Passing blame to preceding instructors is commonplace throughout education. The hierarchy of allegations flows from university to secondary school and down through the grades. Outside of education, many business and political leaders label our whole enterprise as a failure and plot privatization. In both instances I find the discourse tired and uninformed.
All of public education in the United States, but particularly K-12, is an accurate expression of our people and their representatives. Education is our largest institution and the one most democratically governed. Authority comes up from the people to their local and state boards of education, as well as ultimately to state legislatures. On one level, the schools are a creation of government, so I am struck by the irony of politicians who damn the same public schools they have established. As an educator, it is clear to me that state government is the single most important source of authority over schools. The right to function is given or taken away by the state. The rules of operation are state authored. The federal government provides approximately 10 percent of the funding for K-12 education in the U.S. and its influence is commensurate. Local school boards have tremendous specific and day-to-day control and they are among the most responsive of groups to the body politic.
When individual citizens criticize the schools, it is usually in the context of "the schools my children go to are fine, but other schools are very poor." This is parallel to their evaluation of congressmen: my representative is fine, but Congress is poor. This does not occur accidentally. Influential, successful citizens normally locate themselves in school districts where they are pleased to send their children. Belittling the schools of the "other Americans" is a way of criticizing those segments of society, their institutions, and their communities, as well as fulfilling some human need to criticize and scapegoat someone not too close to home.
America's less successful schools are representative of their communities in the same way that elite schools are a synopsis of theirs. Poverty, transience, and limited English skills are economic, social, and educational handicaps in the endeavors of adults or children. For better or worse, the schools accurately mirror their communities. John Dewey called them a microcosm of society. Like it or not, we are all ultimately part of one nation and one society. There is no real advantage in pitting one school against another or turning the legislature against its creation, the public schools. We are past the point where we should end empty one-upsmanship and collectively address our societal problems.
The public schools in toto are ours as a society and, similarly, for those of us at the university, K-12 is our creation. We have educated every professional person in the institution and provided their advanced training. This is especially true for Fresno State as this area's dominant university in the preparation of school personnel. The failures and achievements of our local schools are ours as well. If basic skills have not been inculcated, it is our graduates who were the teachers of record and we were their professors of record. Assigning blame is valueless. What can we do to move ahead?
On August 26 a number of Fresno State academics testified downtown before state officials on the new Science and History Standards. University people need to speak out, lobby and insist that society and its leadership provide the conditions necessary for schools to succeed. Class size reduction is one example of such a reform. Better salaries for teachers, particularly beginning teachers, is another. Acknowledgment of the interaction among social maladies such as unemployment, poor health care, sub-par housing, crime, inadequate nutrition, and parental abuse with success at school needs to be truly recognized. Insisting that the schools can succeed in settings where nothing is healthy or redeeming is a cruel fantasy.
We at the university should also give leadership in discussions of the meaning and purpose of education. Education first and foremost should be aimed at bringing forth realized individuals who are also contributing citizens. Education begins with spiritual understanding and proceeds to social awareness. We need to reassert to the public what liberal and general education truly are and how they go beyond what standardized tests measure. In the rush for accountability, it is up to us to insist that the easily measured should not continue to assume priority in schools on the narrow grounds of scoring convenience.
On campus we have a current pressing need to work together in committee to advance the curricula that teachers study here at Fresno State. One role is to design courses that hone in on the content knowledge needed in teaching so that our time with future teachers is used to best advantage. There is great value in connections among faculty from all disciplines who instruct current and future educators. Those contacts can occur in colloquia, joint visits to schools, supervision of student teachers, guest lecturing in classes, teaching in the Joint Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership, and so on.
Finally, we can all help our public schools by speaking well of the profession of teaching, showing empathy for the selfless work so many teachers and principals perform, and thanking those who teach or plan to teach for their motivation to serve others and their contribution to the well-being of us all.
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