How the State Codification of the EAA will really change our educational reality.

We tend to make a regular distinction between the "real" and the "ideal." The former is what is, and the latter is what we think ought to be.

Indeed, we tend to separate the two in our everyday thoughts and our speech.

"Be real," we might insist to someone who we think is naive, pressing for an unattainable goal. The "ideal" thus gets implicitly defined as "non-being," something -- although that is of course not the right word -- that doesn't exist.

But the ideal is not synonymous with non-existence. We do well to attend to this distinction, rather than the supposed distinction between the real and the ideal.

On the contrary, the "ideal" impinges on what we call "real" every minute of every day -- and in that sense the ideal matters, and it matters very much. What we long for, what we imagine, what we hope for ..... is very much a matter of our existence, our reality. The ideal guides us, draws us, haunts us.

When we change our ideals, then, we change what we tend to call "reality" and we change that reality quite drastically.

Over the next few days, perhaps as early as next week, the Michigan state legislature will return to the issue of HB4369, the state codification of the EAA, the "Educational Achievement Authority" and in so doing they are poised to make an enormous change to our long held ideals about public education.

The EAA codification, by statute, removes from the state the long held ideal that public education for all was possible. It literally divides the state in half between those who have the political power and financial capital to pursue a full, comprehensive education with music, art, recess, devoted and trained teachers and those who will be left at some point soon with a room of up to 50 classmates and computer modules, staffed by just graduated college students looking to add something about "social commitment" to their CV before moving on to their "real" career.www.eclectablog.com

Now, of course, the (public) argument for removing this ideal by statute is that we are already divided in two, that poor, largely minority School Districts already lack what more affluent and predominantly white Districts have.

That is the reality we are told. Be real. And it is perhaps impossible to argue the point. As the white father of two in Bloomfield Hills I am certainly not interested in trying.

But I do quite passionately -- and this is the difficult part to explain -- believe that part of our current reality with all its divides still encompasses the ideal that we can all somehow have the same great public education.

So in codifying the EAA -- as the legislature seems poised to do -- I see that we are not changing reality  in the sense that we are mitigating these divides but in that we will jettison the ideal that still guides us, that has guided us for sometime, the idea that great public education for all is possible

 And that loss truly will change reality. I would not want to be the deciding vote for that change. I really can't imagine that any Michigan legislative Rep has that much confidence in the EAA to risk the loss.