a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

American public schools have problems, all agree. Here’s a mental exercise to consider the situation, what has been done, and what might be done.

Imagine that the American public school system is a patient, and it comes to a clinic where there is an office, a department, headed by a doctor supposedly trained to help a public school system. The patient describes symptoms: generalized ache and pain, especially intense in certain schools and prone to spike or become acute under certain circumstances; terrible headaches; fever; unbelievable anxiety and fear of…it searches for the right word…abandonment? being unwanted? The doctor makes notes, and puts a thermometer under the patient’s tongue –starting to search for what is known in doctor-lingo as “the signs,” the measures to go with “the symptoms,” the patient’s subjective report. So far, so normal practice. The next thing the doctor would normally do is take a detailed history and consider what further in-office examination and what further lab tests should be done and what team of doctors should be called upon to provide a holistic diagnosis and treatment plan.

But then things start to go strangely: the doctor, looking at the thermometer, says “Oh, my god, you DO have a fever!” And, sounding frantic, immediately prescribes: “We have to test you for fever every hour until the fever disappears. We’ll start immediately: You must come back in an hour and have your temperature taken again.” So the school system reorganizes its whole life to be able to come in every hour for the tests. But, meanwhile, the condition gets worse, the fever gets worse, the anxiety escalates, and the doctor, alarmed, decides to use a different type of thermometer, which will, perhaps, give a more satisfactory result. In his panic, he starts blaming the school system, especially its teachers and its students.

Considering this situation, you, a citizen supporting this clinic with your taxes, would, of course, judge that the doctor is crazy, the clinic is beyond irresponsible to have such a person on staff. Malpractice all around. The patient is fast approaching a chronic condition. But you would not be listened to. Instead, years pass until the clinic, on the doctor’s recommendation, passes the No Child Left Behind Act of 2003, and arranges for the patient to come in to be tested with a new electronic standardized thermometer. Proudly looking at the bigger picture, the clinic also passes legislation to support new clinics, privately financed, to treat the patient part by part. Any part of the patient not responding to the temperature test will be closed down or amputated; only the parts retaining some health will go to the new clinics to have their temperatures taken. By the time things get to this point, there is such craziness and chaos that everyone not making money from the clinics is depressed and hopeless –particularly the patient.

That, in metaphor, is where we are with the problems of the American public school system. But what if things had gone normally in the diagnosis of a complex problem or set of problems?

Consider the history that was not taken. As I was suggesting in my last post, the American public schools have a long history of being caught between corporate worker-creation purposes and their public purposes, which were to prepare children to be “the public,” to be citizens, and to give them the conditions for that preparation: that they not be child-laborers and that they not live in circumstances –for example, extreme poverty—that would block their development and their schooling. The schools were to be the first developmental step for children in the direction of equality.

But suppose we just start taking the history at the moment circa 1970, in the middle of the Vietnam War, when it took a turn especially fateful for the present. At that moment, fifty years ago, the huge post-war demographic surge known as the Baby Boomers were getting ready to put the huge demographic surge of their own children into the public schools. Only a very small portion of the Boomers had not gone to public schools themselves—there was, for example, no private school in my town. With very few exceptions, my friends had mothers or grandmothers who cared for them at home before they went to school.

Looking at the history, we find out that a crucial piece of legislation came before the Congress: the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971. Both Houses passed the legislation by small margins after much acrimonious debate. Republicans, particularly from the South and Mid-west, invoked Hitler and Stalin (both) and called the legislation “socialist.” The nation’s children would be “federalized” if they were offered state-supported daycare and preschools (on the model of Head Start but for a wider population) and expanded healthcare. Federalized children, when grown up, would lose the Cold War. Following the advice of the child psychologists, educationalists, and pediatricians who had contributed to the bill and came to testify in favor it, the Democrats were pretty solidly behind this Good Society recognition of how crucial a good start in life and education is for a child. There was even some recognition that women, entering the workforce in greater numbers, needed help as much as they needed traditional family structure to evolve in the direction of equality for them without jeopardizing children while it did. Richard Nixon, alarmed that the Act had passed, vetoed it, claiming that it was too expensive, unworkable, and –most importantly–“family-weakening.” Nixon proposed, instead a program that would give families in which both parents worked some financial help with private day-care costs. So much for the poor and unemployed. So much for single mothers. So much for public concern for early childhood development.

This piece of the history marks, I think the great turning away from public schools and toward private care, schooling (not preschooling), and healthcare for children. It favored middle and upper class families conventionally defined. And it was connected to the great turning away from family programs that took any form other than subsidies and tax breaks for the middle and upper class (less and less for the middle class in comparison with the upper class as time went on). It encouraged all parents to work and thus keep tax revenues up and welfare rolls down. No more “welfare queens”! The only part of the Comprehensive approach that survived was passed in 1974 as the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. (“Even Richard Nixon can’t be in favor of child abuse,” quipped CAPTA’s main sponsor, Senator Walter Mondale.)

The percentage of children reported for suspected abuse continued the steady rise that had begun in the 1960s; most of them never got any treatment, and ended up in the public schools. The Supreme Court majority helped the situation grow worse with Wright v. Ingraham (1977). This decision permitted public school officials to punish their students corporally without any due process at all and without students and their families being able to argue that “cruel and unusual punishment” had taken place. So child abuse increased right in the schools as well (except where municipal boards forbade it).

By the early 1980s, it was obvious to many that something was profoundly wrong. One of the country’s best-known journalists, Vance Packard, wrote Our Endangered Children (1983). He pointed out that the public schools were deteriorating physically as well as in terms of the quality of education they offered; and he argued that inequality was beginning to define both the children going to the schools and the schools themselves. By the early 1990s, after eight years of Reaganomics, Dr. David Hamburg, head of the Carnegie Foundation, surveyed all the then-existing reports on the nation’s children and published Today’s Children: A Generation in Crisis (1991). He wrote about every area of children’s lives, including the lack of pre-natal and pediatric care, early daycare, public pre-schooling, support for public education. He wrote about the shocking numbers of children who had no childhood –those who died young, the abused, the girls pregnant at 13, the boys in juvenile detention or prison. Jonathan Kozol, a teacher turned chronicler of the public schools, showed how the nation’s schools were becoming resegregated as inner city poverty soared. In Savage Inequalities (1991), Kozol described all-black city schools that were dilapidated, ill-equipped, without teachers or with substitute teachers who revolved through. Classrooms overfull of kids who were hardly literate or numerate –but who had no trouble understanding that they and their schools were being discriminated against. They knew perfectly well that there were public schools in other parts of their city that were state-of-the-art while they were in something that resembled a rotting juvenile detention center in the middle of a war zone.

These are just a few of the books that tell the history of our patient. For the last twenty years, there has been no mystery about what is wrong with our public schools –with most of them, not the few that are well-funded, well-kept, community supported, able to recruit excellent teachers. There is also no mystery about what the treatment should have been when the problems began to escalate. First, adequate local and federal funding distributed to meet the needs of schools –more funding for the schools facing the most challenges. Long range planning to reorganize and restore “the infrastructure,” “the facilities,” that is, the buildings and equipment; trimming and pruning when appropriate, building new when appropriate, responding to changing demographics. Fair pay and conditions for teachers who were free to unionize and who are supported for their own continuing education. Teacher-developed curriculae offered with the minimum of testing or teaching to the test. Developmental support for the children –good food, good healthcare and attention to fitness, good ESL, good counseling, good parent involvement or help when there are no functional parents. After-school programs. Daycare and preschooling. Adult education on premises. Schools kept, as much as possible, to a administratable size, no huge children factories; schools kept connected to other community institutions –for example, embedded in universities, attached to public service agencies, sponsored by retirement homes. It does take a village to raise a child! It is not good to indenture children to businesses or turn their schools into businesses or hire business people with no background in education to run them.

Our patient, the public school system, was traumatized. It was an abandoned child. Adults left it behind while they went off and did their ideologies. All along, since the 1970s, it has needed caring, knowledgeable, and committed adults to recognize what was happening, come forth, and rescue it. And rescue the meaning of public education for a nation that wishes to think it is a democracy. Many brave, public-spirited souls have tried heroically —against the odds of an adultocentric callousness and craziness that really ought to be named for what it is, prejudice against children. It needs a diagnostic name and treatment, this social and political illness: on the model of “racism” and “sexism,” we could call it “childism.”

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