This September I hope to see the conversation around public education begin to change.
Instead of ceaselessly disparaging the quality of our public schools, I hope we can get back to talking about how to be sure all our schools have the resources they need to do their work as successfully as possible. I hope to see our elected leaders working together to face the funding challenges of our schools with determination and the full-throated support of their constituents.
But before we send any elected officials to Boston, we owe it to them to step back, collectively, and share some hard truths with each other, about why public education is the source of so much of our collective anxiety.
For years now, there has been a barrage of disparaging attacks aimed at public education, much of it heavily funded by for-profit organizations with a stake in the educational “market,” by lobbying organizations with agendas that have nothing to do with education at all or by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is a major player in both of the above.
We’ve gotten so used to these attacks that we’ve stopped bothering to fact-check them, which is unfortunate. If you look past the rhetoric, you usually find that by any statistical measure public education comes out ahead of either publicly funded charter school education or private school education.
Why does the good news of public education go unacknowledged? I think it has less to do with what teachers are teaching and more to do with who they are teaching. We are a diverse society. Our regular, neighborhood schools, by design, do not discriminate. Anyone is welcome to attend and our teachers actively work to teach to the unique learning styles and needs of all children. This is tough work that has required many educators to rethink what they do and how they do it.
The teachers I grew up with did things differently. I grew up in Tennessee and Virginia in the 1970s, where teachers seemed primarily interested in teaching my classmates and me how to fit in. We were like No. 2 pencils, all neatly lined up and sharpened to a point. We sat in straight rows, walked in straight lines, recited our homework dutifully. But we were never as uniform or homogenous as our schools and teachers assumed.
Teachers today don’t have the luxury of ignoring differences among learners because we are no longer a society that is comfortable warehousing kids with disabilities, medicating kids with attention issues or bullying kids who don’t conform to binary gender roles — and that is a good thing. Today’s public school teachers acknowledge the complexity and beauty of who we are, and who we always were.
As a parent of two children educated in public schools, and as an architect dedicated to designing schools to support the work of our teachers, I see so much to be proud of in the classrooms of our local public schools. I see that my own kids are more tolerant, collaborative and creative than I was, and are far better at math, science and music than I will ever be. Maybe they can’t recite “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” but that is a price I will happily pay.
Join me this fall in working on behalf of candidates who respect our public schools, our teachers, and most importantly, our children. Let’s give our local schools more, not less, support so that they can continue to nurture the next generation of artists, coders, contractors and political leaders no matter what zip code they are born in.
Let’s commit to resisting the nostalgic fantasies of those who seem eager to reinstate segregation based on race, class, gender conformity and learning abilities. This is a critical moment that requires us all to be on our best behavior.
Dorrie Brooks, of Florence, a volunteer coordinator for the campaign to elect Jo Comerford to the state Senate, is associate principal at Jones Whitsett Architects in Greenfield.