(This essay has been partly inspired by my recent reading of Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All and Steven Brill’s Tailspin. Both books should be on every educator’s #MustRead list. It appeared originally as my “From the Executive Director” message in the Independent Curriculum Group’s March 2018 newsletter and has been slightly modified for this venue.)
I have been encountering too many things in books and in the news that worry me about the fate of our planet. Rising inequalities, in particular, have become a constant gut-punch. To begin with, I must own my privilege, the goodie bag of cultural capital I tote around as a white, aging, cis male and as a beneficiary of a “meritocracy” built on educational attainment in a system one of whose chief gatekeepers has been standardized testing.
The winners in this “meritocracy” have been nurturing and rewarding their own now for several generations, and the numbers tell us that my cohort and our children—if not each of us personally—are holding an increasingly disproportionate share of the world’s wealth. Authors like Anand Giridharadas and Steven Brill and political figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are asking insistent questions about this, and I have been wondering how our system of education might hold itself accountable for its role in creating and sustaining inequity. Even more, musing on the ideals and aspirations embodied in so many of our schools’ mission statements and the caring values of the educators I know, I have been trying to figure out how the education sector might become a powerful voice in the work of making things better.
I have spent my life in and around independent schools, places of privilege and affluence, and I have a sense of those who believe in and attend such places. Those with access to these schools share some fundamental beliefs about the nature of school and education:
- They believe in school as a place where all things that happen will be instrumental goods in the lives of students.
- They believe that the tall and benevolent ladder of education carries upward lives whose material and social prospects are measured by the number of rungs climbed and the quality of the ascent—and who see few if any limits on this number or this quality.
- They look to schools to provide ever-improving ways for learning to occur and ever more creative and instrumentally useful kinds of learning experiences.
- They expect schools to be places of safety where each student is known and cared about.
- They expect schools to be places that draw out and refine the best characteristics of children and young adults.
- They expect schools to create conditions whereby engagement and enjoyment will be a natural part of their cultures and curricula.
- They expect that this engagement and enjoyment, provided in the context of an appropriately high degree of challenge, will lead to the reward of adult lives of meaning and satisfaction.
- They believe and expect that all of these things will come to pass.
These certainly should not shock us. But above all they should not be held solely by those who can afford private schools or who live in communities with public schools tied in to the same meritocracy. Why should not every family in every community have the right to believe and expect the same for every child?
Why is it not our greatest, most urgent national project to create a society whose highest goal is for every citizen confidently to hold these same beliefs and expectations as realistic and true?
Is this just work for educators or sociologists, for psychologists or economists? Is this work to be undertaken on a band-aid level, as remedial redesign in classrooms and districts or as beneficent but faceless initiatives concocted in boardrooms, think tanks, or propaganda mills?
No. This must be the work of the society as a whole and of its political systems on every level from village to suburb to city to state to federal. It must be the work and the commitment of every leader at every level. The bullet points above must be part of a manifesto, an educational bill of rights that inspires and commits government to build a system around these principles:
- All children must live in physically and emotionally healthy communities and be properly nourished and cared for as a precondition for learning.
- Every family must have access to schools that are responsive and committed to the well-being and success of each student, where each student is known, challenged, and supported.
- Access to learning and its fruits cannot be not limited by race, income, family situation, faith, gender, or other external or personal factors.
- The learning needs of each student must be met in full without detriment to what the student may attain.
- Schools and educators must be liberated and encouraged to bring the best of what is known and what might yet be known into every classroom in equal service to every child.
This work is built on hope, hope that may seem wildly idealistic but is fundamental to a just and equitable society. These expectations and beliefs can only be met when every member of society can see clearly, from cradle to grave, a pathway to a life free from debilitating worry and dispiriting stress, a society in which material and physical security are the rightful and realistic expectation of every citizen.
We must begin by shouting from the rooftops the need for change, and then we must create circumstances and places where educators from all sectors might come together and share ideas, resources, questions, and practices so that every community might attain the same level of confident optimism about the purposes and prospects of education, of going to school.
I don’t know how this is going to happen, but it won’t until more of us begin to acknowledge not only education’s role in sustaining the status quo (pun unintentional but apt) but also to imagine and embrace the role that all schools, public and private, might play together as engines and exemplars of authentic and equitable change.
And to bring this back to the place we are, we might even ask whether the Independent Curriculum Group’s Principles of Independent Curriculum, guidelines for equitable, mission-driven teaching and learning, might be a part of this larger manifesto for change.
What do you think?