Amy Lueck writes in this article about the role of the high school in shaping American society and building a sense of community, an understanding that these children are OUR children.
She begins:
In 2016, shortly after she was appointed to the position, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos declared American public schools a “dead end.” Instead, DeVos advocates for “school choice,” code for charter schools, vouchers, and other privatization efforts.
Families who have watched their local schools struggle might agree with DeVos, but her characterization is still troubling. It reflects a distrust of education as a communal goal, not just an individual one. That’s a big change from the objective of American public schools during their first two centuries. Far from being a “dead end,” for a long time the public school—particularly the public high school—served an important civic purpose: not only as an academic training ground, but also as a center for community and activity in American cities.
From curricular offerings to extracurricular activities, shared milestones to cultural traditions, high schools have been remarkably consistent across the country and even across generations. Many Americans can remember the awkward school dances that memorialized the best (and worst) music of the day. Or bumping past different teenage archetypes on their way to classes. Or the pep fests and rallies they may have loved, or loved to hate. Football games that captured the attention of entire towns.
Public schools have also perpetuated racial and economic inequity. But the high school still galvanized a shared, American society. It helped people aspire toward greater equality together, and it used education to bring together diverse interests and people to forge social bonds of support. That effort shaped the American city of the 19th and early-20th centuries. High schools can continue to do this, so long as they can resist being dismantled.
She traces the history of the high school, and the departure of affluent white families for the suburbs, which has affected desegregation and funding.
She concludes:
As Americans face a new era of educational reform and broad societal change, they might do well to heed a lesson from the first two centuries of public education: As an institution, the fate of the high school cannot be detached from the community of which it is a part. Like all educational institutions, it is inextricably wrapped up with the goals and values of the town, city, and nation in which it is located, reflecting and perpetuating them.
Those values include Americans’ attitude to the very schools that would pass them along, too. If, as a nation, we decide that the public schools are a “dead end” for students, we should not be surprised if they become so—and along with them, the cities, towns, and communities they once built together.
Yes, we are trying to hold on to something important: community, democracy, the common good. Are we prepared to junk them in exchange for “choice?”
In many suburban school districts the school as cultural hub starts in elementary schools with little league and soccer played on school fields and scout meetings held in school buildings after school hours. The public school and libraries the common ground for diverse community members to interact with each other as members of the same community.
It is often public schools that serve to introduce new immigrants to American culture by hosting adult ESL and citizenship classes. Some communities offer GED programs and other adult education courses in the evenings in public school buildings. Public schools serve the needs of communities throughout the country allowing people to continue to develop a sense of community responsibility and identity.
As one who has grown up and lived with one foot firmly in different cultures, the non-American side of me (as well as with any foreign exchange student) has always been fascinated with the roles high schools play in American communities. What Amy Lueck describes is a history that has no parallel anywhere or at any time. Public education is the most essential part of the American identity, not the military or baseball or hot dogs or apple pie.
Baseball is America!
I was looking for you last weekend, but never found you!
I ended up leaving after Sat lunch as I wasn’t feeling well. I would have loved to have met you!
YES. The USA public school experience — which culminates in some nationally expected and very traditional high school expectations — is so deeply ingrained that when I try to discuss how this system is now being attacked with non-informed relatives, friends, etc., there is almost no ability to “hear” what I am saying: the decades-old structures around how school IS and HAS BEEN and WILL BE keep them from hearing that the entire educational industry is being set up for massive change.
Boy do I know that feeling! The wake up call for me has been how parents who are willing to volunteer to raise funds or join a board for anything are unwilling to listen and, if they do, be motivated to have some kind of continued interest, much less take action. As I tell them all, once you notice, it will be too late to do something.
BINGO.
“From curricular offerings to extracurricular activities, shared milestones to cultural traditions, high schools have been remarkably consistent across the country and even across generations. Many Americans can remember the awkward school dances that memorialized the best (and worst) music of the day.”
Kind of like this?
Or like this?
To answer your question, Diane:
It sure seems that some believe that the “free market” and the claimed choices it produces (which “it” really doesn’t) is what is best for this country are willing to forego the common good. Their greedy interests belie their presumed altruism in supposedly providing education for the unwashed masses of this country.
Well stated!
Like enthusiastically, Duane….
The “it” is public relations and marketing. They are trying to sell something no one needs and can potentially be harmful to them…a lot of them. Kind of like the money that is propping up the failed policies and interests of the privatization of education.
I would just encourage public school families to read ed reformers.
What you will find if you do is that they do not support existing public schools, and indeed plan to privatize all schools.
Here’s a piece written by one of most high profile ed reformers:
https://www.the74million.org/article/david-osborne-creating-a-21st-century-public-education-system-for-the-future-quality-of-our-lives-our-economy-our-society/
Read that and see if you believe ed reform “supports” public schools – they offer absolutely nothing of value to families with children in existing public schools.
If you’re a charter parent or a voucher parent you should definitely hire ed reformers but you’d be nuts to hire them if you have a kid in a public school. They either don’t recognize your kid’s school exists or they are actively lobbying to close it.
Read them yourself. Look for any positive plan or support they offer to any public school, anywhere. There are none.
Here’s another ed reformer, writing about public schools:
“When the Berlin Wall fell in 1990 people fled to the democratic west away from the communist east.”
https://parentshaveschoolchoicekidswin.com/2018/10/24/oh-youre-the-charter-school-candidate-im-not/
Yes, you read that right. Ed reformers compare public schools to the “communist east”
Don’t hire people who seek to eradicate public schools to run public schools. That won’t go well for your kids. Indeed, it hasn’t gone well for public school students. They have lost funding every year these people have been in power.
The big losers in the conversion to a privatized system is public school students. They either have NO advocates in government or they have lousy, weak “agnostic” advocates in government who are completely ineffective.
Hire public employees who support public schools. Don’t hire public employees who are opposed to public schools. It’s just common sense. Stop paying people to harm your kid’s school.
The degree to which public high schools have shaped communities had a relationship to the development of small town America in the progressive period. Whatever else might have been a problem with turn of the century progressivism, their belief in institutions (thank you Robert Weibe) made public schools what they are today, an integral part of their communities. Try to take a school away from a community and see the searing rebuke from the people. This is why reformers dare not insert charters into stable school systems. This is why they choose places where community is already threatened.
Your mention of Weibe just sent a flutter through my heart. Now I have to stop what I’m doing and get one of his books out of my shelves!
“Choice” from the corporate reformers of public education is a catch phrase that will eventually lead to NO CHOICE.
Very true, Lloyd.
One consequence of choice is that the children of engaged parents flee the high school leaving “other children” behind. This undercuts the idea that “OUR children” are in public education together. In affluent communities, virtually every parent is engaged, which makes it impossible for reformers to gain a toe hold. In less affluent communities or cities parents have bigger concerns than where their child will go to school… they worry about where their child will sleep or where their next meal is coming from… and finding the time to study “choices” for their child is an impossibility. The parents who ARE engaged in those less affluent communities and cities are the target group of privatizers…. and when the engaged parents abandon the public schools it exacerbates the divide between rich and poor.
I know exactly what you are talking about. Families in affluent areas, with excellent public schools, are not clamoring for school choice. Wealthy people already have school “choice”, because they can afford to move to and live in the areas with the excellent public schools.
When wealthier people leave the areas with the bad schools, this sets up a “vicious cycle”, and the tax base declines, the school budget shrinks, and the families that can move, do move.
What we have in America, is “educational apartheid’, where affluent families have excellent public schools, and economically depressed areas, have terrible public schools.
No, Charles, that is not true.
The public schools in depressed areas are not terrible. They are underfunded. Most of the people working in those schools would be superstars in an affluent suburb.
You really don’t understand that poverty is a burden to children and families.
I know it is useless to recommend a book to you but please consider reading Richard Rothstein “Class and Schools.” If you learned from it, you would not say embarrassing things.
I agree that the public schools in economically depressed areas are underfunded. I agree 1000%. I read this book “Savage Inequalities” by Kozol (A public-school advocate) some years ago. see
His book is more relevant today than ever. He also claims that there is educational apartheid in the USA. See “The Shame of the Nation”
I tend to agree with you, that if the teaching staff at decrepit, inner-city schools, were to be transferred to fully-funded, suburban schools in affluent neighborhoods, that the teaching staff would have the potential to be “superstars” (as you put it). This is exactly what happened to Mr. Kozol, after he was fired for teaching the poem “A Raisin in the Sun”, to a group of first-graders. (The poem was on the fourth grade curriculum).
I have a good understanding of the effects of poverty on people. I lived in a nation, where the annual income was about $350. I live in Metro WashDC. I see the despair and desolation every day. I need no lectures from anyone, on the effects of poverty.
I will look up the book you recommend. I suggest that you read the excepts from Kozol’s two books at the links provided.
I am more in agreement with you, than you realize. Wealthy areas, with a solid tax base, tend to have excellent schools. Economically depressed areas, with a crumbling tax base, tend to have lower-quality schools. As long as our nation continues the ludicrous practice of financing public education with property taxes, this “savage inequality” will perpetuate.
See
https://www.amazon.com/Class-Schools-Educational-Black-White-Achievement/dp/0807745561
I enjoyed the preview. I am ordering the book!
Thanks for the tip.