Public schools in the United States have been in crisis for a while. If you have any stake in the education game, you know this is nothing new.
In the wake of COVID-19, public schools have had unprecedented amounts of pressure put on them to offer students a high quality education, to pay their employees and to respond with compassion in their communities.
With all this happening at once, public schools have been forced to re- imagine how “school” operates. Certainly the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater, but in the wake of all these changes, schools are being forced to adapt to the needs of their stakeholders in ways that should have been extant years ago.
Change can be scary…ooooooooooooooooo…but public schools are being forced to get caught up with the modern world.
After all, public schools are supposed to be preparing students for the world they are to inhabit, not one that existed 60 years in the past.
Here are the first two suggestions to encourage public schools to expand and adapt in the wake of the coming changes.
***
1. Get Police Out of Schools
Imagine you’re a 7th grade student and you’re walking to class. An officer on campus walks by you. The officer has a gun, a taser, a billie club, handcuffs, a radio, and is wearing full body armor.
Do you feel any safer? Do you feel like school is a safe place to come learn and grow?
The increasing trend in public schools is to have a school/taxpayer funded police department at each school district. The justification is that a police force or department in schools provides a safer environment. This is a reactionary response in the wake of the upswing in school shootings since the early 2000s.
Public schools have added more officers and created school based police departments. School boards and bond packages across the nation have voted to use tax dollars to build these departments. Yet the frequency of school shootings and other acts of violence on campuses are increasing. If having police on campuses was effective, shouldn’t these numbers be decreasing?
While the intention is good, the fruit of increased police presence in schools is not. The reality is that public schools are the barometer for what happens outside of schools.
If we want our schools and our children safer, then we must discuss the big-picture issues that our school-aged population now face. Children in public school are now facing: an unprecedented mental health crisis, an unprecedented substance abuse crisis, more single-parent homes, and both generational and onset economic hardships. Everything in the preceding list is exacerbated by a public health crisis such as COVID-19
Funds to create programs and to provide care and support directly related to the above listed problems can be redistributed from school-based police departments.
What would you rather spend your tax-dollars on…more police presence on campus, or programs that will give healing and relief to the most vulnerable children in our communities?
***
2. Teach and Model Character Development
Most public schools in most states adhere to a model known as “standards-based instruction”. These standards are set by a state education agency and local school districts must comply to receive funding from their state agency. While some states have adopted recommendations from the federal level, the method is the same.
There is a standard of minimum requirements for each student in each subject in each grade. The student is expected to meet these requirements to advance in their education. We would not argue that setting standards as a guideline is a bad.
These standards are academic in nature and revolve around task completion and an archaic system of “grading.” (More on grades in Part II).
But as educators strive to make students reach these standards, and the students work to achieve these standards, the pursuit becomes highly individualistic. This emphasis on personal achievement is a byproduct of standards-based instruction. While high individual achievement is good, these standards reward task completion, grades, and high achievement over building character.
Character doesn’t win school districts awards, nor gain them funding. High achievement does. Thus, we have entered an age where public education has been corporatized at-large.
As Lukianoff and Haidt suggest in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, individualized focus on high achievement incentivizes aims at creating educational advantage in the context of economy. The cost has been the increasing fragility of our youth. The educational doctrine over the past 30 years has been: Make good grades, so you can get into a good college, so you can get a high paying job. If this model of “success” were actually successful then why are rates of anxiety and depression at all time highs? This has been the product of our public schools.
“Success” is not a buffer nor an excuse for being a crummy person. But often we have failed in public education to model this. The proof is in the pudding.
With a poisonous cocktail of rising social factors at play, the fact of the matter is that children aren’t taught the value of character and integrity at home. A large part of this burden falls on public educators. (Schools could circumvent money from police departments to create parent education programs…)As anyone who has worked in the field for any length of time can attest, public educators are often surrogate parents.
As schools reinterpret how to operate in these unprecedented times, the burden is on educators to become more empathetic, to model this to their students, and to value character building over high achievement and the money attached.
While immediate changes in these areas may not be workable, educators and officials must begin re-imaging what public schools must look like as the world around us continues to change.
