Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

For the past decade or so, no profession has been as demeaned as public education. Instead of facing the fact that schools and social service and public health agencies are woefully underfunded and the fact that the safety net for families has been shredded, school reformers and politicians blame “failing schools” on bad teachers and poor parenting. In doing so they have turned parents and taxpayers against public— make the “government”— schools making it increasingly difficult for public education to get out of the death spiral it’s been put into.

But thanks to persistent work by public school advocates like Diane Ravitch, Jeff Bryant, and a host of progressive politicians and writers the public is beginning to understand that the public schools aren’t “failing” because teachers are failing, they are “failing” based on meaningless data gathered from irrelevant and time consuming standardized tests that are making schools joyless places to learn. And now, after over a decade of stagnant pay and nearly two decades of test-driven instruction, teachers are coalescing around these issues AND the issue of privatization and getting some favorable attention and favorable results. As Axios writer Khorri Atkinson reports, there is no end in sight for the nationwide wave of teacher strikes because the teachers’ calls for “…smaller class sizes, fewer annual standardized tests, and opposition to the expansion of private-school voucher programs and charter schools” resonate with parents. Like the teachers, parents are tired of overcrowded classrooms, the mind-numbing test-driven curricula in many schools, and the closure of neighborhood schools to effectively push students into private for-profit schools located far from their homes and not necessarily with the playmates their children grew up with. And they are also tired of seeing teachers come and go from the schools in their communities and in many cases not seeing their children’s teachers in the community because the teachers cannot afford to live there.

Maybe… just maybe… the tide is turning and the respect for teachers will return and with it a chance to restore public education to its rightful place as a hallowed institution in our country.