I’ve been mulling over this analysis of national education politics for a while. A lot of it is bang on, and, if you add a heaping cup of Seattle self-righteousness, it’s pretty good at describing the rather combative tone of our education politics of late.
“When major figures in the education world debate policy, they usually start out with a gauzy declaration that it’s all about the children.
Then they begin hurling insults.
High-profile activists, including union leaders and at least one member of Congress, have tarred one another with choice epithets such as slave master, murderer, bitch, charlatan, roach and bully bound for hell. And that’s just in the past six months.
Behind the nasty rhetoric are substantive disagreements over important issues like charter schools, teacher evaluations and private school vouchers. But the substance tends to get lost in all the smack talk.”
You don’t have to look far in the blogosphere to find smack talk a-plenty in Seattle. And in the battle between Sue Peters and Suzanne Dale Estey for a school board seat, a lot of this stuff got delivered to the door of every Seattle voter. Voters didn’t know too much about what either candidate thought about, say, how schools should be run, but they knew all kinds of juicy details about what the campaigns had to say about each other, including that Suzanne Dale Estey had wealthy backers and Sue Peters wrote for a blog that included a graphic portraying Bill Gates and several other education reform supporters as Dementors. (In case you’re not up on your Harry Potter terms: Dementors, otherwise known as “soul-sucking fiends” feed on human happiness. A severe encounter leaves the victim a soul-less shell.)
When it came to what needed to be done day to day in the school board, the two largely agreed with one another, but that didn’t stop it the race from turning into chum for gossip sharks.
And this rancor is in spite of the fact that the cast of characters are a little different here from the ones described in the Politico story – to the point that an outsider would have trouble telling them apart. And the shifts and nuances are so frequent that I don’t think any two people involved in the education debate would divide the sides the same way.
Both sides are heavily populated with liberal Democrats. The education reform side also includes a scattering of dogged blue-state conservatives, some of whom are even Republican. Still, one good way to hurt the feelings of a Seattle education reformer is to allege their cause is not progressive.
The education reform side – of which I am a member – has a preoccupation with social injustice in the form of achievement gaps. Gaps between races, gaps between rich and poor, gaps between mainstream and special education students, all sorts of gaps that have no business being there. The agenda, backed by the ever quantitative Bill Gates, is to find and document strategies of eliminating those gaps, raising achievement among disadvantaged students. This means lots of testing, and data collection, so leaders can track what is going on, and take action to solve problems. It involves some new strategies, such as coming up with a way of evaluating teachers that takes into account how students do in their classes. They think that principals should have more control over hiring and firing, that they shouldn’t have to take forced placement of teachers who have been laid off from other schools. Many but not all education reformers also favor changing the funding formula to allow for charter schools. The argument is that years of the current school system haven’t done that much for poor people, so it’s time to try new ideas. And they like the combination of academic rigor and emphasis on critical thinking that comes with the Common Core.
The detractors to this side argue that the preoccupation on tests and things that can be quantified is leading schools to drop emphasis on things that cannot be easily quantified, but are nonetheless important. They argue that kids are tested too often, and that testing takes too much of schools’ limited resources. They point to instances in which schools striving to raise kids’ achievement in reading and math, end up cutting back on history, civics, the arts – all kinds of things that are necessary in the education of a responsible citizen. They fret that while the children of the wealthy continue to have the advantage of a wide-ranging curriculum, the children of the poor are increasingly channeled into schools that are overwhelmingly preoccupied with reinforcing basic skills. They worry that charter schools are the beginning of the privatization of the education system, and that the demand for data is leading to an invasion of kids’ privacy. Many don’t like the Common Core much either.
But here’s the thing: when it comes down to things on the ground, they tend to agree on an awful lot. Quality early education – yup. Health clinics and other wrap-around social services in schools – absolutely. Cutting exclusionary discipline – most definitely. Stopping the chronic underfunding of the state’s public schools – yes, yes and yes. Raising graduation rates, and closing achievement gaps – of course.
This is why the education debate in Seattle often reminds me of this scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Because on most things that matter, the people who care enough about public education’s future to start hurling insults agree with one another. And they do have a common enemy: the chronic indifference which led public education to get into this mess in the first place.
And there are ways we can work together. Seattle’s uniquely nuanced teacher evaluation framework, with its emphasis on continued training, was one. Also, there is no reason that schools couldn’t use instruction in history and civics as a way of promoting the text understanding and critical thinking demanded by the Common Core.
So let’s quiet down, and have a conversation.
-by Fiona Cohen
