Whenever anyone identifies as conservative, I tend to hear about how all the public schools are terrible, and if there were only private schools everywhere, people would all be educated. First and foremost, that is garbage propaganda offered by the mainstream media, which is owned by people who never sent their children to public school. Secondly, history shows that private schools were only developed to avoid school integration in the South, which is where I have lived. The notion that public schools are inherently broken is what people tell themselves to destroy an educated population, and there is no proof that they would all be decrepit if people actually wanted to maintain an educated population.
One thing I constantly hear about now is how nobody is allowed to fail anyone anymore, and that everyone should be more interested in the traditional grading methods. Does anyone think that poor, single parents working multiple jobs in multigenerational households went up to the school to petition for this? Even they did, nobody abides by the words of poor parents, and nobody can prove otherwise. Rich, white parents have the ears and wallets of the majority of school boards in the United States. When I think of all the helicopter parents, I am reminded of a Garrison Keiller phrase about his fictional town of Lake Wobegon: “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”
Too many schools suffer from excessive interference by parents who cannot differentiate the children as anyone other than extensions of themselves. They lack boundaries, and disrupt most of the processes at even the best of schools due to their need to be in control. Image is everything to such parent, so children are never allowed to make parents look bad. Because of such mindsets, offering poor grades or even maintaining a modicum of discipline is seen as a direct threat to the autonomy of the “child,” upon whom the parents are projecting themselves. With nutjobs trying to ban books and enforce religious beliefs on the vulnerable, good teaching would be a difficult task with the best of teachers.
During the reign of Bush II–because no one will tell me that the Bush family did not intend to develop a monarchy themselves–No Child Left Behind was enacted. The policy largely focuses on tests, which means that as long as the tests are passed, the school qualifies for more federal aid. Growing up, I was one of the students who found those tests easy, so for me, there were never any problems. I was also the oldest of two children in a two-parent household run by Yale-graduate attorneys who owned their own successful practice, which meant that school was seen as my job. Most people did not grow up in such a household, which I learned through sleepovers. Parentified children or those who might have had mental health–although we rarely discussed things like that in the 1990s–could have experienced unseen challenges.
Blanket statements are offered by propaganda, and the only reason politicians make them is because of their donors. No one will ever know what a truly equitable school system looks like for the United States because nobody really wants to know. The wealthy run the policy, and they have never demonstrated a capacity to play fair; essentially, they cannot compete, and so they cheat. Public schools could have been much better than they were, but as long as people cling to the dominant narrative, the children will ultimately be the ones who suffer.
Chasing A Dying Empire 