It's The Racism, Stupid

The race to the bottom is on. 

 On Monday, Republican state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita called teachers “educational terrorists.”

Jeez.

I attended a Catholic grammar school where the nuns were merciless and physically punitive, but even those of us with visible welts never called the good sisters “terrorists.”

Then, last week, GOP gubernatorial candidate Matt Salmon called the teachers union “a scourge on our society.”

He also sent a press release announcing his response to a questionnaire from the Arizona Education Association, saying, “I hope that this statement answers the final item in your questionnaire asking what kind of ‘relationship’ I anticipate having with the AEA as Arizona’s next governor: A confrontational one.”

We're the bottom of the barrel, as in 50th

Confrontational?

A scourge on our society?

So, teachers are the problem?

Has Salmon not been paying attention to what the Arizona Legislature and lawmakers like Ugenti-Rita have done to the state’s public school system over the past several years?

As in, wreck it.

So much so that a recent national survey found that Arizona had the worst public education system in the nation.

Bottom of the barrel.

50th.

Why would conservatives want to wreck the public school system?  It's supposed to be the hallmark of American democracy, the "little red school house" that made America the egalitarian democracy it is, the place where rich and poor get a good education and learn to be good citizens and leaders of this nation, from city hall to the Congress and the White House.  That's supposed to be one of our proudest democratic achievements.

Except the "little red schoolhouse" never had any black kids in it.  Not in the pictures, not in nostalgia, not in reality.  This assault, full out and total, on public schools, is about Brown v. Board.  It's about destroying the public schools so the only people left there are poor, marginalized, and black, brown, or "white trash" (which means "white n-----", so, "white" in skin, only.).  It's about ending the public school system, essentially if not effectively, because it is "polluted" by the wrong people being there:  as students, as teachers, as administrators, as human beings.

I know, I know, sounds grim and implacable and excessive; the very definition of "over the top."  Or it did to me, when "white flight" started and Jerry Falwell made it both a national and impossible to not see thing; and "school vouchers" came along to get kids (white kids, implicitly) out of public schools and into private ones, on the public's money.  But why should I pay property taxes to a "failing school"?  And why is it failing?  Well, because of the "wrong" students being there.  Those students don't get into private schools.

No, they don't.  When we moved to town, we were advised the school nearest the parsonage wasn't really a good place for our daughter, who was starting first grade at the time.  We took that as wise advice (now we know better), and managed to get her into a private school, one in need of enrollment and with hefty scholarships to help us.  It was an excellent school, in many ways.  I have my complaints about private school pedagogy, but that's a rant for another day.  It was also a lily-white school, something that came home to me when the school, in one of my daughter's last years there (it had no high school), started forming committees to help it respond to an evaluation being conducted.  The school having given us so much (mostly financially, but in other ways, too), I volunteered for one committee.  It was, if I recall now, about diversity in the school.

We met a few times, we did  next to nothing.  The school did, however, admit a young black girl.  First one ever; not because the school was racist or was trying to block such admissions.  I think mostly it was the location (in a lily-white part of Houston; there are such places, mostly segregated by extreme wealth and property values that go along with it), and the cost of the school.  Still, they admitted one; just in time for the evaluating agency to note their efforts.  The school won the award it was going for, got a big plaque to hang on the walls of the building that could be seen from the street, and the committees dissolved, having served no purpose but the purpose of window dressing.

It was all about tokenism, in other words; and the agency giving the award played along (it was a DOE agency, again IIRC).  Appearances were everything.  Yes, the educational standards were high.  But having been a student myself for over 26 years through four programs beyond the baccalaureate, I've gained some experience with pedgagogical technique.  That school had none, except sink or swim.  It didni't actively try to drive students from the school; but it didn't actively try to keep them, either.  Parents were expected (and most could afford) to hire private tutors, to enroll their children in after-school programs, effectively making the students education slaves toiling in the mines of pedagogy to unearth the nuggets of information themselves.  The philosophy was "You either get it, or you don't."  It's a fine way to make widgets; but children are not widgets.

Those schools are not for everyone.  Public schools are; and should be.  Private schools will not take children with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, special needs.  Oh, they won't explicitly refuse them; but they will keep their enrollment closed and put such students on lists from which they will never be removed.  Other private schools will take such children, but without the oversight given public schools, will not treat them as they should be treated.  Texas had experience with this, in one form.  Several decades ago Texas went whole hog for "charter" schools, giving public money to private schools, with little or no oversight, because "administration" is the great evil of education, you know.  Turned out those "schools" (there weren't many of them) took the money and ran.  The "food services" at one was literally a vending machine.  Textbooks were almost non-existent (this was a replacement public school, not a college).  Desks were also few, and rickety.  Teachers?  They didn't get paid, they didn't stay long.  The whole thing was a scandal and a disaster still remembered.  "Charter schools" now are more tightly run, more critically examined, more carefully allowed.  But there are hardly enough of them to take over the burden of the public schools.

Besides, the real dirty little secret is no state will give families enough money to afford good private schools. And if the state doesn’t oversee the schools, they will be worse than the public schools are now. And if the state does regulate them, how will they be different from the public schools now? Not to mention all the federal funds that will only go to public schools, anyway.

Nobody ever said these clowns were smart.

So the push/pull goes on.  The push to punish public schools almost (but never quite!) out of existence, the pull to establish competing forms of education that allow the "right" people to abandon public schools altogether.  It can't quite be done; the fight can't quite be abandoned.  Our best hope as a society is public education, open and guaranteed to all, provided with all the resources our wealthy country can muster.

But we don't do it that way.  Not even in our public school systems.  Still, without those systems, what democracy can we hope to have?  Which is to say, without addressing directly our hidden wound, the scourge of racism in America and American history, what democracy can we hope to have?