Recently, I saw a meme suggesting what school should have taught us as opposed to what it teaches us. The setup usually lists a set of skills that seem like common sense: how to do your taxes, how to work through the legal system in ordinary situations, how to determine your credit score etc. They would eliminate skills such as, but not limited to, the Pythagorean Theorem, how to calculate slope, fictional texts, and most concepts after the first half of Algebra 1. These sorts of memes argue for the utility of school i.e. the extent to which what children learn is directly applicable to their post-K-12 life.
Fine.
However, when we look through the current standards, we see evidence of the types of skills that open doors to dealing with complex problems, no matter how amorphous. For example, it’s hard to understand how to do your taxes when you can’t calculate taxes and interest, both of which are standards in middle school math. You can’t read legal papers without reading for voice and vocabulary, which are part of the literacy standards across the content areas in elementary and secondary education. Also, these memes assume that these various systems don’t create complex webs of rules that bar the ordinary citizen from full access to them, thereby creating dedicated professions to help ordinary citizens untangle the tapestry.
But ultimately, it’s about what we value and who we value that informs what a “good” school is.
In spite of the neutral language that many advocates use to argue for their visions of schooling, it’s often mired with explicit and implicit biases about the school, like the composition of the student body, the architecture and upkeep of the school, and the location of the school itself. I’ve listened to educators who worked in public school settings tell me that they never worry about the schools they send their child to because they live in neighborhoods where they don’t work. Of course, the composition of the student body in those schools were very different than the schools they worked in, which also meant a whole host of resources and expectations were also different. Yes, the home district was predominantly White. The schools where the educators worked were predominantly students of color.
Yes, every one of the folks I spoke to who advocated for this dichotomy sat back and rarely advocated for equitable conditions. The “way it is” doesn’t have to be.
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