Recently, I saw a meme suggesting what school should have taught us as opposed to what it teaches us. The setup usually lists a set of skills that seem like common sense: how to do your taxes, how to work through the legal system in ordinary situations, how to determine your credit score etc. They would eliminate skills such as, but not limited to, the Pythagorean Theorem, how to calculate slope, fictional texts, and most concepts after the first half of Algebra 1. These sorts of memes argue for the utility of school i.e. the extent to which what children learn is directly applicable to their post-K-12 life.
Fine.
However, when we look through the current standards, we see evidence of the types of skills that open doors to dealing with complex problems, no matter how amorphous. For example, it’s hard to understand how to do your taxes when you can’t calculate taxes and interest, both of which are standards in middle school math. You can’t read legal papers without reading for voice and vocabulary, which are part of the literacy standards across the content areas in elementary and secondary education. Also, these memes assume that these various systems don’t create complex webs of rules that bar the ordinary citizen from full access to them, thereby creating dedicated professions to help ordinary citizens untangle the tapestry.
But ultimately, it’s about what we value and who we value that informs what a “good” school is.
In spite of the neutral language that many advocates use to argue for their visions of schooling, it’s often mired with explicit and implicit biases about the school, like the composition of the student body, the architecture and upkeep of the school, and the location of the school itself. I’ve listened to educators who worked in public school settings tell me that they never worry about the schools they send their child to because they live in neighborhoods where they don’t work. Of course, the composition of the student body in those schools were very different than the schools they worked in, which also meant a whole host of resources and expectations were also different. Yes, the home district was predominantly White. The schools where the educators worked were predominantly students of color.
Yes, every one of the folks I spoke to who advocated for this dichotomy sat back and rarely advocated for equitable conditions. The “way it is” doesn’t have to be.
As an educator who sent their child to a public school, I didn’t send my child to the school for wayward notions of academic excellence. Any discerning citizen would better interrogate why solely using standardized test scores to measure school quality has deep, deep flaws. I sent my son to that school because it had a student body that attempted to mirror the diversity of New York City. The school catered to the Black and Latinx parents who wanted to send their child to a school with ideals steeped in progressive pedagogy. The principals welcomed us into the schools and the environment felt more open than even the schools my wife and I worked in. Every child learned at least one verse of “Lift Every Voice” and a Black Lives Matter at Schools bulletin board hung prominently throughout the year.
When issues arose, people paid attention, and it wasn’t just us. No one tried to undermine our intellect even in conflict. Our child’s confidence in his academics and personhood grew multifold. That showed up on his report card sometimes, but in his interactions with us and his peers even more.
But we’re fortunate because we’re educators and generally know what to look for in pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. Not every parent/guardian has that deep knowledge. Thus, schools might recruit students with glossy advertisements, promising rigorous curricula, and a religious/private school aesthetic in a secular framework. They’ll elevate the parents who’ve become “true” believers to cheerlead for their institutions, too. Individually, I don’t begrudge people who would do anything for their child to get their child a good education, whether by lottery, tuition, or cozying up to a parent coordinator to put in a good work.
Societally, I simultaneously believe that every child deserves a good education. Every child.
There are a large set of education advocates who’ve said, “But Jose, we can’t wait until America corrects its property taxes and education laws to get our talented and gifted children the education they deserve.” OK. But a strategy that only strategized for the “in the meantime” doesn’t get us to something more everlasting. As I’ve illustrated, we don’t have to center dominant ideas of what a good school is to send our children to good schools. We also have to work on deconstructing school systems that intentionally create inequitable and unjust schools at the root.
Even if every school had the same exact resources and truly equitable measures for success across the board, our internal social wiring makes it so that schools with scores of students with marginalized identities will never be looked at as “good.”
This separate and unequal dichotomy explains the so-called gaps in housing, politics, law enforcement, and other post-K-12 sectors as well. The project we undertake by advocating for education as a human right, for every child, is one of full citizenship and democracy. Any less is underwhelming. We may not all come to agreement about what a “good” school is. We may continue to make individual choices for when we send our children into the far future. But one thing we need to hold ourselves to is the idea that all of our children deserve an option of schooling that sees them as fully human and fully deserving and capable of the breadth of human knowledge and beyond.
Maybe they’ll find a2 + b2 = c2 boring, but they’ll have known that communities across the world fought for the idea that our children deserved a good present and future. Because, not just despite, our past. That’s a meme worth sharing. More soon …
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