Legitimate concerns about our public schools

Betsy DeVos is remarkably unqualified to serve as secretary of education, even compared to her ill-equipped predecessors in that office. Her campaign on behalf of vouchers and school choice, while spotlighting the benefits such alternatives can offer some students, ignores the disadvantages and impracticalities inherent in privatizing public education.

Among the former is the further dissolution of American communities, which commonly coalesce around their local schools. Among the latter is the reality that providing alternative schools that serve some won’t remedy the problems troubling the schools that, owing to practical and financial realities, actually serve the many.

Ms. DeVos’ inexperience and lack of expertise don’t invalidate choice advocates’ criticisms of public education. The solutions critics offer may be irrelevant and inadequate, but the problems that plague our schools are real and do need solving.

When it comes to the troubles that roil public education, the society that governs and populates those schools with its children bears considerable responsibility. Self-indulgence, complacency, neglect, and narcissism are contagious and crippling. However, public schools themselves must answer as well for the current state of public education.

It’s been decades since parents, colleges, and employers began complaining about the decline in student achievement. That decline has coincided with a disdain for teaching content, knowledge, and facts. Instead reformers have championed “critical thinking.” Unfortunately, you can’t think without something to think about.

Knowledge isn’t something you scavenge from the Internet a piece at a time when you need it. Knowledge is something you carry around with you. Too many students carry too little.

Over those same decades during which academ-ic knowledge and skill have fallen from fashion, experts also have drafted schools to assume responsibilities that once belonged to other social agencies and home. This has bred resentment among many parents who take their responsibilities seriously and find schools’ expansion into tradition-ally parental provinces a usurpation of their paren-tal duties and rights. It also increasingly has encouraged and enabled parents to abandon those responsibilities, which has prompted schools to assume additional nonacademic responsibilities and further compromised academic learning by crowding it out.

At the same time that classrooms have become less focused on academics, they’ve also become more disrupted and even violent. Time is lost. Focus is lost. Learning is lost. Parents rightly are concerned about the threat to classroom order and their children’s safety. Sadly, the crusade against what reformers brand “school-to-prison pipeline” discipline, the inclusion of profoundly disturbed children in regular classrooms, and a return to the permissiveness that characterized schools in the 1970s have rendered too many classrooms hostile learning environments where behavior expectations are set by the most disruptive child in the room. This is just one of the lessons of the 1970s that schools have chosen to ignore.

In 1983, A Nation at Risk blamed “extensive student choice” in coursework, “diluted, diffused” curricula, reduced homework expectations, burgeoning nonacademic demands, and lax discipline for the nation’s resulting educational “mediocrity.” Yet, today, student choice reigns, homework is discouraged if not prohibited, “social-emotional education” claims an everlarger portion of the school day, and teachers who maintain disciplinary standards are condemned as “punitive.”

Poor Elijah and his superintendent remember the 1970s. From time to time Poor Elijah complains that his district is recycling the bankrupt follies of the past. “Yup,” the superintendent agrees. And yet he does nothing as ardent reformers, fresh from education school, lobby to impose that past all over again.

In a bitter irony, schools and school officials never learn.

Along with their demands for a renewed focus on academics and safe, orderly classrooms, parents often complain that their children’s school seems unresponsive. This sense of disaffection often lies in the move to consolidate schools and districts. Proponents promise “equity” and lower budgets, neither of which their consolidation blueprints deliver. Parents commonly feel alienated from their children’s school because control of their school resides farther away in anonymous offices. For what it’s worth, principals and teachers often feel the same way.

Parents have also been gulled by promises of individual attention that schools can’t actually deliver. These assurances sometimes have been well-intentioned, but in many cases they’ve been crafted to elicit parental support. Despite ballyhooed mechanisms such as “personal learning plans” for every student, there’s a limit in a classroom with 20 students as to how personalized and “individualized” any student’s program can be. Parents nonetheless understandably expect to hold schools accountable for these assurances. The difficulty is I’m a public school classroom teacher, not a private tutor. That makes a difference, especially when you’re the guy who’s expected to keep someone else’s impossible promise.

Parents in the past have been just as loving and just as concerned about their children’s future, and consequently about their education, as parents are today. Apart from religious schools and select prep schools, there was a little demand then for alternatives to public education and minimal demand for publicly-funded school choice.

The problems at school aren’t all at school. Many reside at home. But until and unless schools address their particular failings, until schools acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong and continue to go wrong, parents’ demands for alternatives to public education will persist and grow.

I don’t believe that choice and alternatives to public schools can solve our nation’s education problems.

But I also don’t believe that schools can afford to ignore why parents increasingly want to choose something else.