Words&Dirt

“Through this tree, we glimpse the benefits of ecological thinking.  Instead of viewing a tree simply as something that looks nice or provides a single offering such as apples or shade, we can begin to see how deeply connected a tree is to its surroundings, both living and inanimate.  A tree is a dynamic element embedded in and reacting to an equally dynamic landscape.  It transforms wind and sunlight into a variety of daily and seasonally changing microclimates, harvests nutrients, builds soil, pumps and purifies air and water, creates and concentrates rain, and shelters and feeds wildlife and microbes.  Add to all this the better-known benefits for people: fruit or nuts, shade, climbing and other fun for kids, and the beauty of foliage, flowers, and form.  We start to see how tightly enmeshed is a simple tree with all the other elements in a landscape.  Now we can begin to imagine the richness of a landscape of many plant species, all interconnected by flows of energy and nutrients, nurturing and being nourished by the animals and microbes that flap and crawl and tunnel among them.”

––Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway, loc. 2804

“Poverty persists not because schools are bad and teachers don’t care but because society neglects its root causes.  Concentrated poverty and racial segregation are social problems, not school problems.  Schools don’t cause poverty and racial segregation, nor can schools solve these problems on their own.  W. E. B. DuBois said during the depths of the Great Depression that ‘no school, as such, can organize industry, or settle the matter of wage and income, can found homes or furnish parents, can establish justice or make a civilized world.’  DuBois was not ‘making excuses.’  He was placing the blame for poverty and inequality where it belongs: on the shoulders of those who control industry and government.

DuBois recognized that schools alone cannot create equality or eliminate poverty.  They can help highly motivated students escape poverty.  Many thousands of personal stories attest to the power of one teacher, one principal, one school, that saved a student from his or her parents’ life of hardship.  Educators and schools do have the remarkable power to change lives.

As important and inspiring as those stories are, they are atypical.  There is no example in which an entire school district eliminated poverty by reforming its schools or by replacing public education with privately managed charters and vouchers.  If the root causes of poverty are not addressed, society will remain unchanged.  Some poor students will get the chance to go to college, but the vast majority who are impoverished will remain impoverished.  The current reform approach is ineffective at eliminating poverty or improving education.  It may offer an escape hatch for some poor children, as public schools always have, but it leaves intact the sources of inequality.  The current reform approach does not alter the status quo of deep poverty and entrenched inequality.  After more than a decade of No Child Left Behind, we now know that a program of testing and accountability leaves millions of children behind and does not eliminate poverty or close achievement gaps.  The growing demand for more testing and more accountability in the wake of NCLB is akin to bringing a blowtorch to put out a fire.  More of the same is not change.  The testing, accountability, and choice strategies offer the illusion of change while changing nothing.  They mask the inequity and injustice that are now so apparent in our social order.  They do nothing to alter the status quo.  They preserve the status quo.  They are the status quo.

Will it be expensive to address the root causes of poor academic performance?  Of course, but probably not as expensive as the cost of doing nothing.

We need broader and deeper thinking.  We must decide if we truly want to eliminate poverty and establish equal educational opportunity.  We must decide if we truly want to build a society with liberty and justice for all.  If that is our true purpose, then we need to move on two fronts, changing society and improving schools at the same time.”

––Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch, loc. 4580