William Raspberry's columns were the part of the newspaper I read immediately following my favorite section--the comics*. After my parents, he was the most influential person in shaping my nascent worldview. I remain attracted to the values he espoused:
- Balancing self-reliance with the needs of a diverse society
- Attempting to see the world as it is, so we can work to make it the world we want it to be
- Learning the lessons of history, while avoiding being handcuffed by the mistakes of previous generations
- Respecting the humanity of all, but with no patience for the arrogance of power or privilege
In addition, I appreciated Raspberry's tone, which the New York Times imprecisely called "moderate." A better word, suggested by a commenter at the Washington Post obituary, is "reasoned." Raspberry argued for all sorts of things that had nothing to do with being in the center in a left/right political spectrum. This was because Raspberry understood the difference between a value and an opinion -- the latter being subject to change based on the facts he reported. More often than not, his columns focused on finding shared values in a world of conflicting evidence and countervailing opinions.
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"In virtually every public controversy, most thoughtful people secretly believe both sides."
--William Raspberry, 1935-2012
Raspberry was, and still is, right. We have so many decisions to make about how best to educate our children. And you know what? We secretly believe the answer to most policy questions is both. The problem is that our instincts put policies in competition with each other. Instead, they should be in cooperation. We are confusing the values (which we mostly agree on) with opinion (where there's legitimate difference).
I've written before that pitting charter schools against district schools is a silly and a false choice. What we need to focus on are finding high-performing pockets of excellence and learning from them.
One of the best things about working in education is that it can be a win/win. If I do well, a student does well. If another teacher at my school builds a fantastic culture, I benefit. If another teacher in another school does a great job, that's also a win for me as a fellow citizen. Our community can never have enough well-educated citizens.
It's also frustrating to see a false dichotomy made between traditionally-trained teachers and Teach for America. The right frame is how can we get more high-performing teachers in our classrooms?
Once we've acknowledged that the only competition in teacher training is attracting the best people into the profession rather than pursuing a different career, then there's a bunch of great policy issues in which to delve: How do we best train these teachers so that they become great teachers as quickly as possible? How do we make teaching a sustainable and financially rewarding profession? How do we offer educators many career paths?
We have scarce resources, but they're almost never distributed in an all-or-nothing fashion. However, we argue about these choices as if they were. We set up false competitions when we actually want to make investments so that all kids win.
This doesn't mean we won't, or shouldn't, have debates about policies on how best to educate our kids. We should. This is important stuff. But when we do, we should acknowledge that, more often than not, both sides have shared values as to the importance of education, teachers, and great public schools. Otherwise, we're going to spend a whole lot of time and effort in a fake competition.
We're all rooting for the same team: our kids.
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* Calvin and Hobbes has been equally influential in my life, but that's a topic for another day.
Disclaimer: All views expressed are solely my own and don't represent any organization with which I'm associated.
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