Jan Resseger explains that only one choice at election time will protect vulnerable students. Reposted with permission.
In 1899, on the first page of The School and Society, John Dewey defined educational equity as essential for the public schools : “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put through the agency of the school at the disposal of is future members. All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”
Certainly, John Dewey didn’t fully anticipate the ugly conversation we are having today—where an attack on Dewey’s principle of equity and on public schooling itself has been mounted by well funded billionaires in philanthropies like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and Americans for Prosperity, well supplied with ideology and policy developed by the Heritage Foundation and other so-called think tanks, and spouted by billionaire-funded proxies like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The ethos underneath the wave of school vouchers passed by far-right state legislators as well as the specific educational policies promoted in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 includes individualistic consumerism and white ethno-nationalism. There is a lot of money being invested today to help us all forget about Dewey’s vision.
One of the most troubling aspects of today’s far right attack on public schooling is that it appears to be a another in a long a series of political reactions against the principle of equity in our public schools. Since the Civil War, according to constitutional scholar Derek Black in his powerful book, Schoolhouse Burning, our society has struggled to realize our long declared principle that all children, no matter their race, gender, or immigrant status have an equal right to education. Black writes that after the Civil War in order to join the union, states were required to guarantee in their state constitutions that no child would be denied the opportunity for education. Among the primary purposes of those post-Civil War state constitutions is protection of the right to equal public education for every child: “The framework is the same as it has always been… where we understand public education as a constitutional right. This means public education is the state’s absolute and foremost duty… This means the state must fully fund schools and reform policies unrelated to money when they impede adequate and equal opportunity. This means that the state cannot manipulate educational opportunity by geography, race, poverty, or anything else for that matter. This means the state cannot favor alternatives to public education over public education itself. This means the state must honor the constitution over its own ideologies and bias. This, finally, means that public education must be in service of our overall constitutional democracy. Every education policy we face must be filtered through these principles.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp, 254-255)
Walter Feinberg, a philosopher of education, names another primary purpose for public schools. Our schools must be inclusive of many voices and a safe place for students from all cultures, religions and ethnic and racial backgrounds to be heard: “To be an American, that is, to submit to the nation’s laws, is different than to identify oneself as an American and to participate in the public will formations that determine the direction of national action and inaction. This identification is active and requires an engagement with interpretations of events that comprise the American story. That there is an ‘American story’ means not that there is one official understanding of the American experience but, rather, that those who are telling their versions of the story are doing so in order to contribute to better decision making on the part of the American nation and that they understand that they are part of those decisions. The concept is really ‘Americans’ stories.’” (Common Schools: Uncommon Identities, p. 232) (emphasis in the original)
Not only are both principles —equity and inclusion — left out of this year’s Republican political platform and the policies laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but they are explicitly targeted. In a recent brief, staff at the Brookings Brown Center for Education Policy list eight federal education provisions that many of us take for granted but which would be eliminated. The first six of these proposals would directly undermine equity in K-12 public schooling by reducing services for poor children or ceasing protection of the rights of racial minority or LGBTQ+ students. Such proposals are designed take us back to the 1950s, before more recent reforms ensured that public schools would come closer to representing the value of equal educational opportunity which our our federal government has sought to help protect since the Civil Rights Movement. Project 2025 would:
- promote universal school choice (universal private school tuition vouchers);
- eliminate the Head Start program that serves preschoolers in poverty;
- discontinue Title I, that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children;
- rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students;
- undercut the federal capacity to enforce civil rights law;
- “reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools”;
- dismantle the U.S. Department of Education; and
- privatize the federal student loan portfolio.
The first six of these provisions would undermine the protection of equitable educational services for vulnerable groups of children. Project 2025’s education provisions would also further undercut inclusion and diversity at school. These policies represent today’s far-right parents’ rights ideology aimed at elevating the the personal efforts of individual families to protect their children from “woke” policies or from peers the parents consider undesirable. The first—universal school privatization—would, of course, also create the opportunity for parents to remove their children, at public expense, to private educational institutions that can insulate their children from experiences and peers that threaten their parents’ values. Walter Feinberg would argue that in a broad and extremely diverse society, insulating and separating our children denies their preparation for citizenship by undercutting the public system’s capacity to bring together students whose values, ethnic and racial heritage, economic backgrounds and sexual orientation may differ.
Project 2025 was developed as a blueprint for the policies of a future Trump presidency by the Heritage Foundation with the participation of many officials of the former Trump administration. Despite that Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025’s proposals and despite that much of this agenda could not be imposed by Donald Trump if he were to be elected without buy-in from Congress, the proposals, if enacted, would dangerously threaten the future of public education. It is also important to remember that as President, Trump appointed Betsy DeVos as his education secretary—the same Betsy DeVos who founded and for years served as a board member of the nation’s most prominent school voucher advocacy organization, the American Federation of Children. And as education secretary, DeVos repeatedly inserted into each federal budget a proposal for a $5 billion federal tuition tax credit voucher program—which, fortunately, Congress neglected to pass.
The Republican educational agenda starkly contrasts with the public school agenda of the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. In contrast to this year’s Republican prescription for universal school choice, Kamala Harris declared her support for public schooling and for supporting teachers in her first speech when she ran as a candidate for the presidency in 2019: “You can judge a society by the way it treats its children, and one of the greatest expressions of love that a society can give to its children is educating those children with resources they need.”
Education Week‘s Libby Stanford reports on Harris’s priorities in the current presidential campaign and on the platform passed at the Democratic Convention in August: “Vice President Kamala Harris… would push for universal prekindergarten, expanded career and technical education, a reduced emphasis on standardized testing, and efforts to improve teachers’ working conditions if elected later this year… The DNC platform calls on Democrats to oppose private school choice..” Stanford adds: “The platform also calls for full funding of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. When the federal government first mandated special education services in K-12 schools with the 1975 Individuals for All Handicapped Children Act, Congress promised to gradually increase investments to ultimately cover 40 percent of the nation’s average per-pupil expenditure for public schools to pay for special education. Congress has never met that benchmark… Since Biden took office, IDEA funding has increased by 10 percent.”
Supporting public education has been a primary concern in Biden-Harris federal budgets, a priority the administration has had to fight for in a Congress where the Republican-dominated House of Representatives has pressed for an 80 percent cut to Title I. The American Federation of School Administrators reports that under the Biden-Harris administration, public schools have benefited from a $2 billion increase in Title I, a $1.5 billion increase in IDEA Part B funding, a $628 million increase in career, technical and adult education, and a $95 million increase in Title III funding to expand instruction for English language learners.
Harris chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, a former public school educator, has led his state legislature to increase school funding by nearly $2.3 billion, to advocate for reducing racial gaps in school achievement and school discipline, and to provide free meals to all of Minnesota’s public school children.
All these investments have supported the principle of the equitable provision of schooling for ethnic minority children and disabled children—groups of children whose needs are inadequately funded by too many states. Harris’s personal experience as an elementary school child who was part of a voluntary school busing program in Berkeley, California also taught her about the importance of making the ideals of inclusion and diversity work. The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler quotes from Harris’s memoir: “Looking at the photo of my first-grade class reminds me of how wonderful it was to grow up in such a diverse environment. Because the students came from all over the area, we were a varied bunch; some grew up in public housing and others were the children of professors.”
Meckler continues, however, explaining that Kamala Harris also learned about the complexities of making diverse schools work: “Children who participated in the program were forever changed, according to interviews with about a dozen people who, like Harris, were bused in Berkeley in the early to mid-1970s. The period shaped their worldviews, and some of Harris’s childhood friends and classmates say the program was the reason they have felt comfortable in diverse environments ever since. The desegregation program also was hard for many students, with some describing fights and bullying between students of different races and economic statuses and schools that did little to help them work through the tensions. The result: Busing exposed children in Berkeley to both the hope for an America that can rise above racial strife and the reality of how hard it is to achieve it.”
Kamala Harris recently announced one more top priority supporting equity and inclusion of all children as part of her economic plan: strong support for reinstating the expanded and fully refundable Child Tax Credit that the Biden-Harris administration had pushed as the centerpiece of the 2021 American Rescue Plan COVID relief, but which Congress allowed to expire in 2022. There is widespread agreement that an unacceptable rate of U.S. child poverty is a primary cause of huge opportunity gaps among children in our public schools. In a recent NY Times column, economist Paul Krugman notes that “(W)e could have expanded the child tax credit just a few weeks ago—although not as much as Harris wants—but Senate Republicans blocked the bill.”
This year there an unbridgeable disparity between the two Presidential candidates’ goals for our society, their grasp of the role of government, their educational philosophies, and their vision for public education. The contrast is evident not only in their promises, but also in the investments they made and the colleagues they appointed or with whom they chose to align. Only the Harris-Walz campaign supports public school equity and inclusion.
