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.
