pre-service teaching classmates at the party decided to pass around a joint. In that moment, I was truly horrified by what I saw. These were soon-to-be-teachers. Most of them spoke about wanting to teach in New York City. All of them in the room were white. I don’t think I’m wrong in my guess that several of them came from affluence and several others probably had similar middle-class backgrounds as me. And none of them seemed to see a problem with what they were doing.
I was struck powerfully by the inequity of the moment. I realized that the friends I had who had issues with drug use had a safety net that protected them when things went wrong – a safety net that my students in that classroom didn’t have. It was a safety net that Juan didn’t have. And I was revolted by the realization. I left the party, because I couldn’t even be in the room feeling what I felt. In time, I learned that what I was feeling was an understanding of white privilege and of class privilege – at the time, I didn’t have that language, but I knew what I saw was wrong.
Since that moment, I’ve been pretty powerfully anti-drug, not just for the reasons most teachers are – although after fifteen years in teaching, I’ve seen too many kids ruined by drugs but because of the inequity I see in the way society deals with teenage drug use – especially marijuana use. I’d love to run a visualization test on people and show a picture of a white student and then a black student, both with a joint in their hand, and ask them to react to the photos. I’m guessing we’d see very different responses from a lot of people.
I couldn’t – and can’t – live with seeing people take advantage of that unexamined privilege.
There are dozens of reasons for teachers to speak out against drug use. Too many of us have lost kids to drugs. And I hate what I’ve seen drugs do to kids, no matter what their demographics, but the biggest reason I have come to hate drug use is that it becomes one more racial and economic imbalance. Too many of my kids would not be able to overcome the obstacle of getting picked up for possession. And too many kids in wealthy, white suburbs would find it to be nothing more than an inconvenience. If that is not unpacked and explored by students, we will do harm to our students on two fronts. First, if we nod and wink about drug use, we may be setting a student up for consequences they are not prepared to deal with. And two, when we do not examine how certain behaviors highlight the race dynamics and social class structure, we will create barriers to honest and open communication and growth.
We shouldn’t be o.k. with that.