Our schools, our community

It’s all about the narrative, a friend says. How do people understand, or hear, what you’re saying?

I’ve thought about this a lot in the past weeks – as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brilliantly refuses to allow others to shape her narrative, as 45 continues to manufacture fake crises and sow hatred and ignorance … and as the Madison School Board race gets underway.

Several narratives about education have worked their way into our national psyche with fairly pernicious consequences. “Schools are failing” is a constant lament, along with the dangerous and misleading assertion that, somehow, more “rigor” and “accountability” are the magic bullets that will ensure school success rather than steps on the path to an increasingly corporatized and dehumanized educational system. False claims about closing the so-called achievement gap (a problematic framing in and of itself, but more about that somewhere down the road) mask the tremendous damage being done to all students, with disproportionate impact on students of color, by the draconian cutbacks to public education we have seen across the country, including Wisconsin.

The claim that schools are failing too often lays the blame solely on teachers, while calls for rigor and accountability seek redemption and success in a seemingly unending series of curricular implants that are force-fed on schools with scant, if any, input from teachers, students or parents.   It also holds up the private sector as the potential savior of the “failures” it points to.

But without common ground that is public, we are lost. Public space is at stake today across the country as the very heart of so many communities — thriving public schools and affordable housing — is under attack.   When the driving factor is profit, allegiance to a company or obsession with data, we are lost. Many of the voucher and charter schools do little to help students who are English Language Learners or students with disabilities – because they have no legal obligation to do so. Students who need extra help may be tossed back into the public sector, already reeling from a transfer of funds to a private sector that has no real commitment to our communities.

We can see this across the country – not only was post-Katrina New Orleans ‘whitened’ as the city rebuilt and many African-Americans were forced out, there are no longer any public schools in the entire city.

Eve Ewing’s brilliant book Ghosts in the Schoolyard examines the disastrous fallout in Chicago after Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the forced closing of some 50 public schools. Nearly 90% of the affected students were African-American, and many observers have long criticized Emanuel and Arne Duncan for their policies that fatally weakened many public schools and opened the door to privatizers. As we have seen in Wisconsin, privatization of this sacred public space was a major goal of the Walker administration – not surprisingly, as it is one of the key points the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is trying to ram through in states across the country.

It is instructive to see teachers all over the US rising up to fight – against attempts to privatize public education and the deepening demoralization among teachers … but also, critically, to support their students – that beloved community that is a strong public school.

So, back to Madison. What is the role of the school board? What should it be? School board members must have a vision, a critical eye and a willingness to question the status quo. While some may call this “adversarial” (the same perspective that scolds an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and wants public servants to shut up and make nice), a willingness to speak truth to power, whether that power be Pearson or an administrator tangled up in data points and educator effectiveness, is at the core of being an effective advocate for our schools. We need a critical and unflinching eye that can take on the corporatist narrative and joy-killing agenda that, often with the best of intentions, has infiltrated too many public schools, including those in Madison. We need to honor the local wisdom already in our schools and community (for instance, providing a pathway from high school through a teacher education program and then back into the Madison schools) and bring in voices even when they may dissent from the administrative status quo.

To borrow from the legendary John Lewis, we need board members willing to make “good trouble”. Our schools depend on that.