Public education finds its voice; but they really need a new sound.

Those fighting for public education -- after years of caving and waffling and crumbling in the face of the assault brought by corporate reform -- are finally finding their voice again. Diane Ravitch, of course, has done wonders. The repentant , come home to lead the counter-insurgency. Grassroots groups in Pennsylvania have done what none thought could be done. The Opt-out movement is singing.


You would think, however, as this bit of lost ground gets regained, and the public education community seeks to continue to surge forward, they would be more concerned about how easily some of its oldest public positions and rhetorical stances have been turned on their heads by those that want to undo public education.

"Students First" is, to me, the most striking example.

Public ed rightly deplores the Michelle Rhee let group and its motto, but they spend little time reflecting on the fact that -- for years -- "it is for the kids" or "whatever is best for the kids" were platitudes indulged by public education itself.


Indeed, the genius of the Rhee/Gates/ Broad crowd was that they were able to take a phrase or a, again, a rhetorical stance that had long been mocked as hypocritical (public education involves a lot, and it simply wasn't always about the kids, and nor can it ever be) and turned it into a marketing positive.

The same is true of "choice."

Public education long argued that students should have many options and choices in curriculum and life (even when those options and choices were illusory) and so there is no difficulty explaining the glee some found when that mantra was turned back against public education.

Indeed, again, the concept of the charter school as an option or choice came out of public education supposedly for all the "right" reasons but the concept -- or so the public ed community would have it -- has been perverted.

So here's the question to ask: what allowed for these terms and concepts to be so easily and effectively perverted?

The evil and faulty policy of opponents? Out and out corruption and crony capitalism?

Of that I have no doubt.

But was there, too, not something of a poisoned well at the start?

The question is critical at the moment because public education -- with its back to the wall like never before -- is returning to this potentially tainted well for more.

Many, led by faculty in shrinking Colleges of Education, are arguing for their role as, literally, a font of social justice itself. Rather strikingly, instead of considering the ways in which their own hyperbolic publicity habits historically have been flipped around on them, public education is doubling or tripling down on this language.

Public schools are democracy! goes the cry.

This is a high risk rhetorical stance to take.

For instance, public education long has long stressed the fact that it is available to ALL. And so it should.

But availability has never been synonymous with equity, in education or much else.

And it won't be even if public education survives the age of corporate reform and the turn of the national Democratic Party against its strongest supporters. The utopian rhetoric of public education -- positive affect 24/7 -- grates. This is particularly true in age of extraordinary cynicism and media overload. Over time, in fact, the cheer leading mode weakened public education simply because the whole enterprise felt entirely too hypocritical to too many. Public education is messy and hard. It isn't, and it can't be a font of social justice. What it has been -- at its best -- is a functioning democratic (small "d") institution, one of the few left standing in any recognizable form.

Many in public education are shocked and scandalized that reformers have referred to the advent of for profit charters as the "civil rights" issue of our time. The ugliness of this is marked because so many communities of color have been hit hardest by "reform."

But where, pray tell, did the reform crowd get the idea that public education was a beacon of civil rights?
 

As public education searches for its voice while under attack it is time to find a more sustainable tone, a more politically lasting expression of what "it" in fact is, and what it, in fact, tries to be.

Scapegoating of DPS nearly complete: Schools should watch (because you get scapegoated doesn't mean you embrace the role)

No public school ever has "failed."

But if you read mainstream media regularly about education or, worse, simply glance at mainstream media and allow it to become the background melody of your thought, you would think all schools are failing.

Indeed, so pervasive is this message that almost no one outside of the 30% or so of public school teachers and parents who resist this narrative considers the oddity of the fact that for it to be true, or anywhere close to true, schools in every state would have to had started failing at roughly the same time.

As if a virus hit, or a meteor. An accident? Was this what caused dinosaurs to go extinct?

1996?

Now, of course, communities have failed. And, then, in turn schools within those communities have failed. When the communities start to fail -- politically, economically, socially, etc., the onus of responsibility for all things gets shifted to the schools and then there is a subsequent collapse of the schools.

Rather ironically, given the media full court press on failing schools, the schools are actually the last public institution to go (public libraries doing what they can). Instead of being fragile, schools are quite resilient. They have been robust enough to survive in an age that has taken down other public institutions: whole state legislatures, Governors, and, of course, the US House of Representatives.

In my hometown of Detroit, MI, for example, the schools have lasted much longer than the city itself. Granted, they have been under "emergency management" of one form or another since 1999  but they have survived.

The schools even survived the city's "historic" bankruptcy.

The official death of Detroit Public Schools, however, comes this week (Thursday) when the state's Governor (Snyder) puts into place a plan that will forever end public schools in the city in the sense that there never again will be any neighborhood schools governed by an elected board. This District, once the state and country's grandest, dies this week -- for good.

Mark your calendars as this death certainly will mark the beginning of the end, then, of all such Districts unless there is radical change in resistance tactics.

Here is what all need to acknowledge: a consensus has been reached it seems on Detroit schools.

This District, like the smaller Highland Park and Muskegon Heights, is incapable of governing itself. There will be zero public protest from other Districts in the state who still enjoy elected boards and full community engagement. Rather surprisingly, you will hear little from other political action groups, traditionally committed to the idea that places like Detroit should have the same freedoms and rights as other communities. Tacitly, at least, all agree with the Governor. Community governance for schools can't work here. This is -- by far -- the majority opinion.


Why in the smoke and lightning and outrage reporting of education discussions does no one say it?

Let's start with the obvious: if you are on the side of those who want to schools to be seen as "failing" you have every incentive not to point this out. The scapegoat mechanism set in place years ago is functioning perfectly.

For the other side -- for the defenders of public education -- things are trickier.

They are in a double bind of sorts.

If you argue the truth -- schools aren't failing, communities are -- you are putting the blame in part on communities and very often poor, black communities. And that seems unjust. And it is unjust. Poor, black communities aren't failing because they are poor and black. But this has nothing to do with schools. Or, conversely, defenders of public education have to put the blame on the forces that are systematically scapegoating them, such as the Gates Foundation, Eli Broad, the Obama/Clinton form of what used to be the National Democratic Party. This is perfectly just, but these folks are well outside the political reach of those that value and rely on public education.

What to do, what to do, what to do?

Unfortunately, the public education community, rather than resist the scapegoat role it has been handed, instead has embraced the identity their attackers have assigned them.

Many, from K12 to faculty in Colleges of Education, have taken to seeing themselves as the very font of "social justice" rather than what they are: a resilient and critically important (if flawed) public institution.

This is something like the sacrificial lamb bleating out, "Yes, yes, it was me...it was me...cut my throat. I have direct line to God at my disposable to fix all ills but I choose not to use them. Kill me instead."

Public schools can not be all things to all people. They can not solve racial injustice. Nor can they solve economic injustice. The job they have to do is plenty -- and hard enough. You really can't save the world. Don't argue like you can.

But do, please, as you so often admonish the kids, be comfortable with who you are and celebrate that. Scapegoats, by definition, fail. Schools, again, never have.

Let this be the gift of Detroit Public Schools to the whole state: the schools are sturdy, remarkably so, but at some point you exhaust what seems inexhaustible.

Opt out of tests? Starve the Beast? Sure. But opt out of media kid wars, too

Here's me in high school. 1983.

I am the white kid.

Like most guys my age who played a lot of sports, I can describe every moment. This picture? The shot was not blocked. I drew contact from the other team's star, and put him in foul trouble early. Made 1, missed 1 at the line. We won in OT.

Glory days, as the Boss sings.

If you are interested, let me know, we'll get the guys together, get a beer, and I will start two weeks before that game and take you all the way through to the locker room after.

No thanks? Really?

I understand. Hold on to that smirk. I think it a good thing.

There are some other more important memories I want to discuss here, memories that for me explain much about the insidious current relationship of media to public education.

This photo comes from The Macomb Daily, my local county paper at the time. Every Wed and Saturday during basketball season I would ask my Dad to run out and pick up a copy of this, The Detroit News, and The Detroit Free Press and any other publication that might have coverage of high school sports.

At 17, I lived to see my name in print. A picture? Whoa.

In that, I was not unlike any other kid who played. We loved to see our names in print. So did our parents. Frankly, certain papers stay in existence only by reporting on kids' sports.

School sports.

 Public education has been under attack for 25 years now but local high school sports reporting hasn't changed much. This has been a sustainable business model. Pick up a high school sports page and you would think it is 1976 and everything is just peachy with public education.

Parents still love to see their kids get recognition in the "paper" -- even in an age that likes to think it uses considerably less paper. Schools, for their part, love to get their kids recognition in the paper, too, because it seemingly reflects well on the school, even though most schools have more or less "outsourced" their sports' programs to travel clubs for preparation and non-teacher itinerant coaches.

And the "paper" likes these stories because they sell papers. "Dad, get a couple extra copies" in the pre-digital age -- or "shares" and "likes" and "clicks" in the current age.

Ah, there's the game -- and therein lies the rub.

There is an unhealthy perversity to this relationship, a kind of sickening enabling that would drive an alcohol/substance abuse counselor crazy.

Here is the basic problem: self-promotion should have little to do with K12 children and schools where life is very up and down and the real battle is for growth and self-discovery. The adolescent desire to see one's name in print is, like mine, something we should manage and teach, not indulge.

That is one reason, for example, why we have very strict privacy laws for minors.

I kept this picture because of the size of the coverage and the particular nature of the victory (for which you would need to buy me, again, a beer to hear the full story).

But the reality behind the picture was that I had been suspended for two games prior for blowing a gasket about officiating and challenging an entire other team to an on court brawl. This pictured moment, then, captures the 8 seconds after I stepped on to the court the first game back after having been benched. I was furious, still, at that moment, and went straight to the basket not to draw a foul but because I wanted to run hard in to something, anything. I found that incredibly satisfying at the time.

The fact is simply this -- the photo marked me at my worst: violent to an extreme, with ill managed emotions, and narcissistic.

Pictures don't capture truths. We just think they do.

"Papers" or media, for their part, care little about self-growth and the day to day battles of learning.  And why should they when parents like me act as enablers? Papers and news media care about clicks and money that keep them afloat. Like schools, many are in an institutional death spiral, bending or twisting from the form many imagine them to be just to stay alive -- again, not unlike schools.

A story of student "outrage," for example, is worth much more financially than a story of student "achievement" and certainly much more than the day in day out grind of growing and learning. If it bleeds -- rather in gore or in sentimentality -- it leads. But these media engagements, good and bad, are some distance from education and reality.

Sports coverage makes it all possible, financially speaking.

And -- rather sickeningly -- it provides a template for all other coverage of schools.

Who is in the top 5%? Who moved out of the top 5%?

Are we talking about team rankings? Or failing schools?

The education story, then, is always of a miracle win. Or a catastrophic failure.

Shakespeare could be writing about parents, schools, and media when he writes, "Therefore I lie with her and she with me/And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be."

Historically, one is tempted to say that such "lies" make the world go around.

But here is where are basic problem gets more complicated. Current media is not driven by a particular desire to sell copies or even get clicks. In education "reporting," Gates and Broad Foundation support a great deal. In Michigan, the Devos family and the Mackinac Center. Local publications crumbled in the 2008 crash and all were given over to a single entity The Gannett Company. There was much promotional money to be had in conveying the simple message that schools are failing. Not a day passes where you haven't seen a promotional oped or story saying as much. Gannett has bought hard and its "hometown" papers now speak with one simple voice and that voice says and finds space only for one voice: "schools are failing."

In other words, if you are a casual observer, and you think schools are failing, you think so because many have invested so much money to tell you so, and you are reading prose that equates to high school sports' reporting.

Educational reporting exploded -- but in a very bad way. I have read almost every mainstream media piece of reporting in Michigan since 2012 and almost every piece of it is excrement.

Shit. Pure crap.

Schools, baffled at their inability to tell "their" story, started trying desperately to respond, create positive coverage. Those that could afford it hired communications directors. And these folks try to channel the positive affect that is certainly part of K12 ("go team"!) to counter the "schools are failing" narrative.

God bless them. There is a logic there.

But, for those interested in preserving some semblance of public education, this tactic is doomed to fail and, in fact, inadvertently make things worse. Even with the best of intentions, communication directors swirl in the same lies. You indulge partial pictures posing as truths while confronting an opponent with a single message ("schools are failing") and unlimited funding. And there is veritable feast every time a moment of discouraging human reality takes place and can be captured on film that threatens in a blink to blow everything up.

Schools won't win this game, in short, because it is not their game.

It is the media game.

Teaching and learning is different. It is about truth -- all the truth -- and not perception of a given moment. It is about the boogers and the fist fights and everything else that goes badly wrong in the course of a young life. For kids and teachers and parents school is life and bad and even horrible stuff happens in daily life. The media translates that as "schools are failing." And we are fast giving up the right to condemn bad actors in this game because, well, who isn't a bad actor in a game we all agree to play and, in fact, hunger to play?

Trying to "sell" the good story is no different to freakish runs of bad stories.

Across the country parents are finally starting to "opt out" of standardized testing, the corporate and political game that is insinuated itself in to public education and done so much harm. It won't be an easy fight, but it is critical. The tests are the key. The tests go and so does the big money.

Let me here try to start to open another comparable front in the battle while there is finally some hint of positive motion: parents and schools should, too, begin "opting out" of the media game.

Take your own pictures -- you have plenty. Write your own sports stories. Celebrate your own successes. Mark your own failures. You now have the technology. Starve the media. Starve the beast. Screw the rankings. And end the cycling of communication director to reporter and back again. Take your communications and consultant money and hire qualified school counselors. Tell your local media especially that you are no longer open for business. Contract cancelled. These are kids. Ask their parents directly.

That will require fortitude.

The temptation to see your kids' name or school's picture in the "paper" is profound. It has seeped into our DNA.

I dug that picture out when The Macomb Daily -- seeking clicks -- ran a fifty years of high school sports series (my opponent here, and also a fellow school parent, was ranked 8th of the players in the last 50 years -- that was wrong, too; he should have been 3 or 4) and friends started texting me for fun. Grown men. This series got a ton of clicks from my gen-gen-generation. I was enjoying the nostalgia immensely, until I started to think clearly about it. And I started to really think about the picture, the whole picture.

When I was a boy, I thought like a boy...but I was being took again.

Media shouldn't keep me perpetually a child and it should not shape our children's education. In that arena we have all kinds of restrictions. We resist porn. We resist certain song lyrics. We resist certain films.

It is time to tell the "hometown" papers to shove it until they want to engage collaboratively with schools, institutions trapped in comparable economic forces. There will be time enough for kids to have to deal with all that. At the moment, it is our job to keep them out of this game.

And to do that we have to be the adults and, finally, stop playing.

The "talk" a white father had with his son.

Dear son:

Almost every African-American father in this country has to  have "the talk" with his son.

Because of the history of this country African-American fathers have to tell their sons to act with extreme caution around police officers. If a black kid gets pulled over while driving or stopped while walking down the street or grabbed at a high school party and he responds in anything but a completely deferential manner he risks getting shot.

We talked a lot about that this year because of what was on the news.

While we are most distinctly white, we need to have a talk as well. Fortunately, our talk is not that close to life and death.

Simply put, we are lucky -- historically speaking.

History is something we live in, not something that we have put behind us, not something that you can look up on the internet if you need to, and you need to be taught and learn this history in order to even have a half a chance of glimpsing even for a second a semi accurate vision of yourself and the world you occupy with others.

With that in mind, here is the single main point of this "talk."

You are never, under any circumstances to use the word "nigger."

If you absolutely need to at some point you may refer to the word as the "N-word" as I will do for the rest of this letter.

Many find this euphemism  awkward or disingenuous because N-word is a word you will, in fact, hear a lot: in gyms, in movies, in schools, in malls, on the train, in streets, certainly in music. You will hear it in a lot of contexts. Sometimes it is intended to hurt. Sometimes it is intended to undo hurt. Sometimes it is used to show solidarity. Sometimes it is casual.

That it is out there, however, is not relevant at all to my point and to my rule for you.

I don't care about the regularity of its use. You just never use it.

Ever.

In fact, I like the fact that our euphemism -- the "N-word" -- sounds odd or disingenuous  to some, like we are trying to cover some thing without really covering it.

 That is precisely what we are trying to do. Cover or manage an awful history that we live in or with, like a scar on our body we want to hide -- but can't. The "N-word" should sound pathetic, tinged with shame, scared.

As I said, we live in the wake of history. And we hold its triumphs, and its scars. Those roads we drive on, the schools you go to, the doctor's care  that have kept you and so many others alive and well -- everything you enjoy and need was created by other people that came long before us.

And just as you enjoy and use the good things you didn't create, you have to stand the burden of the bad things you didn't create, even at age 10. That is what it means to live in history.

 It means to be responsive, and responsible to this "other" world that literally called you in to being -- whether you wanted it to or no. And, generally speaking, you have been luckier than most in the place in to which you have been called by history. If you take human history at its broadest, and you are alive and living healthy in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2015, you are easily within the top 5% of the luckiest humans who have ever lived, no matter what else happens to you.

But back to more recent history: this country was founded on slavery. Its very survival depended on white people owning black people as "property." For the country as you know it to go forward, to get started, this practice had to be included in our founding documents and ideas. Without a collective understanding that slavery had to exist, the land of the "free and the brave" wouldn't be -- as odd at that sounds.

Quite simply, the "N-word" was used everyday to enable that horrific system to move forward some 75 years.

That system, in turn, weakened only in 1865 after thousands of lives were lost in the Civil War.

We really only know the numbers of soldiers lost in that war.

Slaves? We weren't able to count.

Those people don't even exist as numbers in history.

At some point soon, if you haven't already, someone will say to you "Slavery ended in the Civil War! I never owned slaves" as if this absolves them or frees them somehow of the history we live in.

 It doesn't.

And when you hear this argument you are to mark the person (in your mind) a fool or uninformed or both and move on with that knowledge recorded. At best, at your age, you are to say simply, "I don't see history that way." Once into adulthood you will have to choose for yourself how and in what way to engage full on stupidity. I have no good answers for you there, only to urge caution.

The horrors of slavery persisted well after the war. We only imagine that wars end. They don't. Black people were routinely captured and shot and bullied and forced to live segregated lives, despite their "freedom" in this "long ago time."

Think this: Grandpa was born in 1925 in Georgia.

You are good at math.

Let's put that math to use then: Is 1865 that long ago? Is there a big difference between 1865 and 1925? 1925 not part of your life? Grandpa?

Here is another number: 700,000 people live in the city of Detroit right now. One city in America. Estimate the number of people in the country between 2015 and 1865 who have been hurt, either in the extreme or in a slight, in this "long ago" history that organized itself around the "N-word."

Lots, huh?

In 1965, massive Civil Rights laws had be enacted to try to correct this history from the end of the Civil War. You remember who was born in 1965, right? Me. Mom. Do the math. Because, again, the passage of the Civil Rights did not "fix" this history.

Given this, I hope when someone says to you, as they still do to me, "why can't I use that word?" -- as if a freedom is being denied them -- I want you to think of these numbers now swirling in your big math brain and assign each number a face, a name, a face and a name of someone you love -- not a vague image of a character from TV in costume --  and then ask yourself if you are, in fact, being denied a freedom in not being able to use this single word. Or, are you, in fact, in some small way, simply marking an enormous wound in your mind's eye?

Your "right to free speech" is not a right to say whatever pops into your head and then claim some abstract protection as if you have been grievously wronged. Make note of fools who think this, too.

One more math fact: this word only points to one of history's horrors. One. One of thousands. So you will be told, at some point, too, of any number of different persecutions. And, strangely, you will be told that because these countless other horrors have happened your Dad is overdoing it with the restriction on the "N-word". It isn't special, you will hear, as if these other horrors somehow open the door for making things worse with this particular horror -- and this particular word.

The absurdity of this argument, I trust, you already can dismiss for yourself, even as a fourth grader.

The word isn't magic or sacred but a way of reminding yourself that, again, we live in history, not apart from it. Neither you nor anyone else gets to walk away at complete ease.

Although on many days it will seem as if you, in fact, had left history behind. You have grown up, for example, knowing only an African-American President. The world you live in is filled with people and names and cultures that probably would have baffled Grandpa. Many of them close friends, family.

But history is like your own body. You never really leave it. Some of the wounds and scars, physical and emotional, you take even now will come back to you when you are my age.

Everyone knows this is true of their body, but they can't seem to accept it is true of the body politic as well.

Now, please don't get confused. Not using the word will not somehow make you a better person. It will not make you "good." It certainly won't make you "better" than other people.  And it certainly won't free or liberate you from the horrible conflicts that surround it. You will be called any number of different things in life that are hurtful and that will prompt you think, "well, if I get called this, then..." Don't. Hypocrisies will abound in any discussion of the term. Indeed, the hypocrisies that surround any critique of the term often generate even more insidious uses of the term. When I tell you not to use it, then, I am not handing you a magic talisman. I am just telling as your father what not to do with a single word.

That is, I am preaching what some call zero tolerance only to you, zero tolerance of yourself using the word.

But never think zero tolerance can work as a policy for others, one you or some institution can impose on others. There can't be a zero tolerance policy for history. History is, and you set up any institution or individual for failure if you ask them to stand athwart it, outside it, above it. No one is. And we will all fail at some point, just as our institutions that help us live will fail at points.

Indeed, attempts to purge or cleanse a wrong like this often redound on the very people who call for them in the heat of passion or what, for us, is the "heat of the media moment" -- something very different from very real human passion. So history shows if we can be bothered to look.

Not using this word, however, will force you (and that is both my main concern and perhaps  the only point where I can exert some influence on history) in one small way to understand your place in history, the way history shapes all us, and the way history always will shape us.

I insist on this: this is one word you can't seize hold of -- no matter your wealth, your technology, your position of safety -- and master.

And for that understanding there really is no word.