Presidential Politics and Public Schools

Way back in the Summer and Fall of 2000, then-candidate George W. Bush campaigned on the importance of public schooling. Although he had not coined the phrase, he was quite forceful --- and quite right --- in calling public schooling the key civil rights issue of our time. Then two things happened which drastically changed the calculus: the first, of course, was 9/11; the second was No Child Left Behind.

The events of 9/11 removed any possibility of by-then President Bush's concentrating on domestic issues generally and public schooling in particular. Instead he successfully pushed for the Federal legislation that came to be called No Child Left Behind, a top-down, bureaucracy-laden, rewards-and-punishment program of tremendous pressure for public schools to conform to specific demands for content and for measures of accountability.

Rather than an on-going process of grappling with the difficult questions regarding the purposes of public schooling, how those purposes could best be achieved with a mass population in overly large schools and overly large classrooms, what the best content would be, what the best methods would be, and so on, NCLB was meant to be a kind of machine that, left on its own, would ensure better public schooling.

The result was that the "standards movement," which had great potential for improving teaching and learning, was hijacked for the narrow purposes of scoring at prescribed levels on standardized tests. Rather than encouraging their faculties to improve student learning, principals all over the country hectored their faculties to raise test scores. Those of you who are not teachers will have to take my word for it that the psychological, pedagogical, and epistemological differences between the two approaches are huge.

In short, the "standards movement" had resulted not in improvements in teaching and learning but in a kind of mindless passing of information to ensure better test scores. What had originally aimed at better teaching had succeeded in almost eliminating good teaching altogether.

Why does this matter? And why is it important that no politician on any level that I know anything about is talking about the importance of public schooling during the campaign of 2012?

In a number of profound ways, public schools are public institutions: we all pay for public schools and --- all public budgets taken together --- we spend more on public schooling than on any other category; because the state requires that children be sent to school, and because in any given year, between 90% and 95% of all school-age children are in public schools, it is very close to a mandate that everyone goes to public school; and the policies and programs in place in public schools are defined by popularly elected legislators, at the state level and at the local level through school boards.

The point is that we are invested in public schooling whether we ever think about them or not. What do we want from them? And why? And how should that be achieved?

The answers to these questions are not obvious. As a profoundly public issue, it is inevitable that a pluralistic and diverse public will have differing, and sometimes opposed, views.

The problem --- at least I think it's a problem --- is that no one among our leaders and would-be leaders has anything to say about these questions or seems interested in addressing them now or in the near future.

Our children are --- in fact --- the future. And public schools have been seen as an essential foundation of a mass democracy since the early years of the 19th Century. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Public discourse here in the early Fall of 2012 is dominated by talk of jobs, growth, entitlements, scandals, and accusations, while one of the truly important issues of our time goes ignored.