Welcome to Educating. All Our Children., dedicated
to building an informed community of advocacy on behalf of our children and
their education. The public’s schools, so vital to democracy and to children’s
wellbeing, are under siege.
Testing systems that once seemed to be an expensive bureaucratic
nuisance that “one day too would pass” are now widely understood to be the
Trojan horse of statistical tricks to triage students, discredit teachers, and
cast suspicion on the very legitimacy of public education. The urgency of this assault on the
public’s schools calls for timely, informed, collective response: a paradox of both immediacy and
thoughtful deliberation.
The “All Our Children”
in our name means just that – every child must grow and learn and thrive under
our care. The “Educating” extends
to us, the parents, teachers, scholars, activists, policy shapers – the grown-ups
who must get smarter about what is going on before we can fully educate the
children.
Educating. All Our Children. will keep the focus on the children as we share timely
information, important research studies, voices from the classroom, and in
doing so, work to recast – and reclaim --the debates about what our schools
would be like if we were committed to a powerful, equitable, and democratic
education for all our children.
To begin, a piece I
wrote as an introduction to a special issue on Education and Democracy for the American Educational Research Journal –
in 2002! Our struggle isn’t new, but energies must be:
“There has perhaps been no time in our
history when the links between a public education and democracy have been as
tenuous as they are right now, at the beginning of this new century. From Jefferson to Dewey, from the
common schools to the freedom schools, educational practices and policies in
the United States have invoked the values of democracy for their legitimacy.
Even when the reality has fallen far short of the ideal, the articulated
premise surrounding public support for the education of children has been
democracy’s need for an educated citizenry. That an educated citizenry could prevent, discern, and even
throw off tyranny underlay the presumption that the education of children was a
shared and common good, an insurance, if you will, against tyrants and
oppression, against those who would co-opt or silence the voices of the many.
The denial of literacy to slaves spoke perversely of the power that Whites
believed an educated mind to possess – a power multiplied when held not just by
one slave, but by slaves in common.
Our press and government chambers are filled
with stories about education, advocacy for education, plans for education
“reform.” Education would seem to be a vaunted priority, a collective good. Yet
when closely exampled, many of the policies and practices being promoted as
reforms are attempts to restructure even publicly funded education into forms
of private goods. Such efforts
include privatization and standardization.
Privatization, particularly in the form of
vouchers, removes public education dollars from public governance, transferring
public funds into private entities that may or may not have any responsibility
to serve a public purpose. . . a fairly transparent threat to a tradition of
schooling that presumes both a democratic purpose and a democratic governance
of schools.
The symbolic language of education for
democracy has dominated the history of education in the US,
even when many of our schools were highly inequitable in the populations they
served and extremely hierarchical in their bureaucratic structures. That symbolic language. . .
nevertheless provided a common ground where, from time to critical time,
citizens could revisit not only their goals for schooling, but their ideals for
their children and for their country."
Our hope in launching
this blog – a decade after those concerns were raised -- is to create a space
for reclaiming, re-asserting the many ways we need to be talking about children
and the public’s schools – morally, developmentally, democratically, creatively,
truly educationally. Educating. All Our Children. aspires to
be that common ground.
