When Schooling Becomes Nonsense

How Can We Support Those We Serve?

Once upon a time, or so I’m told, publishers were able to make a single edition of a textbook and call it a day. Schools did whatever they wanted with that material, but they didn’t ask the publishers to re-create it to meet their local or individual needs.

Could that really be true? Who can even imagine it?

Those days are long gone. My entire professional life has been spent in a world of state standards and, at least for the more populous states, state-specific editions of textbooks and programs.

But even that world is disappearing. The idea that you can create a single version of a program to meet the needs of an entire state? That’s not good enough! Simply aligning to the grade level, academic standards is just the beginning of the challenge now. You also have to deal with local culture and local concerns and local fears. We can’t leave it up to the teachers to adapt materials on their own, to meet local needs. You can’t trust those people! Or maybe you can trust them, but you can’t ask them to do all that work.

It’s strange, but in some ways, addressing different needs between Massachusetts and Mississippi is actually less challenging than differentiating between Boston or Jackson, or any other city, and the smaller, more rural communities in either state. They have different values. Some of them are suspicious of “socialist government schools.” Some of them are suspicious of “bible-thumping activists.” All of them require materials to guide student learning.

But how can you create an American history program that emphasizes the long arc of the fight for civil rights—the struggle to extend the rights and blessings of freedom to marginalized minority groups—if every one of the words I just used is adored and celebrated by some of your clients, but loathed and feared by others? You can’t. What story are we supposed to tell? How many different stories can there be? One per customer?

Math is not much safer, by the way. Just two years ago, the state of Florida blasted new math programs offered by major publishers because they dared to talk about things like cooperation and collaboration in problem-solving, language which fairly stank, they felt, of Social and Emotional Learning, a thing which they did not want spoken of. Florida insisted on doing math in its own way.

These are complicated and angry times. How can we in the educational publishing and ed tech world navigate the needs and fears of our clients responsibly, without sacrificing what we know to be right?

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Two Stories

Anecdote 1: I was leading a curriculum team that was developing assessment items for use in very religiously conservative schools. We had strict guidelines around acceptable content for reading passages and accompanying imagery: no women in the workplace; no boys and girls playing together; no exposed skin in pictures (beyond faces); no discussion of evolution or genetics; no discussion of the planets (because they were named after pagan gods)—things like that.

Did I love working under these constraints? I did not. But I tried to set some guidelines for myself, to feel like I had some agency and control. Avoid certain topics to show respect for their culture and values? That was fine with me; it was their school and their community, and they were paying for the product. But I drew the line at lying. I wasn’t going to say that the sun revolved around the earth, or that the earth was only a few thousand years old, or anything like that. I wasn’t going to present as fact and test student “knowledge” on anything I knew not to be true. Fortunately, nobody ever asked me to.

Anecdote 2: I was leading a product team and one of our reading programs, which published articles weekly across a wide range of subjects, was causing concern in some districts and foreign countries because of some of the topics our writing team selected. This required the writing team to create topic exclusion lists on a district-by-district basis, which was time-consuming and a bit depressing for a team that worked hard to find the widest possible variety of subjects to keep students engaged and interested.

When book-banning talk started heating up after COVID, we decided to put the power in the hand of district leaders instead of our central teams. We built a tool for administrators, where they could review lists of topics and suppress them at a school or district level. The writing team could publish whatever it wanted, and schools could decide what they wanted their student to see or avoid.

Am I proud of either of those actions of mine? They felt right at the time. They felt fair. But was I compromising…or surrendering?

Who Rules: The Clean Part

Who gets to make decisions about what gets taught in schools?

Let’s start with the easy, fairly straightforward part. Starting at the top: the Federal Government (as of this writing) has no authority to dictate what is or isn’t taught. Period. Even when Common Core was being cursed and hissed at, there was no Federal iron hand telling anyone what to teach. The “national” standards were voluntary and adopted (or not) and adapted (or not) by states. There are some Federal rules around how schools are run, partly to enforce civil rights legislation and partly to guide title funding that goes out to states and to schools. But curriculum is not dictated by Washington.

Curriculum is sometimes dictated at the state level. States adopt learning standards to set grade-level goals for students, and some states also adopt textbooks or programs in support of those standards—sometimes a limited shopping list of blessed materials that schools can choose from; sometimes a particular, mandated text; sometimes nothing.

Curriculum is dictated to the largest extent by school districts, under the guidance of leaders hired by elected school boards. School and district leaders make the thousand and one decisions about what gets taught, when it should be taught, how it should be taught, and what’s for lunch. They are accountable to their superintendent, and the superintendent is accountable to the board, and the board is accountable to voters. If the curriculum is poorly aligned to the state’s standards, or test scores are a disaster, or there are complaints from parents, there is a direct chain of accountability.

Who Rules: The Messy Part

Seen this way, parents are the true rulers of the school, through their elected representatives on school boards and the people those boards hire. If parents are unhappy, they can petition and protest. If they’re really unhappy, they can vote people out of office and demand a change. Parents must be heard and attended to.

But do schools do exactly what parents want, all the time? No. They can’t. This is not Baskin Robbins, with 31 flavors. This is not Cold Stone Creamery, where you can decide what fun stuff you want mixed into your ice cream. Every single customer doesn’t get exactly what he or she wants. As I’ve written previously, a district has to serve the parent community—and the rest of the tax-paying community—in the aggregate. It can’t cater to a thousand persnickety demands from a thousand persnickety parents, any more than the police department or the fire department or the guy who plows the streets can. Public schools are a public service—they make decisions for the good of the community as a whole.

The Balancing Act

Ah. But. “The community” is a tricky concept. I mentioned something above about parent and non-parent taxpayers. Those are two separate constituencies within a larger school community. They may share a great many desires and goals, but they may also differ on a number of things. The non-parent segment may be sick and tired of their school taxes going up every year, and cool, new programs being adopted every year, and, I don’t know, fancy new furniture being purchased every decade or so. They may not see any direct benefit in all of this spending, and they won’t until they try to sell their houses.

On the other hand, part of that non-parent constituency (or maybe split between parents and non-parents) might be a sub-community of local employers and business-owners, and perhaps they do see a direct benefit in the strength of the school program, in preparing young people to be better citizens, employees, and consumers.

AND…what are the borders of this community? In this day and age, don’t our young people belong to many communities all at once, all the time? Don’t they have access to, and draw values from, very far-flung people and groups?

Schools, families, neighbors, and religious institutions all work together (in theory) to raise young people into adulthood, steeped in the wisdom and values of the local community. But which community are they beholden to? Is it just the group that pays taxes? Maybe. Is it just the group that complains the loudest? Maybe.

Does a community have the right to have tight, cultural borders—to ignore the wider world and prescribe what children learn and what values they’re taught? Of course it does. Could a different community feel an obligation to prepare students to be part of a larger, more global culture? Of course it could. And those two communities could, conceivably, sit right next to each other. And both have the right to do as they please, and both require products and services to support their educational mission.

The Obligation

I absolutely believe in vendors and publishers respecting and meeting the needs of local cultures, local communities, and local values. And yet, personally, I don’t like the idea of letting schools off the hook too easily. Learning is supposed to be more than simple recitation of what the last generation thought it knew. Learning isn’t supposed to be simple or comfortable, or reflexively responsive to whoever complains the most. Learning requires stretching some muscles—getting smarter and stronger. It shouldn’t be any more comfortable than a good workout at the gym. You’re meant to stress and stretch muscles so that they can grow and take more weight. And just like in the gym, you’re not supposed to be left untouched, undisturbed, unprovoked, unchallenged, unbothered, and unaffected by your education. That’s babysitting, not schooling. The point of babysitting is get kids to go to sleep. The point of schooling is to get them to wake up.

The Danger

A government or a movement that wants to quiet dissent and minimize challenge can do so through brute force, but it can also do so, efficiently and with less shock, by controlling what gets said in public and what gets taught in school. And we don’t need to wait for Big Brother or black helicopters or jack-booted thugs to sweep down into our districts to change what is taught and how it is discussed. We’re already doing it to ourselves, through social media, intimidation of elected school boards, and self-censorship—through activist groups insisting that their values are the only values that need to be attended to, and that they, personally, define what “the community” is.

They do this to make educational programming safe for their kids (allegedly), but it doesn’t make schooling safe; it makes it clownish and stupid and of little actual value. When we censor ourselves to avoid offending anyone, we make school stupid. We ask children to sit in their hard chairs all day long to learn about the world, and then we withhold and confuse the facts of that world and hope they don’t notice or complain. If they swallow the slop without complaining, we call them Good Kids and reward them. But are we actually helping them understand the world they’re going to live in and work in and inherit?

Obfuscating the reality of racism during discussions of slavery makes the entire rest of American history make no sense. Or it makes it make the wrong kind of sense. They have to live in this country—with all of its echoes and resonances and lingering effects of something they haven’t been allowed to grapple with. How does that help them?

Pretending that great poems aren’t about sex or death or other Big Human Things makes the whole idea of poetry a confusing waste of time. Literature grapples with the big questions of life, and we ask kids to read that literature without actually grappling with those questions openly or honestly. What’s the point?

Math in life is about much more than memorizing times-tables. Taking the unpredictability and genuine problem-solving-ness out of math makes it hard for kids to understand why they will ever need it.

What is the point of any of it, if you’re not allowed to think about it, but are merely required to repeat it back to an adult the way you heard it?

Primum Non Nocere

I say, save the fairy tales for home and the dogmas for church, and let schools teach what they’re supposed to teach. Let teachers and students ask hard questions and think their way to hard answers. Let them think without panicking, every day, about what thoughts they might be having.

That’s easy for me to say, I guess. I’m an informed customer, being a former teacher and an Ed Biz guy. I know the teachers in my community. I trust their wisdom and their professionalism. Not everyone feels that way.

But however you feel, you have to acknowledge that education is what made the human race world-conqueringly successful as a species. We found a way to let an individual animal know more than they could ever personally experience or discover in a single lifetime. No other animal gets that, except through hard-wired instinct. We—just we—learned how to download the life experiences of our entire species and make use of it within each of our short, individual lifespans. Only we get to do that. Every child who starts school this year gets to start unwrapping the gift of thousands of years of knowledge, exploration, folly, confusion, revelation, and joy.

And what do we adults do? We undermine, obfuscate, and make inefficient that whole, glorious endeavor…to avoid offending our neighbors.

Shame on us.

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