Last week I went to a meeting about schools. By the end of it, I was convinced of one thing: It’s hopeless. Forget the children. Let’s get drunk.
A joke! I jest! Ok, technically, it was a planning meeting for a conference in San Antonio designed to teach people how the budget crisis in Texas is affecting schools; it was my first day and I was more than a little lost. After a lot of phone calls and some ‘splaining, I’d just started an internship with Save Texas Schools, an Austin based organization that’s working to…well. Guess. You might have heard about them lately, if you’re in Texas – they drew 12,000 people to their big rally at the capital last March, after the 2011 session of the state Legislature was drawn out in a special emergency session just to deal with the issue of funding education. The ‘Ledge voted nay on that particular issue (We do have to balance our budget, after all, and not raise taxes even though the current shortfall is the direct result of a tax cut pushed through in 2006.), but STS soldiered on and plans to keep on campaigning for education funding in the state.
Even if all that passed you by, you probably still know that education is hot topic in Texas. Only a month ago Austin’s ISD made a huge, controversial decision to hand over a number of schools on the city’s East Side to a charter school agency (More or less without consulting the community the schools serve, who are less than pleased.) Our state regularly falls to the sludgy bottom of lists ranking educational performance in the nation, and…well, insert a joke about the governor of your choice, but don’t forget that the Department of Education is one of the agencies Perry REMEMBERED about wanting to eliminate and that many of the ideas in the National No Child Left Behind Act were drawn directly from W. Bush’s testing-heavy Texas policies. Hell, if it weren’t for football and the extreme, continual, mind-bending lack of water, we might never shut up about education down here in Texas. There are a lot of factions with a lot of different ideas about it. They mostly spend their time shouting at each other. Still, most can agree on one thing. Education in Texas? The education system in America? It sucks. Especially if you’re poor. Especially if you’re not white.
This all does nothing to answer the question “Yes, but why do you CARE?” For one thing, I AM white. I am not particularly poor, especially when compared to the majority of the world and I am finished with my secondary education, a good chunk of which was undertaken at non-public institutions. I don’t have kids. I don’t have any interest in having kids in the conceivable (hah) future. This is not, it would seem, my problem. And yet. Here I am. I
It’s not just the internship. I’m reading books. I’m looking at (ugh) NUMBERS. I’m setting myself on no less a mission than to understand and change the American education system for the better. And like you, I have been wondering why exactly I would do such a thing. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
1. Following the Money
If modern history teaches us nothing else, it should teach us to watch very carefully in which pocket the big guy is putting his wallet. There is a LOT of money going into education these days. The Obama administration requested 1.35 billion dollars this year for their Race to the Top grants; private groups like the Gates foundation are heaping millions more into lobbying and paid research. And let’s not forget the amount of money being made FROM education – the testing industry, the text book lobby, the charter school industry and for-profit universities. All these folks may turn out to have nothing but the best intentions (and to be fair, I think most school reformers on some level genuinely want children to succeed). Still, it’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a corporation to do anything entirely without their own interests at heart. It’s good to keep an eye out, just to make sure the ultimate beneficiaries of education reform are the kids we’re supposed to be educating.
2. Of the People, By the People, For the People
I have friends who laugh at me every time I say it, but we live in a democracy. And if we truly believe that our particular system should not perish from this earth, then we need to be educating citizens who are historically and culturally literate (you see what I did there?), as well as liberally endowed with the skill of critical thinking. We need these students, who have been born into the information age, to understand where their information is coming from, to recognize bias, to be able to come to their own conclusions based on the evidence provided and to advocate for their rights and for the future of their planet. Most importantly of all, we need them to do what we currently can NOT: to understand why it is possible to be on different sides of a difficult issue and still to value compromise enough to struggle on.
3. It’s The End of Days
Well, possibly. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting one of those pretty, heavily CGIed apocalypses where the folks with the best cheekbones survive to repopulate the planet. Still, our banking system’s screwy, our manufacturing sector’s shrunk to nil, we’re losing polar ice and continuing stubbornly to live in places where there is not enough water to support us and we can’t even agree on whether or not our cell phones are giving us brain tumors. How will we survive? Well, by producing the doctors, scientists and inventors of the future who will assumedly solve these problems, but also by educating the historians and the artists – today’s children who will ultimately be the ones who tell the stories of who we once were and who we want to be. It doesn’t matter what we do: we can’t stay on top forever. What we can do is equip future generations with the tools to endure and innovate.
And that, as far as I can tell, is the reasoning behind my sudden interest in education. Thus the internship. Thus the research. The next Save TX Schools rally will be at the Texas State Capital in Austin on March 24th. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
So much to say, but it can be easily summed up: you’re awesome.
I’m glad you have the energy to care. I often have fallen into the hopelessness that you joke about at the start of the post, but we need folks like you who are willing to face the stark truth and try and make it better. : )