Rachel Levy is a public school parent and teacher in Virginia. She wrote this article as part of the series created by the Network for Public Education called “Public Voices for Public Schools.” Rachel recently ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. She learned about politics at the ground-level. And she saw how much the public appreciates its public schools.
She wrote:
I was proud to tell voters that I was a teacher. I am proud to be part of a profession of smart, resourceful, responsible, and caring people who do socially useful, meaningful, and intellectual work. Unfortunately, that same sense of ease people felt when I told them I was a teacher, the same sense that I am a responsible and reliable member of the community may be tied to the sense right now in this pandemic that teachers are expected to take care of everyone else and put the health and lives of others above our own and our own family members. It may tie into the practice of not allowing teachers and educators input into the policies, practices, and working conditions that determine the quality of our working lives and the quality of education we’re able to provide.
My message to voters was that our public school teachers are not expendable, replaceable or disposable. To value our public schools is to value our teachers. To value our public schools is to value democracy.
Just as the January 6th insurrectionists came for our democracy, there are people coming for our teachers and for our public schools. I don’t believe that teachers and education alone can solve poverty or build democracy. But our public schools are a building block of our democracy, and we need them and our teachers to be strong in order to weather the current fascist storm.
From the response I got on the doors campaigning, I’m confident that the public agrees.
Please open the link and read the full story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks to NCLB, it seems like the onus of everything the child does falls upon the teacher, as if NCLB absolved parents of their innate responsibility to actually raise their children. So many of us are raising their kids and face parental complaints about why their child was suspended for talking back to a teacher in a profanity-laced tirade. It’s incredible the level of abdication of parental responsibility.
Really? You’re going to blame parental responsibility (lack of) on NCLB? Try looking at what happened in media, movies, radio, tech industries etc. Fantasy scenarios/culture has more to do with bad behavior than NCLB.
But I will concede that the over testing using standardized tests to rate, rank and sort children causes them much distress and sends many hormonal teens into a tailspin of bad behavior. The data and the “need to succeed” at all costs is harmful to children/teens. I still think that media has played a HUGE role in the destruction of civil society.
“You’re going to blame parental responsibility (lack of) on NCLB?” no, read what I wrote with more care: “as if,” especially when I had a student sexing herself out to score some blow for mom. Good times.
and a theory often “bought” by the middle management level in many reform-invaded schools — advisors and disciplinarians often frustratingly on the side of the reformer
“My message to voters was that our public school teachers are not expendable, replaceable or disposable. ”
I recently saw a story on a small rural school district in Oklahoma. The principal is running the school by herself. Since so many teachers and support staff have either quit or have Covid, the principal is driving the bus, preparing plans for minimally prepared subs and teaching when there is no substitute for a class. She is also filling in for the school nurse.
I recently came across this excellent article by a teacher in Brevard County, Florida, He traces the concept of “common schools” back to Jefferson and reaffirms that public education is an essential component of a democratic republic. The main “customer” of public education is not parents or students. It is our fragile republic. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/teacher-why-schools-120029896.html
At the anecdotal levels, the vast majority of parents I served supported teachers. Throughout my time in North Carolina, poll after poll showed that citizens would be willing to pay more taxes for better schools. However, the nature of our politics and its coverage by the media drowns these voices. Keep it up Rachel Levy! Perhaps we will get through this din of anti-intellectual propaganda after all.
Whenever I read a post on social media bashing public schools and teachers, I always answer with the fact that the majority of parents and students are happy with their schools in poll after poll. I also mention that there is a campaign to erode trust in our public schools in order to privatize them. We need to take a stand against misinformation about public schools and teachers.
In poll after poll…conducted by who and questions asked, please? The problem with surveys and data is that is ALWAYS skewed to fit an agenda. Sorry, but many parents aren’t happy with public schools but don’t have the money to make a change for their child/children to attend private schools. Parents are not happy with the over testing, the CC curriculum, the lack of recess/art/music, the over emphasis on STEM, the data collection, the over crowding/conditions of buildings etc. Parents generally like the teachers and the idea of public schools/education from 20-25 yrs ago, but we (the readers of this blog) know that it’s not the way it is any longer.
LisaM– I’m assuming retiredteacher is referring to the annual PDK poll, which as far as I know as never been accused of having a political agenda.
Here’s the PDK poll from the ’20-’21 school year— the year in which a number of large districts were closed to in-person teaching for 7 of 10 months. PDK departed from its usual format to get opinions on schools’/ teachers’ response to the pandemic. Regarding their own communities, 67% parents of pubsch students and 64% of all adults gave teachers an A or B. Their schools were given A/B by 64% of pubsch parents, but only 54% of all adults agreed. All of them rate the nation’s schools and teachers as a whole [whom they only ‘know’ via the press] considerably lower. https://pdkpoll.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Poll53_final.pdf
The PDK polls have long shown high pubsch-parent & all-adult satisfaction with their own local schools/ teachers, while they give the nations’ public schools a “meh” rating. A recent pre-pandemic PDK poll I saw called attention to a relatively new phenomenon: a large majority of public are pro being taxed more in order to pay teachers more, coupled with a majority saying they would prefer their children not go into teaching.
That last rating may or may not indicate public awareness of the problems with overtesting—it may just be about salaries. But the current poll at top suggests the local public sees their teachers fighting an uphill battle against school policies.
I will offer a different parent’s perspective:
I agree with the person above that almost all parents are unhappy with “the over crowding/conditions of buildings etc” and unless they are lucky enough to be in a public school with prime facilities that isn’t crowded, that would make most unhappy.
But beyond that, you can find parents who want even more testing for their kid along with those who want even less.
But kids have always been “tested” — that has nothing to do with Common Core. Parents didn’t object to “testing” in decades past. But with Common Core, the change in curriculum was paired directly with high stakes testing. It did not have to be. That was entirely a political decision, designed and promoted entirely to make public schools look bad.
I have watched “bad” and annoying new curricula come and go. I used “bad” and annoying new curricula in the 1970s.
The difference was when it was not simply an annoying way to teach students that only worked for some students, but instead became something that mandated a high stakes test to measure how well that curriculum was being taught to students! It is truly insane.
If the movement had not been taken over by ed reform hacks, low scores on Common Core tests would have been an indictment of the curriculum! Instead, those ed reform hacks made it an indictment of the students and their parents in charter schools – using some of the nastiest racist innuendo to accuse the kids of being violent and their parents of being uncaring and lazy to hide that the kids who didn’t score high enough on standardized tests were rejected as unteachable.
With public schools, ed reform hacks blamed teachers and administrators. They blamed parents only in so far as the parent didn’t embrace that their child ws only as good as their test score — then those ed reforers accused the parents of refusing to acknowlege how pooerly educated and ignorant their own kid was.
With public schools, the ed reform hacks professed sympathy for the other students who “failed” and blaned their incompetent teachers and school, right ujp iuntil the time that child entere a charter when that violent child and his aprents again werfe entirely to blame.
Parents are happy because most public schools do NOT “over test” but the mandated very high stakes tests make them angry, and they blame those who mandate them, not their school.
One parent believes that a big issue driving privileged parents into private schools is supposedly “the over emphasis on STEM, the data collection”.
This is nonsense. Most public elementary schools barely have science anymore and the Math curriculum has been transformed into a writing one! Parents want MORE regular “stem” style math in elementary school.
And in high school, students still take the same English/Social Studies/Math/Science courses they always have. Maybe they have an extra computer course but I haven’t found masses of parents complaining their kids get too much math and science.
Technology? There are as many parents – especially of boys – who are grateful their kid can type instead of write everything by hand. When I hear parents complaining that their kid’s school had too much STEM, it doesn’t surprise me that I never hear specifics. Because other parents think it isn’t enough, and it turns out that often “too much” or “too little” is the same — a balance that seems perfectly reasonable when one actually knows the facts instead of just hearing one parent saying “it’s too much” and another parent saying “it’s too little” and that’s why they are off to private school. Which almost always turn out to pretty much offer the same amount of STEM! But somehow it’s okay because it’s private school so it’s neither too little nor too much.
Common Core has some serious flaws, but so did Everyday Math and Lucy Calkins and phonics and the whitewashed social studies books and white-approved novels that were read decades ago.
The only difference is the high stakes test. Without the high stakes test, Common Core has elements of what is taught in private schools and elements of what was always taught to kids. Without it, Common Core is Everyday Math or old time Social Studies books.
The test is the problem because the test is education hacks way of legitimizing their desire to privatize public education. Perhaps not for everyone — just for the students who are profitable to teach. They will happily allow public schools a small allowance – very small – to teach the rest so that their privatized schools can continue to brag about how superior they are.
^^Lots of typos in the 9th paragraph, so here is it again (without typos) if anyone cares:
“With public schools, the ed reform hacks professed sympathy for the other students who “failed” and blamed their incompetent teachers and school, right up until the time that child entered a charter when that violent child and his parents again were entirely to blame.
Well said. I can remember taking standardized tests, and so did my children. They were considered a “litmus” test of student progress. There were no high stakes attached. Now tests are being used as a weapon against schools, teachers and, in some cases, students.
retired teacher…..I assume you are retired. If you haven’t been in the classroom in the past 5-8 years, you really can’t imagine how horrible public education has become in city/suburban districts (for students and teachers). Lots of parents know but don’t have the means to fight or can’t give any more time/resources to fight…..they acquiesce. In rural districts where public schools are still the center of communities, you will have happier parents overall because there is nothing else. Framing the questions to get the desired answers doesn’t make for good polls.
And yes, I took Iowa tests once in ES and once in MS and it never mattered to me, my parents or to my teachers. Now, the tests mean everything.
retired teacher,
The suburbs have lots of affluent parents who could find another option. I have no idea what parents mean when they invoke how “horrible” the public schools are without actually giving an example. Usually I find that it is an example that can be found in any private school. Except the ones that have always been there — overcrowded classrooms and high stakes testing which does not affect most students in high school anyway!
The high stakes tests are horrible, but most public schools do not spend all of their days teaching to the test. They spend their days teaching kids to love learning. The curriculum is far better than it was ikn my days of Iowa tests, despite the standardized testing.
Furthermore, high school students (at least in NYC) don’t take standardized tests except for the same Regents exams they took for many decades. And those have been put on hold the last 2 years anyway.
Walk into a public high school English or History class and you won’t see “teaching to the test”. You will see students learning and reading and discussing and writing.
I’ve never seen an AP class that was “teaching to the test”. They were simply interesting classes geared toward students who are more engaged in that subject or in academics than other students might be. I wish I had been lucky enough to have that many decades ago, instead of the dull textbook learning that turns out only taught the white-approved version of history.
High stakes testing is bad, but it doesn’t make public schools that dishonest horrible education that some parents seem to need to make them to justify their own choices.
I suggest everyone google PS22 chorus and “A World of Peace” to watch a PUBLIC school that teaches music and the Holocaust in a way that is astonishing. It is not “horrible”.
I don’t think this discussion is helped when people make sweeping negative portrayals of public schools. Some are good, some aren’t, just like they have ALWAYS been, long before anyone even heard of Common Core. If anything, they are much better today than when I was a K-12 student.
Where is Bob Shepherd to talk about the bullet list of CC ELA standards in HS? Funny how everyone praises him when he tells the truth about the bad standards and the bad tests, and the bad text books, but let a parent voice that same opinion and all of a sudden that parent’s point of view is wrong or teacher bashing. Parents in urban/suburban districts are not that happy…..they just accept now that they get no where when they try to fight the system in place. Many in my area abandon public schools and the privates are filled.
And NYCPSP…..I have 1 that graduated out of public HS (2 yrs ago) and took those wonderful AP ELA classes and she will tell you that it was ALL test prep with a few short novels/literature thrown in for good measure. My son in private HS takes honors ELA and the reading/discussing/writing is much more intense, meaningful and thought provoking and his book list every year has been phenomenal.
If you think that there is no standardized testing in HS you better look around at other states where it is. There are Jr.s who are still taking ALG I so that they can graduate. They take the PSAT in public school starting in the 8th grade in some states. There is plenty of standardized testing in HS and it all relates to the APing of almost every single HS class.
LisaM,
I have no reason to doubt that your son is being well-served receiving his privileged private school education and your daughter learned nothing but test prep and now attends a college where all of the privileged private school students shine, while all the public school students are at the bottom of their classes, barely able to be in the same college classes as their private school peers with their far superior education.
That may be YOUR experience. But you keep making sweeping judgements about all public schools and parents.
You insult public school students. You don’t realize it, but you do.
There may be “standards”, but so what? Private schools use education jargon to list their own standards, too. It is irrelevant. If your daughter was poorly served by her AP class, then that is no different than a lousy private school teacher or class.
Stop with your certainty that all classes are like the ones that your daughter didn’t like. I hear disaffected public school parents. I ALSO hear disaffected private school parents. Yes, the tests are horrible. But most good public schools don’t teach to the test. At least in NYC they do not. If you moved to the suburbs and got a lousy school, then that’s your school.
On this anniversary of the Parkland, Florida shooting killing so many young high school students, I keep thinking of those wonderful students who expressed themselves so thoughtfully because of one of their AP classes and their teacher.
Your daughter’s experience is her own. Not everyone’s.
“On the night his students debated National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch at a nationally televised town hall, Jeff Foster sat off to the side of the stage like a boxing coach watching his prizefighters.
Thinking back on that experience from the kitchen counter of his Boynton Beach home on Monday, Foster, 46, the fast-talking, tell-it-like-it-is AP government teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in nearby Parkland, is almost at a loss for words.
“To see that happen and realize that’s someone that’s in your class, it’s pretty crazy,” Foster told NBC News. “It’s almost like an out-of-body experience.”
THIS is also what you get in public school.
More about one of those supposedly lousy public schools:
“Foster never anticipated teaching AP government — let alone being the educator behind a fleet of vocal gun reform activists — when Stoneman Douglas hired him in 1999.
When he was asked to take on the course a year and a half after his hiring, he said, he balked.
“I thought this was going to be a lot of work. And then I thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute. This is something you really enjoy and these are great kids and you can really have some leeway with the curriculum,’” Foster said. “Obviously, I said yes, and I haven’t regretted a minute of it.”
Since taking on the role, Foster has taught hundreds of students about special interest groups, with an emphasis on the NRA.
“It’s such an easy one to explain because of all the things that have happened in this country,” he said of the back-and-forth between politicians and the NRA following school shootings.
But Foster said he’s open with his students about his own political affiliation.
He texted González one day after the shooting. “So I said, ‘Emma, this is Mr. Foster. If you don’t believe it, I’m the Republican who supports gay marriage and LGBT rights,’” he said.”
The AP classes have been some of the most engaging and interesting classes my kid has taken. The wholesale bashing of these classes astonishes me. I am not advocating AP for all. But like every other class that was ever taught, it depends on the teacher. The ones who teach it by rote aren’t likely to be teaching any class in an engaging manner.
It’s just another name for an Honors class. What a teacher does with it depends on the teacher – whether in a public or private school.
How many AP classes have you observed?
Flerp!,
How many have you “observed”? Do you think LisaM “observed” a bunch of AP classes or is she speaking based on her own kid’s experience?
Do you have some knowledge that AP classes must be universally bad?
I don’t challenge LisaM’s view that her own daughter’s AP class was horrible. I challenge LisaM extrapolating her own kid’s experience to bash all public school and offer up some false idea that they are all somehow horrible compared to decades ago.
If your kid had lousy AP classes, too, I’m sorry. I don’t doubt that was your kid’s experience. But it doesn’t mean all AP classes are lousy.
It would be like me arguing that because my kid took a good AP class, that means all AP classes are perfect. And that’s not what I am saying.
Feel free to offer up your own opinion of AP classes.
I’ve never claimed to have observed any AP classes. How many have you observed? And where do you come up with this stuff?
Flerp!,
Where do you come up with asking irrelevant questions?
Let’s all stipulate that none of us has “observed” AP classes but it is quite likely all 3 of us have had kids in them. Possibly even lots of them.
LisaM @ 2/14 5:32pm– “Parents in urban/suburban districts are not that happy…..they just accept now that they get nowhere when they try to fight the system in place.”
Viewpoint of a suburban taxpayer in a hi-REtax town with a hi-qual pubschsys [suburban NJ] where very few students head for privsch: still happy as clams; thanx to privilege, nearly untouched. Back when NJ imposed annual state-stdzd tests in the 2000’s, our supt tried to get us waivered. The pubschsys & the town saw this as an unnecessary expense for a hi-rated district where kids already aced what stdzd tests were then given, 99+% grad/ college admission (incl many selective colleges). We were turned down. That did not make us a “teaching to the test” pubschsys: the kids ace the tests without prep. We continue to have ELA classes Bob S would approve of, etc as ever.
There was however a lot of additional ppwk for our teachers, especially associated with all the AYP garbage that came along with the CCSS “accountability” systems. So… teachers got bigger raises.
For hi-SES suburban pubschsystems, these policies pinch a bit, but public is basically oblivious—other people’s problems. A system that was conceived by Kennedy with NAACP backing to raise up the lowest-performing schools, by highlighting who was not getting enough attention/ fed-state $$– w/Bush II handshake– turned into an ed-quality-lowering vehicle for most everybody else, hardest on the targeted ‘beneficiaries.’
https://news.gallup.com/poll/354083/parents-remain-largely-satisfied-child-education.aspx
This Gallup Poll shows 70% of parents are satisfied with their children’s school, A majority of adults do not like the schools, and that homeschooling has returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Reminds me of the Ravitch thesis in Life and Death of the Great American School (2010?)
The more things stay the same, the more things stay the same.
If I am remembering correctly that 70% used to be around 85% twenty years ago. So the constant drumbeating of Public Schools Bad! has had an effect.
However it is still the vast majority.
This finishes with a phrase, “The Current Fascism Storm” and I’m not sure people in the general public know what Fascism is and its dangers. We fought against it in WWII and in the end after the war people came out more fearful of Communism than Fascism. Why? Putin has been both. He was once in line with Communist Authoritarianism and now that Russia is more capitalist (meaning the elements of production are in private hands instead of public ones) he’s good with being a Fascist Authoritarian. Either system tends to either disregard or when possible manipulate DEMOCRATIC decision-making to maintain power and control.
Breaking news:
The global accounting firm Mazars, which did the Trump books, just cut ties with the Trump Organization and issued a statement saying that a decade of the organization’s financial statements “should no longer be relied upon.”
I have one statement about that: Is orange in orange too matchy-matchy?
I doubt the Idiot will ever have to face consequences for any of his actions, but assuming he would…then he would not have access to bronzer, hair color, or personal assistants. Therefore I think his color palette would not be anything near as colorful as orange. The orange of the uniform would set off the accents of his indistinguishable pallor.
Click the link and read the full story. Rachel Levy appears a clear eyed, PhD, education practitioner of the highest quality. “I don’t believe that teachers and education alone can solve poverty or build democracy. But our public schools are a building block of our democracy, and we need them and our teachers to be strong in order to weather the current fascist storm.” So true! So spot on true.
“I saw few signs that people were concerned with culture war issues. No one wanted to talk about whether transgender kids should be allowed to use the bathroom that aligned with their gender identity. Rather, they were concerned about accessing education, inadequate internet, and covid-era schooling,” she wrote. That is the reality on the ground. Corporate oligarchs have their heads in the clouds and their heads in the sand at the same time. We the People have more important matters with which to deal. I wish I could cast a vote for Rachel Levy.
What’s most chilling to me is the self-appointed rich who cloak the taking of Main Street’s assets in rhetoric about worker productivity (career ready).
The same wealthy people studiously avoid correcting Wall Street’s 2% drag on GDP.
Exploiting communities, especially Black neighborhoods is horrific. It’s another level of evil for the rich to give license to the 0.1% to intentionally drive down the U.S. economy.