CAP And Feckless Democrats On Education

Public education has been a political orphan for so many years now, going back roughly to the time that the Democratic Party sold itself to neo-liberalism. Here is the whole problem in one infuriating piece.

It's the Center for American Progress (CAP). CAP was once the holding pen for folks awaiting their spot in a Hillary Clinton administration, a sort of left-leaning thinky tank. And now they've decided they want to speak out on the subject of public education.

The piece, leaning heavily on the results of a couple of surveys, is entitled "Book Banning, Curriculum Restrictions, and the Politicization of U.S. Schools,' written by Akilah Alleyne, and it is devoid of any sense of irony or self-awareness. But Alleyne has only been at CAP for a year, and prior to that she was studenting at the University of Delaware (she went in in 2011 and came out in about a decade later with a PhD while doing a bunch of other stuff), so she may not be so aware of where CAP has been on the whole "politicizing education" thing.

There's a lot that's good in this piece. I kind of love the end of this sentence:

At least 17 states have introduced bills containing gag orders or taken other steps that would restrict how teachers can discuss American history and current events, including pulling books off library shelves in an effort to suppress so-called “divisive concepts”—a shorthand affectation nearly always referring to issues about race and identity.

Yeah, "shorthand affectation" is about right. 

She gets a bunch of other things right. 

Efforts to censor teachers, omit history, or ban important conversations about race in our schools go way too far. Our children deserve an education honest about who we are, demonstrating integrity in how we treat others, and creating a sense of belonging so every child has the freedom to learn, grow, and pursue their dreams.

Check. It is hugely undernoted that all of these gag laws and book restrictions are not about parents' rights or teachers' rights but about restricting the rights of students. So applause for touching on that.

Certain politicians try to use race to turn us against schools and teachers, or point the finger at parents. These politicians want to keep us from coming together to demand every school provide a quality education to every child, not just the children of the wealthy few.

Sure, though I'd go a step further and note that the subtext of all these gag laws and CRT panic and book restrictions is that public schools can't be trusted, and we should burn down the whole system and replace it with vouchers (used, ideally, at private Christian schools). 

But honest--there are some decent ideas in the piece. But there is also this big, bold headline:

Education should not be politicized

Here's the thing. This kind of clueless reversal has become a staple of the reformy crowd. "We really need to improve the quality of discussion about education," reformsters would say, after years of rough unrestrained attacks on teachers. "We must do something about this terrible over-emphasis on high stakes testing," said Arne Duncan, after spending years helping double down on the federal emphasis on high stakes testing.

This is more of that. CAP has been in there swinging for all the reformster standards, including and especially Common Core and high stakes testing connected to it. They leaned on that stuff so hard that I literally ran out of headline ideas for posts about it on this blog. And they pursued all of these reformy goals through political means. 

Democrats have completely lost the knack of supporting public education, leaving them to just sort of make feckless noises in the general direction. They slipped into some kind of neo-lib stupor decades ago leading them to become enthusiastic partners in the right-wing led business of dismantling public education and selling off the parts, all the while listening to politicians and political operatives instead of people actually working in schools. Should not be politicized??!! Don't tell me--get in your time machine and go back and tell the members of your own party.

Do I seem cranky? Probably because of the breaking news that the Democratic candidate for governor of my state, Pennsylvania, is supporting a voucher program that is built on the same model as the vouchers legislation created by the GOP all across the country. Democrats continue to be a feckless, useless, and faithless when it comes to public education. Framed another way, I'm not so sure the issue is politics in education but that the Democratic party so often insists on being on the wrong side of the politics. And CAP has typified that problem every step of the way.

There are some good things in this piece, and I'm sure I'm in a bit of a mood over Shapiro, but damn-- just once I want some Democratic operation (like, say, the entire Biden administration) to say, "We're sorry, but we got a bunch of stuff wrong before, and we'd like to correct that" before they launch into their next round of advice about how to Fix Things.