Classrooms are powerful places

Policymakers in the Ohio legislature keep sowing seeds of discontent with public education, casting public schools as failed institutions and disinvesting in the common good. I can imagine how educators in our school district and across the state feel knowing that powerful people ridicule their work and happily reduce it to test-taking compliance, missing the full sweep of what education is meant to achieve.

If we want to preserve public education, we have to keep fighting the failure narrative. I needed inspiration to fight on, so I turned to books by Mike Rose, a hopeful education researcher who spent years as an educator and classroom observer. His books, Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, and When the Light Goes On, are full of wisdom and hope. His poetic style conveys what a profound experience it is to learn, and he highlights the amazing human skills and connections that make learning possible.

Rose reminds us that public education is at the center of a free society. He is concerned that the failure narrative puts public education and democracy at risk and ignores “the joy of intellectual work and the role of public institutions in fostering it.” For him, education is more than just a knowledge-delivery system.

Rose spent four years visiting classrooms, where he witnessed “the beautiful intricacy of teaching and learning and what should be the goal of education: to open the mind and explore in a baffling world who one is and the possibilities for shaping what is yet to come.” He is disappointed that the intellectual and social richness he witnessed in classrooms everywhere is rarely acknowledged in the public sphere.

Rose rejects the failure narrative as too removed from the reality of the classroom, noting, “we have a tendency to diminish the day-to-day practice of schooling.” He supports a critical review of public institutions but sees great possibilities when looking closely at everyday life in our schools.

I want our public schools to thrive and survive. Rose’s passion and clarity have revived my determination to do what I can to keep alive the “promise of public education in America,” and to resist the movement to dismantle our public system under the false premise of failure.

Rose gives us clear clues about what we can do to sustain education in a democracy. It takes all of us. As residents of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District, we can create enthusiasm for our public schools and reject the failure narrative.

We can remind critics that the truth is to be found where the work is done, not in ideology. We can value the complex work and diverse outcomes that are the evidence of success, outcomes that a standardized test cannot measure. We can resist the trap of broad, sweeping judgment when it comes to public education and challenge those who trash educators or our public schools.

We can hold our educators in high esteem, thank them for their expertise and recognize their priceless work empowering our children, shaping our collective future and driving our democracy. This fall, 19 teachers, 28 classified staff and four administrators started their careers in our school district. Six are first-year teachers. Welcome to our district’s talented and committed staff, who do everything from driving buses to creating warm and challenging classroom communities where children are safe to take risks, grapple with new ideas, and discover their own power to learn.

Rose reminds us to say what matters and focus on the details. It is both possible and essential for us to do that. Democracy is at stake.