We tend to look at the education problem with much too narrow a lens, missing the forest for the trees, as Bob Moses says. Let’s step back a little and take a broader view.
The unfairness of unequal schooling is not only about textbooks, or teacher salaries, or “holding teachers accountable”, or even about curriculum that addresses the actual interests of students—although it is about those things.
The unfairness of unequal schooling is also about the large social and economic patterns of America, where rich people’s children are expected to have more opportunities than poor people’s children. That’s one of the main reasons that people want to be rich in America—exactly so that they’re children will have more opportunities.
We’ve had powerful evidence of this recently. In person school disappears, and suddenly the internet divide, homelessness and overcrowded housing, food insecurity, and underlying medical conditions are thrown into relief. People die who wouldn’t die if they were richer.
We don’t know how to have a conversation about that unfairness. So instead we talk about getting more computers in homes, or finally addressing the appalling physical plant of crumbling schools. In non-pandemic years we talk about capping class sizes at 30 students or 40 students, when we know that the fancy private schools have class sizes of 15.
That’s how rich families’ children learn math best—in a small class with a well paid and well respected teacher, lots of technology, field trips, tons of sports, great cafeteria food and so on. But the assumption is that what the fancy private schools do is simply out of reach for the rest of us, so why dream? We teachers, families, students committed to truly democratic education pick off “lower hanging fruit” and do our best.
I believe this approach of what are essentially timid demands is mistaken. I believe we should demand what we really need. And I also think that there are ways to frame demanding what we really need in a way that is actually a practical method for building up an equitable system of education for the country.
We should not settle for limited opportunities for poor children. We should aim to create in the relatively short term—the next 10 years—an education system that will make rich families think twice about sending their kids to the fancy private schools, because the public education system is so stimulating, so healthy, so vibrant, so luxurious and beautiful that their children wonder why they can’t go to public school, too.
What is hard for us to understand is that people who attend public schools—the students there right now—have enormous creative capacity—in economic terms, productive capacity—that is absurdly underutilized. Millions of adolescents with enormous energy, talent, and intelligence are having their time thoroughly wasted, when they should be working for the benefit of their communities. Their idleness is thought of as a problem! They have to be given things to occupy their time or they’ll cause trouble, get in fights, make babies, take drugs, disrupt lessons.
To me, this is crazy. Their energy and intelligence is an unbelievable opportunity! They could be teaching things, creating things, imagining and realizing things, and of course learning—because people learn by doing. We deliberately tie adolescents down, and then wonder why they don’t learn. They don’t learn, because we are so afraid of what they will do if they are moving their bodies with free will. The darker their skin, the more we are afraid that they “don’t want to learn” and that left to themselves they will cause trouble—physical, bodily trouble. This is crazy. It is crazy, and it is racist.
As a country we have separated young people in our imaginations into two groups: One group is entitled to the range of stimulation and opportunity that all young people crave. They are generally White or light-Brown and almost all from middle and upper-middle class socioeconomic status. They play sports, travel at will, drive their own cars when they’re 16, or have their parents drive them when they’re younger, go to camps in the summer, have significant allowances or (for the middle class) part-time jobs in suburban locations, are treated with respect by their teachers, party in safe places, get braces if their teeth are crooked, and eat very, very well. They and their parents spending on them is a major engine of the economy. The police don’t bother these adolescents, whose drug and alcohol use is mostly winked upon.
Then there are young people from places where families struggle with paying bills, keeping a roof over their heads, getting enough food to eat, finding transportation, medical and dental care. These young people bear the burden of the society’s suspicion: they are monitored, searched, threatened, feared, moved along, and often literally locked up. They learn to stay away from centers of public power, because it is dangerous for them in those places. Their opportunities become more and more constrained. They sit in the back. They wait till they are alone with their peers or families to speak up.
We know that the society is structured to keep these two groups of young people separated. But it’s all done with the almighty dollar—not signs that say “Whites only”, and so this segregation is perfectly legal. We don’t even question that a poor kid from a poor neighborhood should be entitled to attend a fancy private school with small classes, great food, and huge playing fields. The poor can’t pay, so they can’t go. Of course, if we think that young people should all have equal opportunity, this inequality is outrageous. But we Americans don’t think of it as outrageous, we just think it’s obvious. The rich get better education and way more non-educational opportunities of all sorts for their children. Why am I even bothering to bring this up? That’s certainly not going to change.
Well, I’m bothering to bring it up because we are looking at the problem when we look at it as a problem with “improving the quality of schools.” That’s a wrong approach—looking at a tree in the forest rather than the whole forest. The schools for oppressed young people are bad because the society is structured oppressively. You can’t “improve the quality of schools,” unless you understand that trying to do that means trying to change the structure of the whole society. It’s not just revolutionary in relation to education. It’s revolutionary in relation to the economic and political arrangements of the country—it’s not only anti-racist, it’s also anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-war.
AND—this is a big AND—we in the Algebra Project and Young People’s Project networks inherit the legacy of the Mississippi Theater of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1960s—Ella Baker’s and Bob Moses’s and Charlie Cobb’s and Bernice Johnson Reagan’s Movement. So we believe in something we call “earned insurgency.” We’re going to talk about this now for a bit, but the point is that a group of young people in the South in the early 1960s put there foot in the door of the larger society and wouldn’t let it slam shut, and then they pushed that door open in certain ways, changing substantially certain arrangements of the society.
They did not, however, succeed in changing enough, and so we are still wandering around lost in a huge forest of inequality. We need to try to figure out better where we are.