New Vision:
Building a New Vision of Public Education
By Daniel Grego
Introduction
We need a new vision of public education in the United States. Both words in the phrase “public education” must be understood in new ways if we hope all of our children will enter adulthood ready for college, ready for work, and prepared to be contributing citizens.
To build this new vision, one that will serve the interests of all families, we must analyze the organizational systems and structures currently preparing children for college, work, and citizenship. We must examine critically the system of schooling that is supposed to prepare students for college, the systems of youth and workforce development that are supposed to prepare people for careers and family-sustaining jobs, and the 21st century knowledge economy that provides the context for participatory citizenship.
All our children are part of the public. All our children deserve adequate public funding equitably distributed to learning environments parents and young people have chosen and that are accountable for results. School districts do not hold the monopoly on “public education” any more, and the end of this monopoly is progressive - good news for parents and children. We must celebrate this new situation by breaking down barriers between and, in some cases, doing away with obsolete, “over-schooled” organizational systems, labor/management relationships, and public/private distinctions, if we are to realize a new vision of public education.
1. Countering the tyranny of the one best system.
Mark Twain once said he never let his schooling interfere with his education. A critical and often repeated mistake is to equate the two terms. Since “education” is the democratic ideal the public is taxed to support, the system of schooling, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the United States, has a huge financial interest in the words “education” and “schooling” being used interchangeably. However, after a moment’s reflection, nearly anyone could identify someone who would have to be considered “well-educated” who never went to school.
The two terms must be distinguished. “Education” is the process by which people become responsibly mature members of their communities. Or put another way, “education” is the process by which a community points the learning of its members towards its conception of “the good.” It is not some thing an individual “gets,” but an activity in which a community engages in order to preserve and improve itself by developing the knowledge, skills, abilities, and character of its members. In a democratic society, education is “the work of the people.” (Hildreth, p.40.)
“Schooling”, the age-specific, teacher-driven regimen requiring compulsory attendance at an obligatory curriculum, is a practice we in the modern and postmodern world have attempted to use to promote the educative process. We went down the wrong road when we thought learning could be disembedded from communities and education could be the exclusive responsibility of specialists in schools. We are beginning to remember it takes a whole village to raise healthy children. We are beginning to understand children learn in many ways, in many places, from many people. This has always been the case, but it is particularly obvious in today’s world of mass media and information technology.
Who can claim the word “public” for their part in the educative process basically comes down to who has a right to receive public funds. A schooling status quo developed in the United States that historian, David Tyack, dubbed “the one best system.” People working inside the system came to believe public funding for “education” was exclusively theirs. These folks have spun any attempt to diversify educational opportunity as “an attack on public education.” This charge is nonsense. It would be like saying anyone advocating for anything other than a two-hand set shot was attacking basketball.
Today, “public” education includes not only the one best system schools, but also charter schools (which in some states may be authorized by more than one public entity), other types of contracted schools, and even, in some places, private schools receiving public support when parents choose them through vouchers.
This diversification of publicly funded options is the beginning of a new vision comprised of many different species of schools. The promise of such a diverse “ecosystem,” operating in the public interest through public investment, is referenced by Thomas Vander Ark in his “Foreword” to High Schools on a Human Scale:
“A national system of new small high schools requires the creation of many new high schools and a ‘choice’ system that permits students to select their schools and thus encourages schools to be different in interesting and meaningful ways. A system of such high schools also requires us to think differently about school system governance. Small, focused, and autonomous schools imply systems of diverse schools that educate all students to high levels. As a result, state and local school boards need to become managers of portfolios of schools; instead of operating schools, as they do now, boards need to ensure that all students have access to the variety of quality educational options supplied by many institutions and organizations.” (Toch, pp.xi-xii.)
2. Everyone learns; everyone teaches.
Quality educational options must not be restricted by the monopoly of government-run schools. Twenty-first century participatory citizenship depends upon the destruction of monopolistic practices that prevent knowledge and critical thinking from circulating and developing in our youth. If we want our children to be more than mere consumers of mass media and passive recipients of government services who sporadically get out to vote, we must encourage all willing adults to participate in the educative process. Twenty-first century public education is the result of all the people “engaged in creating public goods and public institutions.” (Hildreth, p.40.)
Elaborating upon this promise of a new vision of public education, the authors of “Four Building Blocks for a System of Educational Opportunity: Developing Pathways To and Through College for Urban Youth” place the new vision in the current economic context, arguing for commitment to Reinvented High Schools, Secondary/Postsecondary Blends, Extended Learning Opportunities, and Education/Employment Blends:
“The proliferation of these four learning environments represents a critical component of any strategy that leaders in state and local policy and practice would adopt to address the growing mismatch between the educational experiences and credentials required by our economy and the low educational attainment of so many of our youth. These types of institutions can and should become the building blocks of an education system that guarantees youth the educational choices, opportunities, and supports they need to complete a post secondary credential by their mid 20s. It is both particularly challenging and particularly important to support innovative designs and approaches in a time of deep budget deficits…. If anything, the current fiscal crisis makes redirecting investment to learning environments even more essential.” (Steinberg, p.12.)
Redirection of investment cannot occur unless funding, credits, and credentials can move directly to the sites and organizations that maintain effective learning environments. The staffing and maintenance of those environments cannot be impeded or hamstrung by archaic labor agreements and expensive, inefficient, bureaucratic management practices and protocols. Quite frankly, it is impossible to imagine a progressive future for urban school districts unless we first agree that the economic and historical conditions that gave rise to these districts - and the collective bargaining agreements that define paid work and professional development within them - have changed so dramatically that advocating and planning for their continuing existence may mean we are clinging to the past.
Thomas Toch gestures toward a more promising vista when he summarizes the obstacles and the opportunities connected with the scaling out of the New Country school model developed by the EdVisions Teacher Cooperative:
“There’s likely to be strong resistance from public school bureaucracies reluctant to relinquish their influence over schools and from teacher unions troubled by teachers losing job protections. Collective-bargaining contracts would effectively give teacher unions veto power over teacher-ownership proposals.”
“But Ron Newell, a former college professor and co-founder of EdVisions, says the aim of teacher ownership ‘isn’t to break unions, but to push professionalism to the forefront of teacher organizations.’ And that’s something that teacher unions are increasingly interested in. ‘Young people coming into teaching are insisting on a strong professional culture, they have a more entrepreneurial spirit and are less trustful of traditional public institutions,’ says Louise Sundin, the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. The working lives of teachers at New Country suggest that teacher ownership in small learning communities like New Country is a promising route to the professionalism that Sundin is talking about.” (Toch, p. 116.)
Teachers who are skilled in collaboration and committed to innovative partnership will create new learning environments and strong professional cultures. Effective new professionals will be community educators who flourish in many different spaces and model the participatory citizenship we should expect from our youth. Until teacher unions, schools of education, and school district bureaucracies can discover ways to foster such collaboration, partnership, and versatility, they must be considered obstacles to public education, hostile to the democratic agency of young people.
3. Looking forward to what youth can build.
We don’t need to defend or continue to fund any system whose shadow chokes out grassroots, community participation in and responsibility for the educative process. Instead, we need to clear space so that light can shine on all a community’s assets. Our best hope is to encourage and support collaborations that will keep communities fertile and promote the growth to responsible maturity of all our children.
It is time for the advocates of small schools, CBO schools, charter schools, educational choice, youth development, community development, workforce development, and alternative teacher training, along with faith-based program developers, entrepreneurs willing to put the commonwealth above profit-taking, and contemporary civil rights activists to identify themselves as builders of one movement to bring public education back to the public.
Key participants in such a movement will be young people themselves. Heath and McLaughlin describe the horizon of this new vision as they identify the creative energy and human agency fostered by effective youth serving organizations:
“Inner-city youngsters have no place, except the place they make for themselves, and certain youth organizations have allowed them to do just that. These groups have enabled the young to have a sense of a range of identities that transcends and transforms. Most important, these groups have enabled the young of inner cities to know both that there are choices and that they can help decide what it takes to make the choices necessary to create the terms of their own existence.” (Heath and McLaughlin, p. 10.)
We will know we are realizing the new vision of public education as we witness young people creating the terms of their own existence with help from, rather than in spite of, our schools.
Daniel Grego
With contributions from Roberta Aguero-Glodoski, Betty Balian, LaRhonda Bearden-Steward, Danny Goldberg and Robert Shiel.
TALC New Vision
3030 W. Highland Blvd. 3rd Floor
Milwaukee, WI 53208
414.931.6225
414.931.6235 fax
http://www.talcnewvision.org
Sources:
Heath, Shirley Brice and McLaughlin, Milbrey W, editors. Identity and Inner-City Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender. New York: Teachers College Press, 1993.
Hildreth, Robert. “Building Worlds, Transforming Lives, Making History: A Guide to Public Achievement,” second edition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Center for Democracy and Citizenship, 1998.
Steinberg, Adria, et al. “Four Building Blocks for a System of Educational Opportunity: Developing Pathways To and Through College For Urban Youth.” Boston: Jobs for the Future, March 2003.
Toch, Thomas. High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
Tyack, David. The One Best System. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974.
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