Luck and the purposes of public education

Education reporter Peter Merrow is making a lot of sense: 

Are are we also polarized about the purposes of public education? I am not sure whether we are polarized, indifferent or excluded from the conversation, but we have a real problem. The goal of school is to help grow American citizens. Four key words: help, grow, American, citizen. Think about those words:

Help: Schools are junior partners in education. They are to help families, the principal educators.

Grow: It’s a process, sometimes two steps forward, one back. Education is akin to a family business, not a publicly traded stock company that lives and dies by quarterly reports.

American: E Pluribus Unum. We are Americans, first and foremost.

Citizen: Let’s put some flesh on that term. What do we want our children to be as adults? Good parents and neighbors, thoughtful voters, reliable workers? What else?

Merrow hits a lot of good points in the whole article. You should read the whole thing. I don't disagree with anything he wrote above. That said, I've got some footnotes about the role of luck and what public schools can do about it. 

 On "Help": Schools aren't going to take the place of families. However, we are charged with educating the students we have. These kids -- through no fault of their own -- may come from broken families, from impoverished households, from parents working two or more jobs, from caregivers who value education but were never able to acquire one themselves. As a result, we have two options: 

Option #1: We can shift into blame mode. We can search around for a villain -- poverty, parents, politicians -- and talk about how educators can't really do anything until that villain goes away. 

Option #2: We can do the best we can to compensate. For kids who lack stability at home, school can be an oasis of calm. Teachers can't replace parents, but I see every day the power of a school where each child is known by each adult. I've also worked in schools where that didn't happen. Anonymity is the first step towards falling through the cracks. 

On "Grow": Merrow is exactly right. The only thing I'd add is that we should have multiple measures, subjective and objective, to chart the "two steps forward, one back." As the fifth norm on a poster in my classroom states: "It's OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them." In my experience, the difference between functional and dysfunctional schools is that the former uses data to pinpoint where the mistakes are, then does something about them. The latter does neither. 

Accountability isn't the enemy. It's the inertia that results in its absence. 

On "Americans": I agree one hundred percent. Our schools are the fuel of our democracy. This is one of many reasons that I agree with both Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch -- teaching should be a top-tier profession in the U.S. and teachers should be compensated as such.

** As Basher in Ocean's 13 asked, "Do you know what Chuck Berry said every night before counting 1, 2, 3, 4?"

 

On "Citizens": My only addition to Merrow's list is that our schools should help each child reach his or her full potential. The tricky thing about teaching is that it's impossible to know what that is. Thank God that my future wasn't based on what I did as a 14-year-old. (The Fifth Amendment excuses me from giving details about this and, hopefully, my parents have forgiven and forgotten. Or at least, forgiven.) 

Now, as a teacher of 14-year-olds, I have to balance holding students to high expectations and being understanding as they inevitably fall short some of those expectations. We teachers can't hold a grudge, even with the kids who require near-constant coaching.

The problem is that for too many kids, particularly those trying to break out of poverty, the mistakes they make as adolescents haunt them for the rest of their lives. This, to me, is the worst thing about poverty in the United States -- it's life with not much of a safety net. 

To create the citizens we want to have, it's incumbent on us -- especially those of us born into stable families, secure incomes, and a predictable path to an education -- to use those privileges to help others who weren't so lucky. 

Because that's the thing -- luck plays a bigger role than it should in determining whether a child becomes who he or she is capable of being. 

Luck decides who a kid's parents are, but the the idea behind public education -- beyond facilitating the development of "good parents and neighbors, thoughtful voters, reliable workers" -- should be to offer a children an opportunity and a choice to determine who they'll be. 

Public education will never entirely compensate for the advantages and disadvantages of who one's parents are. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't do a much better job than we're doing now.