Public Ed Isn’t Always Public … or
Publicly Influenced
Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 1, 2016
The waning school year might be a
good time to ask who the chief influencers of public education are.
Public education is a complex
endeavor and gets more so each year. How
far we have come from Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and Abe Lincoln on the
other. One wonders if our vastly
increased sophistication has vastly increased learning. Abe did pretty well, you know, despite the
log classroom and studying by fireplace light.
Public schools have become the
instrument by which groups of all stripes try to move their agendas. Got an idea
that advances your ideology? Get it into
the curriculum or persuade schools to celebrate ____?___ Day (fill in the
blank). It would seem that reading,
writing, arithmetic, a survey of history, the sciences, the arts, and computer
competency would be the primary time consumers at school. Even if they are, there are distractions.
Sports, music and other such good,
non-core studies aren’t the distractions.
The distractions – some old, some new – are drug ed, bullying, Earth
Day, sensitivity training, sexual assault prevention, gender identity, diversity
training, fuzzy math, multiculturalism, and incessant testing, to name only a
fraction of them. If your school hasn’t
been touched (or swept) by these non-academic social diversions, hold on
tight. The tide of social transformation
is coming in.
Compare the above list of
non-academic pre-occupations to the following: mathematics, English, history,
geography, literature, foreign languages, technology, biology, physiology,
chemistry, social skills, and character education. Which list sounds more like real education and
less like social engineering? Which does
your child or grandchild need more? Who
are the influencers that push each of the lists?
Strangely, the subject matter
teacher organizations to which many public school classroom teachers belong
don’t always push the right list. I’m
referring to private groups such as the National Council of Teachers of
English, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and National Council for
Social Studies.
There are many others with various
names. My purpose is not to demonize,
but to scrutinize these organizations, and to remind parents that there are
countless influencers like these who shape their child’s education, some of
which hold social views quite opposite to those of parents. Your own local school principal, school board
member, and state school superintendent
are all but a tiny part of the big picture we call public education. There are many influencers and most of them
are not local and are not known.
The
word “council” is misleading. The
National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) is not a council. It is a 40,000 member organization that
writes standards, curricula, reading lists, etc., and lobbies state school
boards and publishers to adopt them.
Sounds ok until you check to see what’s in those offerings.
For 20 years or so I was a member of
NCTE and its local state affiliate. Its
national conventions were beneficial when their sessions focused on the
teaching of English. But like so many
other organizations that lose touch with their rank and file, NCTE became a
politicized, resolution-passing body. It
began passing resolutions on women’s rights, homosexual rights, union rights,
classroom teachers’ rights, student rights, and minority rights. Soon English instruction got buried as
politics was elevated.
This trend of going political, and
progressive at that, has marked most of the other subject matter classroom
teacher groups. Like so many educational
leaders, these organizations like to blame parents when academic achievement
declines: parents are too busy; they don’t spend time with their children and
don’t read to them any more. (I doubt that Lincoln’s parents did any of
this. Mine didn’t. Coming from the fields, they were mighty tired
at night.) “Therefore,” say the
ideological professional educators, “Give us your kids.”
Classroom teacher organizations are
probably outnumbered by the administrator organizations. All of the following private groups must get
their two cents in and are well organized to do so locally and nationally:
school superintendents, principals, board members, curriculum co-coordinators,
counselors, testing specialists, PTA, and countless others.
Oh yeah, Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is really a paper tiger, but he
still influences by dangling his Department of Education money. But to receive it, states must jump through
hoops and accept such things as Common Core.
School leaders usually choose to jump.
And you don’t think the LGBT
community knocks on the school door to talk about curriculum? So do Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jane
Fonda.
So many voices, such weighty rigmarole. See why so many parents turn to home
schooling and private school? Conservative Americans have cracked the
media, but they haven’t touched public education.
Roger
Hines
4/27/16
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