In Defense of Public Education
Kohl, Herbert
Over the past twelve years public education has come under an attack that is unique in our national history. For two hundred years there have been many criticisms of public schools, ranging from...
...Title IV programs, and other programs that tie money to student failure, have no mechanism for dealing with success...
...Evaluate them, for sure, but on criteria that parents and teachers agree upon, not those mandated by a central authority that might be irrelevant to their practice and goals...
...Once an EH program is rooted in a school, staffed by certified EH teachers, funded by EH laws, using ordinary educational materials specially labeled as appropriate for EH children, the children have to be found...
...As Linda Draling-Hammond, professor of education at Teacher's College, Columbia University, has said,* . . . those who are proposing private school choice are frequently the same people who have been opposing equal funding to schools for the past 20 years...
...The real equity issue is that there are radically unequal allocations of funds to schools...
...Yet degrees in the education of the handicapped are no more than artifices dependent upon suspect stigmatization of children...
...The primary victims of this syndrome are middle-class children who can perform academically but refuse to when they are not challenged...
...Its goal, perhaps unrealizable, is to overcome poverty, eradicate inequity, and at the same time hold everyone up to a high standard of intelligence, sensitivity, and excellence...
...is defensible, but the current state of the public schools is not...
...However, it is very difficult to mobilize such support...
...The inability of regular classrooms to educate all children (and in particular minority, working-class and poor children) has led to the construction of a profession that depends upon the existence of children who are pushed out of "normal" classrooms and made pathological...
...That same year I was involved in a teachers strike that closed the system down...
...The corporations want to train a small elite of middle-level workers...
...This is really a problem when you are part of a system that has produced so much failure...
...There is no mechanism for the elimination of EH programs if they happen to be successful...
...q 232 • DISSENT...
...Nor is a child who has any of the above characteristics...
...Parallel to these efforts is a nationwide thrust for vouchers, which represent, finally, a redistribution of public education funding into the private sector...
...12472...
...I have not been able to find a clear and unambiguous definition of what is meant by "at-risk behavior...
...Stigmatizing students because of teachers' inability to educate is a common strategy in the public schools and is perhaps one of the central causes of community resentment...
...some of them are drugged with Ritalin...
...I sensed some distress as he composed an answer...
...The resources of teachers' unions and other organizations should be used to reach out to a wider public with visions of public schools that work...
...Here are some of the labels they come up with: disadvantaged, culturally deprived, underachiever, non achiever, low ability, slow learner, less able, low socioeconomic status, language-impaired, dropoutprone, alienated, marginal, disenfranchised, impoverished, underprivileged, low-performing and remedial...
...Run people for the school board, and make it known to school bureaucrats, from the superintendent down, that they are accountable for their performance and that blaming your children for their failure is simply not acceptable if they are to receive public funds...
...His remarks hold true for ADD as well...
...An argument can be SPRING • 1993 • 229 Public Education made that ADD is one way that public school authorities are suppressing the spirit of democracy...
...All of this represents an abandonment of a 226 • DISSENT Public Education common commitment to all the children in our society...
...At that point some of the college students called and asked me to return to southern California to help plan the next step, which was to expand their program up to the fifth and sixth, and down to the first and second grades...
...I wondered aloud if these young people would become fully employed and have decent salaries and challenging work...
...And when school failure reaches massive proportions, the climate is created for going beyond individual systems of pathology to the development of categories of social stigmatization that turn societal prejudices into pseudoscientific systems of behavior control...
...Through freedom schools, boycotts, and at times union activities, voices advocating decency and equity in education have constantly insisted upon public education as a necessary component of a hopeful and democratic society...
...and George Wood's Schools that Work: America's Most Innovative 228 • DISSENT Public Education Public Education Programs (Dutton, 1992) show how public education can succeed...
...2. All categories of educational stigma must be re-examined and eliminated...
...Right now, these organizations are too insular and do not relate to the communities they are supposed to serve or speak in ordinary language to parents and concerned citizens about quality public schooling...
...In every case I have been in what can only be described as the belly of the beast...
...What are such children at risk of doing...
...Chris Whittle's avowed intent to build a thousand private schools to compete with the public sector, the corporate leasing of several Baltimore public schools to a Minneapolis corporation, and such diverse programs as Bush's Education 2000 program and the corporate-funded New American Schools Development Corporation created to administer it, and the contractual arrangement between the Chelsea, Mass., public schools and Boston University —all threaten publicly controlled free education...
...Parents would be given vouchers covering the cost of their children's education that could be redeemed at any school in the district that they chose...
...There has been a massive failure of public schools to educate poor children and children of color...
...One of the district administrators even told a public meeting that the district had to increase the number of its Title IV qualified students in order to maintain its programs...
...It is probably true that all of these efforts have reached no more than 10 percent of the public schools, most of which have yielded to bureaucratic subversion, fatigue, conservative attack, and administrative and collegial hostility...
...There are a number of specific things we can do in defense of public schools...
...These publications speak about teachers' experiences in the classroom, but also about larger educational issues, and explicitly advocate equity, cultural diversity, democracy, and creativity...
...The National Catholic Educational Association, for example, just commissioned a Gallup poll on school choice, and the results, released in September 1992, indicated 70 percent support for a publicly funded voucher system so that parents could send their children to public, private, or parochial schools of their choice...
...In California, from 1968 to 1971 I was a teacher and principal of a public alternative school that functioned under a contract with the district...
...The category of "at risk," though applied to individual children, is actually a form of social stigmatization that is at times difficult to distinguish from racism...
...Most of them have problems reading, writing, or doing math, but there are a substantial number of children designated EH simply because they do not like to sit still or stay quiet when they work or because their teachers feel uncomfortable with them...
...In 1966 I worked for the IS 210 planning board and crossed union picket lines in support of community control of schools that I saw as racist and failing the children they were created to serve...
...A child who is merely doing poorly in school is not necessarily "at risk...
...Box 405, Rosedale, N.Y...
...The experiment fell apart in less than three years for the following reasons: • the few decent schools were immediately oversubscribed and the communities they served didn't want to give up any places to outsiders, • the worst schools stayed just as they were and became residue schools, where students who couldn't get into the schools of their choice were assigned, • no training materials were provided, nor were physically depressing sites rebuilt, • the teachers, community groups, and parents who wanted to create innovative schools were denied access to funds or facilities, and • a combination of teacher organizations and administrators made sure that no person or school, no matter how dismal, was evaluated or forced to change or declare itself out of business...
...Corporate education partnerships also pretend to encourage critical thinking...
...Scrutinize school budgets—and rewrite them from the bottom up—from the perspective of services provided directly to students and the community, not from the perspective of . supporting a central Board of Education and the services it mandates...
...Almost all of the children in the classes were designated Title IV children—that is, they were poor, predominantly minority students who were functioning below grade level and therefore qualified for extra federal funding under Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1964...
...Allow teachers, parents, and other groups of educators to create small schools within the context of large public school systems and give them freedom and resources...
...Thinking as a teacher means refusing to accept a marginalized life for any child...
...Many other public school educators have been involved in the development of alternative schools, open schools, schools-within-schools, community-based learning, and the creation of new schools with distinct, democratically oriented structures and curricula...
...Create progressive, multiracial, and cross-class coalitions with other parent groups, caring teachers, and principals to change schools...
...The district's Title IV budget was cut, and there was no more financial support for the program...
...Vouchers would provide only a small part of private and parochial school tuition and would draw money away from underfunded public schools...
...From No More Teachers Dirty Looks, This Magazine is About Schools, Teacher Paper, and Through the Net in the late 1960s and early 1970s to Rethinking Schools, Democracy and Education, Our Schools/Our Selves, and Changing Schools today, teachers have created journals for each other and for the communities they serve...
...To identify children as "at risk" is to pick them out for special treatment not for what they have done but for what they might do...
...Stigmatizing children as a cover for educational incompetence is not limited to the children of the poor...
...Education and economics were not in sync, and the ability of students to benefit from educational reform was dependent upon conditions that had nothing to do with what happened in schools...
...For example, Chris Sajac, the teacher in Tracy Kidder's book Among Schoolchildren, is given pats on the back for feeling bad about referring one of her students to special education since she knows that it is equivalent to an educational death sentence...
...But along with the increase in membership went abandonment of teaching issues as union issues...
...One by one, and then in small groups, the students began to perform on grade level until a critical mass of about two-thirds of the students involved were on or above grade level...
...The current rhetoric pushing schools to prepare students for the work world is a sham...
...This was dramatically illustrated to me last year when I was asked to make a presentation at a meeting of business people and educators who were restructuring schools in a large southern city...
...Taken together, these assaults on public education stand to divide our children into those chosen for a superior education and those left to fend for themselves in schools that would make the ones described by Jonathan Kozol in Savage Inequalities seem like havens of decency and light...
...All of these attempts to remake public education, whether from the left or right, from the unions or the corporate sector, with the major exception of many Marxist critics, had a common premise: that public education as an enterprise was one of the centerpieces of democracy and as such was indispensable...
...I began teaching fifth grade in the New York City public schools in 1961...
...Consider the case of the so-called "educationally handicapped" (EH...
...4. Go on the offensive and let parents know that the corporate agenda for their children is cynical and undemocratic...
...This is also reinforced by the media...
...They eliminate community participation, are union busting, and have no obligation to serve all of the children equally...
...Corporations cannot possibly employ hundreds of thousands of well-qualified technical and professional workers who command high salaries and still squeeze out the profits their stockholders demand...
...The category was invented as an extension of the idea that educators do not need to examine their practice and change it when it fails...
...Practicing teachers have led in the development of feminist, antiracist, and multicultural curricula, as well as in the development of creative approaches to reading, mathematics, and other subjects...
...The authors then go on to list characteristics that can be used to identify students as at risk (not all of which need be present, they tell us, in order to identify a student as at risk): academic difficulties, lack of structure (disorganized), inattentiveness, distractibility, short attention span, low self-esteem, health problems, excessive absenteeism, dependence, discipline problem, narrow range of interest, lack of social skills, inability to face pressure, fear of failure (feels threatened by learning), and lack of motivation...
...Once designated EH, children are removed from the classroom for the whole or part of the day...
...Some of the symptoms of ADD are fidgeting, getting out of one's seat without permission, and doodling instead of doing boring assignments...
...Less than one academic year later the school had reconstituted enough failure to get its full Title IV funding again...
...Educators have to become self-critical and straighten out their own schools before any convincing defense of public schools can be made...
...But that is no longer the case...
...Progressive movements, beginning as early as the 1830s and gaining great influence over the public schools in the first years of the twentieth century and during the Great Depression of the 1930s, called for schools to take leadership in remaking society in an egalitarian and sometimes a socialist mode...
...Words will simply not be enough...
...There is no proof that there is anything wrong with the mental functioning of EH children...
...Corporate schools such as Whittle's and the Education 2000 schools, which would control admissions, standards, and hiring, would signify a direct assault on teachers unions and be free to neglect the children with the greatest educational needs...
...The district, which served many children of color and was experiencing major failure, was to be a model of school choice...
...This voucher movement, well financed and supported by conservative think tanks and previously by the Bush administration, draws upon all segments of the population—from home schoolers, poor people whose children are being badly served by existing public schools, scared middle-class parents who feel their children are not being given competitive skills in the public schools, as well as private and parochial schools that advocate government funding of their work...
...Painfully, he admitted that finding jobs for all well-qualified people was simply was not his or his corporation's responsibility...
...Interestingly enough, these conditions are positive qualifications for future participatory citizenship...
...Thus the EH child is surrounded by an entire social system entailing laws, regulations, funding, college classes, degrees, and certification...
...Over the past thirty years I've been working in public education—sometimes within school systems, sometimes on the margins, and even at times in opposition to those systems...
...The strike was won, union dues checkoff was approved, and the membership of the United Federation of Teachers went from 5,000 to about 35,000 in a day...
...After a year of hard work the program began to bear fruit...
...Finally, in defense of public education, we need to reaffirm that we care about other people's children, about all of the children born in our society...
...Instead, the strategy is to spread stigma throughout the student population and blame the victims of pedagogical incompetence...
...There are two national groups that provide support and information for coalitions committed to progressive school change...
...One is the National Coalition of Education Activists (P.O...
...The central point, however, is that there has been and is, within public education, a continuing force for improvement of free education, equity, and empowerment for all children...
...In fact, once the idea is established that school failure is always the fault of the child and that one can get away with blaming the victims of failed practice, the way is open for the constant creation of new categories of pathological behavior as well as for a proliferation of new professions...
...The teachers are EH specialists, which means that they have taken special classes in the education of the EH child and have certificates or even master's degrees in the field...
...I was amazed at the convergence of our views and asked him what would happen if, through restructuring, most of the students developed technological and critical thinking skills...
...Public schools must open themselves up to SPRING • 1993 • 231 Public Education the uncomfortable fact that many children have been failed by their efforts, and new blood and new life must enter the process if public education is not to be undone by private choice...
...And the school district administration was angry at the students and the college for messing up its supplemental funding...
...Business as usual was restored to the district—meaning failure without accountability...
...We hit it off immediately and shared personal experiences, stories about our children's struggles in their schooling, and ideas for new schools that would provide young people with creative and critical skills...
...Students designated as ADD often refuse to listen quietly and without response when a teacher or another person in authority is talking, resist following instructions blindly, and refuse to do boring worksheets and other assignments if they already know the material...
...In the early 1970s I was asked to help a group of Chicano college students in southern California set up a reading and writing program in a local public school...
...Nevertheless there is much good public educational practice, and books such as Embracing Diversity, edited by Laurie Olsen (California Tomorrow), The Good Common School: Making the Vision Work for All Children (National Coalition of Advocates for Students, Boston, Mass...
...In plain language, at-risk children are at risk of turning the poverty and racism they experience against the society rather than learning how to conform and take their proper place...
...The strike was as much for working conditions as for salary increases, and my local, at least, considered that negotiating over conditions of teaching, supplies, control over curriculum, and self-accountability was as important as salary increases...
...Funding programs based on the continued existence of students who fail is another...
...For two hundred years there have been many criticisms of public schools, ranging from fundamentalist "back-tobasics" movements to the calls for updating and remaking the curriculum after Sputnik so that we could "keep up with the Russians...
...3. Advocate genuine educational choice within the public schools...
...My involvement has been centered on the attempt to create contexts for learning that provide the hope, skills, and knowledge necessary for all children to live decent and rewarding lives...
...Since the Reagan era, public schools have been increasingly treated as both a public financial burden and a potentially large market for private profit...
...Good teaching and effective learning are based on the belief that every child, as a right, should be provided with the fullest opportunity to develop intellectually, socially, and emotionally...
...It turned out that because the program had succeeded in getting a number of third and fourth graders up to grade level, those students no longer qualified for Title IV money...
...The other is the National Coalition of Advocates for Students (100 Boylston St., Suite 737, Boston, MA 02116-4610), which has twenty-two member organizations...
...Teaching well involves patience, the refusal to accept failure, and the ability to maximize children's strengths...
...Recently a new category of stigma has been constructed: Attention Deficit Disorder...
...In fact, the whole book proceeds on the assumption that, definition or not, the category is useful...
...The teacher must believe that each child has an unknown but great potential, and that none of life's options is to be excluded through tracking or other forms of educational stigma...
...but it is time to admit failure in public education and do something about it...
...Nor is there a mechanism for the elimination of dysfunctional professions...
...The reason may be that quality schools may embarrass schools that are failing...
...Then they go on to give a list of possible labels without bothering to question whether accepting the concept without a definition is intellectually responsible...
...Programs that depend upon financial support predicated on the existence of failure or pathology have to maintain the condition they are designed to eliminate in order to survive...
...5. Parents should become more knowledgeable about public education...
...Private school choice . . . is a smokescreen to avoid tackling this real equity issue...
...Those who could afford private schools in the first place would be subsidized while the poor would find their children in what would become residue schools for disposable children...
...The authors admit at the very beginning that a "review of the literature does not indicate a published definition of the 230 • DISSENT Public Education at-risk, low-achieving student...
...In the late forties and early fifties a wave of patriotism led to calls for introducing "Americanism" into the public-school curriculum...
...According to Coles, EH is not a condition of brain pathology...
...The progressives in turn, were criticized by many Marxist educators who felt that public schools necessarily reproduced class relations in capitalist society and were therefore dubious candidates for its transformation...
...Yes, some of the youngsters would get good jobs, but even his corporation, which was committed to the development of the community, had a limited number of new jobs and was reducing staff...
...Our students received Berkeley High School diplomas...
...Teachers, principals, and administrators, as well as their unions, will have to take major risks and speak directly to the public and the media about the value and potential quality of public education...
...The arrangement was irregular, but was created with the cooperation of the school board because it was SPRING • 1993 • 227 Public Education publicly acknowledged that the high school was not serving all of its students...
...This tradition of struggle within public education represents a commitment to the widest possible access to learning...
...Educators must articulate what they consider to be good practice and show how they can be effective with all children...
...So what makes a child at risk, what is the hidden agenda of the people who have manufactured the at risk category...
...Public school choice in Alum Rock, and in many other districts I have observed over the years, became, for the majority of underserved people, no choice at all...
...If not, the voucher option, the private or parochial school, or corporate learning center is bound to be more attractive than public schools of stigma...
...A few days before my visit I received another call telling me that the program had been destroyed...
...Yet to defend public education in a way that is convincing to the public is not easy, given the obvious failure of so many of the public schools...
...EH children are identified by teachers as needing special treatment...
...Money and benefits were the obsession of the leadership, which had become, and remains, more politically conservative and concerned almost exclusively with its maintenance of power rather than the quality and nature of the work performed by teachers...
...Here are five of them: 1. Public schools or programs that work must be identified and made visible...
...But in the current anti-union and anti-worker climate, putting education in the hands of the corporations is a form of workercide...
...they take no responsibility for the rest of the people...
...This implied that all children deserved excellent education and should have opportunities to become whatever they dreamed of being...
...most of them are subjected to simplified versions of the learning material that they had already failed to master in their original classrooms...
...Voices in support of free and excellent public education for all the children in our society must be mobilized if we are to remain a democratic society...
...The first experiment with choice and vouchers within a public school system that I heard about took place in the Alum Rock School District in San Jose, California in the early 1970s...
...Instead of adjusting the classroom to fit these children's styles of learning or changing the curriculum, schools invest the children with pathology and treat them as deficient...
...The school district had agreed to enter into a partnership with the college, and several third- and fourth-grade classes were chosen for the experiment...
...Work to make what happens in your children's school transparent so that stigma is exposed, incompetence revealed, and excellence discovered...
...It is easy to create bogus choice systems in public schools...
...Most public schools are boring lifeless places that serve a few students well, push most through, and get rid of challenging students who become identified as "problems...
...My presentation was preceded by a luncheon, and I was seated with the CEO of a sponsoring corporation...
...This implies that time must be taken to know each child, programs must be adapted to each child's style of learning...
...And it means embracing all children, in their wonderful diversity, and teaching from their strengths nurtured by our knowledge and resources...
...In the sixties public schools were to be the vehicles of racial integration, and during the seventies there was a movement to have them become models of gender equity as well...
...Public education * In False Choices, a special issue of the journal Rethinking Schools devoted to the issue of vouchers and school choice (available at $3 per copy from Rethinking Schools, 1001 East Keefe Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53212...
...The closest I've come appears in a book published in the National Education Association's Professional Library Series, At-Risk, Low-Achieving Students in the Classroom, by Judy Brown Lehr and Hazel Wiggins Harris...
...Each will send free information...
...The classes they are sent to are smaller than regular classes and funded through laws and regulations providing for special education...
...Fight the stigmatization of children—refuse it as a substitute for adequate funding, caring teachers, and good pedagogy...
...There is no common underlying pathology...
...One strong way for educators to defend public education is to repudiate all categories like this and assume responsibility for changing their practice until it works for children they have previously been unable to serve...
...However, the substance of what is taught in classes on the education of the EH child is not much different from what is taught in ordinary teacher education classes...
...I hope that people will begin to speak more intelligently and courageously about ideas like freedom and democracy, reaffirming the essential role of public education...
...If educators can't hold each other accountable for the quality of their work, there will be no work for them to do...
...Not surprisingly, the existence of the EH subsystem has not led to a wide-scale increase in the levels of performance of EH children...
...In addition, public school teachers have developed curricula on their own...
...Public schools that work must become visible, and those that fail must be scrutinized and changed...
...Gerald Coles, a neurologist, establishes in his well-documented book on the EH phenomena, The Learning Mystique, that there is no physiological or medical condition that EH children share...
...The theme of the meeting was "Education and Vocation for the 21st Century...
...No theoretical defense of public education in the name of democracy will be convincing unless a defense can also be made of public schools...
...Corporate arrangements such as those in Chelsea and Baltimore are no less cynical...
...In addition, there was no guarantee that the company, which was part of a multinational corporation, would remain in the state...
...The unequal allocations routinely disadvantage schools in central cities and in poor rural areas...
...We are, unfortunately, now at that point...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
