Public education

I’m a big fan of public schools. I’m not saying that they’re all great and that there’s no room for improvement. What I like is the idea that everyone gets a chance to get a decent education, which is important because it does more than help the individual. Education can make you a more well-rounded person, but it also helps society in general if everyone has an opportunity to live up to their potential. Our communities are better places if everyone can learn the skills to be productive, get a good job and contribute. That’s why we all pay for it even if we don’t have children in the schools.

What I don’t like is the escalation in attacks on public schools. It began decades ago in subtle ways. Class performance was closely examined to call into question teacher effectiveness with no regard to student ability. Then we get standardized tests which do little to educate but are great for manufacturing flaws where there might not be any. One of the more insidious ploys, before the attack on unions started, was to call them government schools.

For some people, government is a bad thing. People support the public – they are the public, so public schools are acknowledged as a good thing. But if you call them government schools then you’ve created a boogeyman to scare people with. It’s all marketing, but where calling prunes dried plums is meant to get you to taste one and like them, calling public schools government schools is designed to get you to mistrust them.

The golden age of America people long for was a time when kids went to (mostly public) school and then went on to trade school or college or an apprenticeship or just worked so they could be doctors and lawyers and plumbers and astronauts and even politicians. Today if you go to public school you’re being manipulated into being a tool of the system. There’s no mention of how schools have always reflected the dominant social mores of their local communities and still do to this day. Nope, now they’re just evil.

But somehow private schools are just wonderful places of joy and learning. That is they are if you can afford them.

In many states funding for public education is being cut at the state level. At the same time local school districts are being blocked from raising more money on their own. State money is cut and local taxes can’t be raised, so we have the self-fulfilling prophecy of school systems in decline. Public schools may need reform and changes to their processes. They need support and they need money. Getting rid of No Child Left Behind would help. That was only ever a back-handed way to promote privatization and never meant to help schools. But schools aren’t failing financially because of bad systems or bad teachers or unions. They are failing because administrations that want to funnel tax dollars into private schools are forcing public schools to fail.

As an example I give you New Jersey, where the state school budget has been cut, the application for federal grants was deliberately fumbled and the Governor blamed the teachers for his own actions. At the same time, a company can get a tax credit for contributing to the tuition for a student to go to a private school – but not for contributing to public schools.

When you control the purse strings and you cut off money to public schools and then point at them and say – Look, they’re not performing well and it’s all their fault – you’re pointing in the wrong direction.