Coffee Break 1-29-8: On Public Education

Why I Believe in Public Education

QUOTE OF THE DAY

No quotes today; rather, we dedicate this post to two education writers who have in the past few days written or delivered testaments to public education without glossing over the problems public schools are facing:

Jan Ressenger, “Why We Chose Public Schools”

Peter Greene, “For Some Reason”

Jan Resseger has just posted a long and detailed explanation of why she and her husband chose public schools for their children. It includes a recollection of Resseger’s own life-enriching experience in public schools as well as the opportunities offered her children. It’s one of the strongest and most explicit personal testaments to public schools we’ve read.

Peter Greene is a thoughtful and highly prolific English teacher and education writer-blogger who’s also among the daily “go-to” sites for teachers and public education advocates. His range of interests and topics is broad, and he brings to his posts the perspective of someone who’s still in the classroom every day. Greene’s essay riffs off an old song by Three Dog Night, “Black and White,” and its oversimplification of racial and economic inequality in the U.S. The takeaway: we can’t just let bygone be bygones, because the consequences of our racial history as a nation are still very much with us.

DeedSpeakOut is also a graduate of a public school 1-12 system and a public university system. Resseger grew up in rural Montana, Greene in northwest Pennsylvania, so we’ll add a little Midwestern perspective to their stories.

My school system, “District 150,” served Peoria, Illinois, a mid-sized Central Illinois city of 125,000 when I was growing up in the 1960s (it has since shrunk to 115,000). Peoria was  what is known as a “factory town,” meaning Caterpillar Tractor Co. At one time, around 40,000 people worked for Cat; if your dad didn’t work for Cat, then your uncle or cousin or boyfriend’s dad did; that’s just how it was.

My parents were children of the Depression; their parents were farmers with large families who went bankrupt in 1929 and never fully recovered. Despite this, my father and all seven of his siblings managed to graduate from high school, and three of his brothers went to college after World War II. All but one of my mother’s five siblings graduated from high school as well, and two of her brothers later became prosperous Central Illinois farmers, business owners, and real estate investors.

My parents’ first post-WW II home in Peoria was “on the wrong side of the tracks,” something both of my parents understood, although they rarely discussed the implications. When I was two years old, they decided to uproot themselves and more out to the north side of the city. They purchased a lot of undeveloped land in a neighborhood (we called it a “subdivision”) that by the end of the fifties had around 100 houses, all lower-to middle-middle class. Ours was probably the least expensive of them all; it was built by a contractor, not an architect, and my dad designed the interior floor plan, which was geared to maximum utility and minimum number of square feet.

The new neighborhood was about 10 minutes’ walk from my primary school, a decent school which drew students from neighborhoods pretty much like my own. I remember my first-grade teacher, Miss Weerts, who was also a first-year teacher. She taught me to read! I only had five teachers my first six years in school, because we had the same teacher in third and fourth grade. Mrs. Smith: she was strict! In fifth grade, I had Mrs. Blackburn, who had been born in Switzerland and still spoke with a slight accent. Of her own accord, she decided to include German in her teaching program. My first foreign language! Gendered nouns! Four cases! Sentences that ended in verbs!  And then there was Mr. Taylor in sixth grade—a male teacher! He helped us work through our sorrow when President Kennedy was assassinated. The school’s principal, Mr. Lightbody, was known, respected, and beloved throughout the Peoria school and teaching community. He remained at the school until he retired. Throughout primary school we had PE, music (plus a chance to join the band), and art as part of the normal curriculum.

Oh, and we had a good library. In fact, my first “job” was the summer between fifth and sixth grades—yes, the library was open all summer—when I went three afternoons a week to volunteer as the “checkout girl.” I felt the librarian, Miss Roecker (the daughter of a local paint company owner), had become my friend. I respected her so much! She knew which books to suggest I read, she was a thoughtful and measured person who believed in reading as an essential part of life. I became the library’s best client that summer.

Interestingly enough, that experience led to a lifelong love of libraries and to two of my closest and most enduring adult friendships, both with librarians.

Primary school was followed by “senior grade school,” a consolidated school for seventh-and eighth-graders (it is still operating in a different form). This school was difficult and challenging.

One of the main reasons my parents had moved five miles north of the city center was so that their two-year-old child could eventually attend the city’s new high school (opened 1957), Richwoods Community High School (RCHS) as it was called then (now “RHS”). At the time, it was technically separate from District 150, in what was known as “Richwoods Township.” By the time I arrived in 1967, it was one of the largest schools in downstate Illinois with 2500 students (today it enrolls half that number). I remember being absolutely thrilled at my course options—four foreign languages, several math options for each year, AP options in several fields. The school, due both to its size and its property tax base, was able to provide a host of clubs and athletic options and installations (football field, cross-country course, track, baseball field, tennis courts, indoor pool, to name a few). I was on the Student Council, and acted in a couple of all-school plays; I was a member of a small singing group, and was a cheerleader—an activity which kept me in good physical condition throughout high school, as it involved three practices and two appearances a week at both football and basketball games throughout the fall and winter.

When I look back on those years, I don’t recall any stellar teachers; rather, I had many extremely good teachers, and what impresses me now in retrospect is how competent and dedicated my teachers were overall. It was a fine school; eighty per cent of my graduating class of 525 went on to tertiary educational institutions. When I entered the University of Illinois, I had no requirements to fulfill; all general education requirements had been met at high school level.

If someone were ever to ask me what I learned at university (no one has, of course), I have long had a response ready: “I learned to think.” UIUC was Illinois’s flagship campus; it cost my parents $120 a month for my room and board, as I had a full tuition and fees scholarship. I was given the chance to study languages (Ancient Greek major; French/Latin minor; also, German, Italian, Hindi), as well as the freedom to take just about any course in the College of Liberal Arts. I studied Economics, Philosophy, English literature, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Art History in addition to the courses in my major/minors.

These days, I consider that two of the most “formative” courses I took at Illinois lay outside my major; I took both in the second semester of freshman year. The first was called “The Economics of Public Finance,” and dealt with how polities (national, state, local government entities) take informed decisions about what public works and services to fund, and to what levels. My professor was a conservative (as was my Econ 101 professor, Marianne Ferber, a student of Milton Friedman’s who is now considered the founder of feminist economics), but he wasn’t dogmatic.

The second was an honors history seminar which examined the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. (remember: King had only been dead four years at the time). In looking back at this course, I wish I had retained a bit more about King; my seminar paper was on daily life in the ashrams, so most of my effort went into understanding Gandhi. This course involved my first major research paper based on primary sources—the UIUC Library had a wealth of primary documents on the subject.

The third course that ended up being life-changing was a 200-level history of ancient art taught by a well-known authority in the field, Ann Perkins. She was an outstanding lecturer (it was a big class, around 70 people if I recall, and there was no discussion). For her, I wrote my first piece of original work in the field. The assignment was to compose a short paper on an ancient kouros and discuss sculptural techniques, with no bibliography allowed. What an assignment! It meant looking at a work of art, an exemplar of a major genre in Archaic Greek art, and just thinking about it, hard. And that’s what I did: I thought about that kouros, hard, for the better part of a week before starting to write. I don’t recall forty-five years later all the details, but there is one that continues to stay with me. For various reasons, kouroi tended on the whole to be rather two-dimensional (height, width, not much depth). I proposed that this feature was  related to the challenge of hewing out a block of stone of sufficient depth to make a full three-dimensional sculpture possible. (I’m not certain of this today, but I continue to believe that art historians need to consider technique and materials first, and take note of the limits imposed by technology before they begin interpretation and explication). When Professor Perkins returned our papers, she did something highly unusual: she prefaced her calling out our names by saying, “There’s one person here—I don’t know this person—who should become an art historian.” And then she called my name.

In the end, I studied ancient art history at the graduate level, earning a PhD from Yale Graduate School. My advisor was perhaps the most distinguished ancient Greek art historian in the U.S. at the time (and for many years afterward; he was quite young when I studied with him). Yale, however, is another story.

But I didn’t become an art historian.

When I took Ann Perkins’ course, I was preparing to attend law school and become a public interest attorney. But the year I took that course, I met Mr. DeedSpeakOut, who was from Greece.

Long story short: we married and moved to his homeland. More on this in future posts.

When Mr. DeedSpeakOut and I had Offspring #1 and then, several years later, Offspring #2, we didn’t send them to public schools. This was partly due to the fact that Greek public schools were on a “one week morning, one week afternoon” schedule that made the logistics of getting one’s children back and forth to school nearly impossible for a working mother. Another factor that played a role—not decisive, but significant —was that we wanted our children to have foreign language instruction incorporated into their school curriculum, and this was only available in private schools. Offspring #1 studied Greek and English, and then did German at the German Institute (and Mandarin with a Chinese private tutor). By the time Offspring #2 was ready for this regimen, we had wised up and sent her for four years to one of the city’s French schools, where she reached NNS (near-native speaker) proficiency in French, and studied both English and Greek in school.

Do we regret not having sent our children to Greek public schools apart from brief interludes (Offspring 1 attended a public school in grades 5 and 6; his teacher was phenomenal; Offspring 2 attended a public school in grade 10; all her teachers were very good, and a couple were terrific)? Yes and no. At the time, we had little choice, at least until both children were old enough to get themselves to and from school alone.

But some of the issues involved in our decision are germane to similar decisions being made daily day by middle class professionals in the U.S. In this respect, I feel some residual regret and guilt.

Two points: first, the public school systems of the U.S. and Greece are comparable in some ways but different in others, as are their private school systems. Our decision-taking was based on some, but not all, of the criteria that prompt parents in the U.S. to send their children to private schools. I am not especially proud of our decision, which suited us at the time as parents both working twelve-hour days, but which didn’t accord with our own upbringing and beliefs.

Second, I note that Mr. DSO had a job offer at the start of his career to assume a position as a professor at the University of North Dakota. We had a plan: DSO to attend law school, Mr. DSO to profess. Had we opted for this life path, we would have sent both children to public schools, no question about it. And I feel confident—no, certain—that both would have received all the benefits Jan Resseger received from her own public education in Montana.

While there is much more to be said on this topic, I’ll conclude this section of my own paean to public education with a note about The Offspring: despite the fact that both attended private schools, both are employed—or will be—in the public interest. Offspring 1 is a public interest attorney in NYC; Offspring 2 is doing graduate work in Public Health and will,hopefully join an agency that works in public health research, advocacy, and outreach.

The lesson here, perhaps: if both your parents were poor and benefited from a public education, your estimation of the worth of the public sector can still be strong, strong enough in fact to dictate your own path in life. Are we proud of The Offspring? Yes, and then some. For this is what Mr. DSO and I believe in: the public benefit, the public weal, the public good.

We now turn to Peter Greene and his post “For Some Reason,” which vividly reminded me how little I had ever really understood about U.S. history, and in particular, racial history—this, despite the fact that I took AP American History as a high school junior, with an excellent textbook and knowledgeable, experienced teacher.

When I began reading intensively about U.S. policy developments in the four areas this blog covers, I didn’t particularly emphasize my own field of experience, education, and don’t cover university education at all, despite the fact that this was my professional field for nearly thirty years. I think the critical developments are occurring at the K-12 level; the issues surrounding our public university systems are related more generally to late-stage capitalism, the introduction of the so-called “business model” into higher ed research funding, the financial collapse of 2008, consequent state budget crises, etc.

The point of Greene’s post is to prompt us to remember, or discover, that the catchy little phrase “Why can’t we all just get along?” is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst. There’s a long, complex history behind why we can’t all get along, and it’s a history largely dominated by federal, state, and locally-sanctioned policies that long enshrined into standard practice discrimination, segregation, and economic inequity for African Americans and Native Americans. The “failures” of inner-city schools are owed to policies—the most influential of which were federal, as described in Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law”—which led to segregation by race and by economic class (often, though not always, overlapping) in every single major metropolitan district in the U.S. The results of these policies are still in effect throughout U.S. city school systems.

When I began my personal crash-course in the changes wrought to public education over the past twenty+ years, it soon became clear that the pattern of charter school openings (and vouchers, in states where they are allowed) displayed a suspicious congruence with inner-city school districts in large metropolitan centers. Such schools, touted as “choice” options for parents, no longer citizens but “consumers,” were producing standardized test results that were as bad or worse than those of the public schools they were intended to replace. And this wasn’t a one-off occurrence; rather, it was the pattern in every single city where charters had been introduced, be it New Orleans, or Detroit, or Chicago, or Miami … or really, anywhere you chose to look.

And it came to me that “failing” inner-city public schools and the tax-supported, quasi-private schools that were being touted as their worthy replacements, and which were failing exactly like their peers, were being asked to solve the consequences of a problem, and not the problem itself.

Rothstein, in my view rightly, observes that federal policies got us into the ethical-moral morass of racial segregation and consequent inequality, and they’re going to have to release us—all of us—from a historical burden that has been weighing on us for centuries. Rothstein has some ideas about how this might be done, but admits that it’s very difficult. A price will have to be paid if we are to heal as a nation. Some might call this necessary price partial reparation; I think of it as a form of restorative justice, and I think the entire country needs to become engaged in such a process.

To return to Peoria and bring the circle full round, so to speak: my high school class had one African American. I never questioned this; to me it seemed natural. African Americans lived on the South Side of Peoria; I attended school on the northern limits of the city.

But now I realize I was wrong not to question this; I was wrong not to wonder why it was that my high school remained segregated in 1971, seventeen years after Brown v. Board of Education.

Admittedly, the public statistics look different today. Richwoods is far more integrated than it was when I was a student. But those familiar with Peoria understand that segregation has simply shifted further north, to Dunlap, which has become the go-to suburb for the city’s wealthy residents—Cat and health care executives, physicians, Bradley university professors. It is now Dunlap’s school district that is overcrowded and overwhelmingly white. The problem hasn’t been solved; it’s simply moved ten miles north.

Not long ago, I learned that Peoria holds the very dubious distinction of being the 2^nd-worst city in the U.S. for African Americans, based on income and unemployment figures. The city’s poorest zip code, 61605 (sixth-poorest in Illinois, which is saying something) lies just minutes by foot from the city’s old urban core, which has been undergoing a slow and sometimes painful gentrification over the past couple decades. We recently learned that the urban core is slated for a substantial new development project, with the relocation of the Order of Saint Francis’ Mission Headquarters to the heart of the “old downtown.” We urge OSF (the largest health care provider in downstate Illinois and the fourth-largest in Illinois) to ensure that residents of zip code 61605 be hired as construction workers for this massive project, and that they be hired to work at the new Mission headquarters. But is anyone in Peoria committed to this?

I feel despair when I think of the Peoria I thought I knew as a child and adolescent, and the Peoria that actually existed only five miles from where I was growing up.

But one can’t give in to despair. DeedSpeakOut recently prodded ProPublica Illinois, a non-profit investigative news organization, to carry out an in-depth historical study of how Peoria ended up the 2^nd-worst city in the U.S. for African Americans, perhaps in collaboration with the local newspaper, The Peoria Journal Star. ProPublica responded that they’d been wondering the same thing. And the Journal Star has really upped its coverage on issues relating to poverty and racial inequities in the city. Is it time for Peorians to come to grips with their history of racial discrimination, segregation, and inequity? And if not now, when?

A final anecdote: in my senior year at Richwoods High, the black student in my class asked me out . But he didn’t ask me out in the normal 17-year-old way, like, “Hey, wanna go to the game/movies/pizza parlor with me next Saturday?” Rather, he said, “If I were to ask you out, would your parents let you go?”

What kind of society was I living in that a classmate couldn’t ask me out because he was black and we both knew it was up to my parents if I could go out with him? This wasn’t equality; this wasn’t even separate but equal. This was, however, Peoria.

Looking back, I’m struck by two things: first, my shame at my own response, and second, the honor of having been someone he considered asking out.

Public education made it possible for me to arrive at this point in my own journey. It’s a journey that can belong to all of us, without exception. In fact, I believe it’s a journey we should all take–and we don’t have to embark on it alone.

This blog covers daily policy developments in health care, the environment, justice and education. It only took a few months to realize that all four areas are characterized by massive inequities, and that every single one pointed to historically-rooted racial and economic disparity as the root cause of injustice.

Liberals make much of justice; we want to see them make just as much of remediating injustice brought about by historically-documented racial, economic, environmental, judicial, and educational inequality.

And that can’t be done with words. Only deeds will do.