From: Bill Ayers
Dear President Obama: Congratulations!
I’m sure this is a
moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate,
regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well
a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely
hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.
The landscape of
“educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on
all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the
mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled
as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several
administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a
merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton,
and Eli Broad.
Whether inept or
clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to
take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all
else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their
particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne
Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of
reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that
agenda.
The three most
trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school
reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private
management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of
teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to
recognize an educated person through a test score. While there’s absolutely no
substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs
along unfazed—fact-free, faith-based reform at its core, resting firmly on rank
ideology rather than any evidence whatsoever.
The three pillars of
this agenda are nested in a seductive but wholly inaccurate metaphor: Education
is a commodity like any other—a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a
screwdriver—that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Within this controlling
metaphor the schoolhouse is assumed to be a business run by a CEO, with
teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly
line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned
heads.
It’s rather easy to
begin to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and
“privatizing” a space that was once public, is a natural event. Teaching toward
a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but
privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes”
(winners and losers) becomes a rational proxy for learning; “zero tolerance”
for student misbehavior turns out to be a stand-in for child development or
justice; and a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never
on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials (they call it
“accountability")—is logical and level-headed.
I urge you to resist
these policies and reject the dominant metaphor as wrong in the sense of
inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral.
Education is a
fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on
a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed
on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the
full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each
is the condition for the full development of all. Further, while schooling in
every totalitarian society on earth foregrounds obedience and conformity,
education in a democracy emphasizes initiative, courage, imagination, and
entrepreneurship in order to encourage students to develop minds of their
own.
When the aim of
education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes
exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it. People
are turned against one another as every difference becomes a potential deficit.
Getting ahead is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which
can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned.
It’s no wonder that cheating scandals are rampant in our country and fraudulent
claims are commonplace.
Race to the Top is but
one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education as
the Secretary of Education begins to look and act like a program officer for
some charity rather than the leading educator for all children: It’s one state
against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce
competition with the second grade across the hall.
You have opposed
privatizing social security, pointing out the terrible risks the market would
impose on seniors if the voucher plan were ever adopted. And yet you’ve
supported—in effect—putting the most endangered young people at risk through a
similar scheme. We need to expand, deepen, and fortify the public space,
especially for the most vulnerable, not turn it over to private managers. The
current gold rush of for-profit colleges gobbling up student loans is but one
cautionary tale.
You’ve said that you
defend working people and their right to organize and yet you have publicly and
noisily maligned teachers and their unions on several occasions. You need to
consider that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that
good teaching conditions are good learning conditions. We can’t have the best
learning conditions if teachers are forced away from the table, or if the
teaching corps is reduced to a team of short-termers and school tourists.
You have declared your
support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance
or background, and yet your policies rely on a relentless regimen of
standardized testing, and test scores as the sole measure of progress.
You should certainly
pause and reconsider. What’s done is done, but you can demonstrate wisdom and
true leadership if you pull back now and correct these dreadful mistakes.
In a vibrant democracy,
whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a
minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne
Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three
sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There
students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to
experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and
a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a
respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long
career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their
mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed,
rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).
Good enough for you,
good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in
public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any
other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school
you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys
our democracy.”
Sincerely,
William Ayers
Published by Rethinking Schools.
Want to make sure this letter
gets heard—and acted upon—send it to Secretary Duncan.
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