Jeff Bryant laments that so many elected officials, who call themselves progressive, have fallen for “education reform” in its most punitive form. For example, even Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders voted for the Murphy Amendment when the Senate was shaping its bill to revise NCLB. The amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, would have kept the federal government in charge of defining what is a “failing school” and prescribing how states should intervene. Thankfully, the amendment was voted down, but most Democratic senators, including Warren and Sanders, voted for it. A group of civil rights organizations lobbied to retain annual high-stakes testing, even though these tests label minority children as failures and subject them to relentless test prep, robbing them of a full education. Fortunately other civil rights leaders, such as the Rev. William Barber of North Carolina, have spoken out against high-stakes testing, as have grassroots leaders of civil rights groups.
Bryant asks:
What’s going on here? Why are progressive leaders in the Democratic Party out of touch with progressive education? Is education somehow so different from issues like finance and macroeconomics that it doesn’t belong in the same populist tent with breaking up Wall Street banks and raising the minimum wage?
To gain insight into these questions, Bryant interviewed Rep. Mark Takano of California. Takano is unusual for many reasons as a member of Congress. For one, he is an experienced educator, which is a rarity in that legislative body. He knows what he is talking about. He has been in the trenches. He was a classroom teacher for nearly 24 years before he was elected to Congress. He knows the real effects of federal policies. Other members of Congress focus on other issues, and few have any real understanding about the consequences of the policies they enact. Takano does. He knows about education.
You will enjoy reading the interview and learn from it.
Takano says, for example:
I saw education before No Child Left Behind. I also experienced education during No Child Left Behind up until I got elected to Congress. Basically, test and punish did not work. Because of No Child Left Behind, I suddenly had to follow a syllabus and a pacing guide dictated by the district office. There was less trust of the teacher, and that’s a mild way of putting it. We began being treated like we were a transmitter of someone else’s idea of what is good education. Effective education doesn’t work that way. Effective education is building relationships with students. It’s about teachers strategizing on how to engage students. You can’t do the canned lesson or scripted content.
I dare say no one else in Congress understands as much about the realities of the classroom as Mark Takano. Let us hope he is re-elected again and again and gains seniority on the House Education Committee.
We can all be grateful to know that there is a teacher in Congress. There should be many more.
