We just wrapped up public school week. A week? Shouldn’t Americans be grateful for free public schooling and a nation that raises children to understand their world? And do they recognize how they own their schools and how public education has been under attack? Soon, Americans will pay for everything in education.
Sadly, some have turned on their public schools, one of America’s great democratic institutions.
Thankfully, many other Americans from both parties want better public schools for all children. They believe every child in America should have access to great public schools with good resources and well-prepared teachers.
What if we dropped vouchers and educational savings accounts, took the excellent charter schools run by teachers, and moved them under public education to be held accountable?
What if everyone united behind creating one great public school system for all children, with services supporting the uniqueness of every child?
Are public schools perfect? No. Much has been done to public education for years in the name of privatization, with policymakers and corporate billionaires believing they know how schools should run and how to make money from the funding that goes to schools.
America’s public schools are different and always impacted by social change, helping us evolve into better people.
For years, most of us have been calling for the following doable changes that will also improve teaching as a profession.
- Make schools safer by lowering class sizes so teachers and staff can get to know students better.
- Insist on less testing and more individualized and small group planning to identify student strengths and improve weaknesses.
- Elected school boards should be responsive to the needs of parents, educators, and the community.
- Insist that principals and school administrators at every level have education degrees and experience working with children.
- Improve literacy instruction, making it age-appropriate, assessing and individualizing student needs.
- Demand rules surrounding partnerships, so those who want to contribute to schools don’t take them over.
- Highlight worldwide cultures so children learn to respect others and our public schools become a showcase for the world!
- Take pride in diversity, teaching students to respect and cherish the differences that make us unique, including religious preferences.
- Address difficulties facing schools with the immigration influx and how to make all children feel welcome.
- Provide every child access to the arts in their public schools with certified art teachers in various areas.
- Technology is essential but should not replace teachers. Protect students from harmful data collection.
- Provide students with great vocational programs and career technical education in high school, helping them realize their interests.
- Every school should include excellent libraries with fully qualified librarians.
- Provide all children with access to life skills classes like an updated version of home economics.
- Reassess the assessments and consider developmentally age-appropriate expectations at all grade levels.
- End harmful practices like third-grade retention and loss of unstructured recess.
- Increase teacher pay commensurate to the teachers’ degrees, experience, certification, and preparedness.
- Strengthen PTAs by creating schools that unite families through pride in sports, drama, music, art, and more.
- Every school should offer a variety of well-resourced classes, including the sciences, history, geography, civics, and other innovative courses.
- Make Teach for America Teacher Aides for America, requiring professional teacher certification in the area teachers teach.
- Improve crummy school buildings, an embarrassment to the country. Schools should be welcoming places that students are proud of.
- Increase counselors and school psychologists and help teachers identify students with mental health difficulties.
- Provide IEPs and classes to help students with severe behavioral disabilities get the services they need.
- Improve Colleges of Education with quality teaching preparation and not with an emphasis on online or scripted programs.
- Return autonomy and resources to principals and teachers.
Living becomes more robust when we care for and cherish our public schools. We have a better chance of uniting. Sending children to a hodge-podge of different schools, lacking the necessary support and accountability, creates tremendous concerns for the future, students, and America.
This needs to be a promise to our youngest children and our teens that public schools will continue to be supported by Americans to work collectively with everyone.
Excellent list! I would also add to provide more time in the school day for teacher planning and collaboration. What I have read of countries that are perceived doing better, they all limit instructional time and value self-actualized professional growth for teachers. Much of what you advocate here would not add to costs although there would be significant resources required for others. We somehow have to convince the public that this would be an investment that would reduce dependence on government services and develop a workforce with the flexibility to enhance our economy.
Great points, Paul. Thank you! I often wonder what happened to instructional designers. This used to be an actual area in educational leadership. Consider looking into lowering class size, but not all classes, or not at the same times. Also, why isn’t anyone complaining about 3rd grade retention since the student uses up funding to repeat a year (not to mention how awful it is). There are so many ways to provide the collaboration you mention for teachers too, to make the professionals. Scheduling is critical yet it’s given little consideration.
The assertion that “public schools will continue to be supported by Americans to work collectively with everyone” can be critiqued from a perspective that values decentralization, autonomy, and resistance to homogenizing forces that may suppress diversity and innovation.
Drawing from the theories of Karl Polanyi, Michel Foucault, and James Burnham, one can argue that the push for collective action and uniform support of public schools overlooks the potential for bureaucratic domination and the stifling of individual and community autonomy. Polanyi’s critique of market fundamentalism and its encroachment on social institutions highlights the danger of overarching systems that prioritize uniformity over diversity. From this viewpoint, collective action in support of a monolithic public education system risks entrenching economic and political interests that may not align with the needs and values of all communities.
Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and governance through governmentality underscores the complexities of managing social institutions like public schools. Foucault would likely caution against the assumption that centralized, collective efforts inherently benefit all stakeholders. Instead, he might argue that such efforts can become mechanisms of control that dilute genuine democratic engagement and individual agency by standardizing education, thereby marginalizing alternative educational philosophies and practices.
James Burnham’s concept of managerialism provides a framework to understand how calls for collective action might inadvertently strengthen the power of a managerial elite. This elite, through the guise of seeking uniformity and efficiency, could exploit the education system to perpetuate its authority, diminishing the role of local communities and educators in shaping educational policies and practices.
Therefore, a push for fracturing institutions and preserving autonomy is not necessarily a call for chaos or disarray but a recognition of the importance of diversity, localized control, and the ability to adapt to changing realities outside of centralized, potentially captured institutions. This perspective values the empowerment of individual schools, educators, and communities to innovate and address the unique needs of their students, free from the constraints of a one-size-fits-all approach that may serve to divide, discredit, and rule under the guise of collective action.
Such a critique does not negate the importance of public education or the need for support and resources but calls for a reimagining of how these goals can be achieved. It suggests that the best hope for a vibrant, responsive education system lies in fostering a plurality of approaches, decentralizing authority, and ensuring that educational institutions remain closely connected to the communities they serve.
Thank you for such a deep analysis of public schools. In trying to understand I think what we have now is bureaucratic/corporate domination which we see by the loss of funding at the local school district resorting in the reliance on partnerships. This certainly results in Chaos but I disagree that it is beneficial. It intentionally removes the democratic connection to parents, teachers, and community, as they now have limited control of their local schools. While rigid accountability has focused on underfunded public schools and a reduction of teaching qualifications, and the transition of support to faux teaching groups like Teach for America, it leads to a lesser organized system. Some children, those with richer, well-resourced schools will get decent schooling. The middle class and poor will get a mix of good and lousy schools.
Our public school system ran well for many years, albeit certainly with room for much improvement, especially schools in poor neighborhoods. Some school districts made improvements by working to integrate schools after Brown v. Bd of Ed. But others were driven out and turned on public ed. A Nation at Risk, a fake fear mongering report, also put the nail in the coffin. There’s money to be made on schools and the push as I see it now is for tech to replace teachers and schools. I fear this will have devastating results in the long term. I think we already see the results of the breakdown of public ed.