Don’t Fool Yourself. Education is Politics.
Systemic oppression is endemic in public education. It’s time we faced our fears and called it out.
It is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the world when the sleeping giant awakens, not just because it portends a display of awe-inspiring power, but also because of the things it stirs up when it rises from its prone position on the grass. Over the past week or so, I have sat back and watched as, once again, a mighty wave of righteous fury has been stirred inside of the hearts of our society’s most forgotten and oppressed. I have seen young people marching in the streets and leaders emerging who stand unflinching in the face of those who would deny their basic humanity, and I have seen a white America — seemingly all too happy to pretend that these things don’t exist when they are not trending in the news — have to once again face itself in the mirror and decide how it wants to be judged in the annals of history. It’s gut-check time, and it seems that many of my fellow white Americans have a renewed interest in examining their roles in systemic racism and white privilege, and to that I say, “Excellent, long may it continue.”
It is once again time to examine the role that schools have to play in perpetuating these systems of oppression. To be fair, nothing I am about to write is necessarily new information, but much like in the classroom, it bears repeating because sometimes it takes saying something a hundred times until it sinks in; the simple fact of the matter is that the public education system is built upon the lie that it is the great non-partisan, apolitical haven of American public life, and this lie allows a litany of micro-inequities, microaggressions, and even outright racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and sexual prejudices to fester right under our very noses.
I received correspondence from one of my more tuned-in minority students the other day, and her take on the situation was damning. In her words, she has witnessed countless instances where
“teachers fail to call out students whenever they make statements that feed into the whole concept of being an individual that lives in a country favoring the oppressor.”
She went on to say that the offending students who are spreading the hurtful and hateful invective “do not stop, and treat it like a joke, because not a single teacher has gone out of their way to make their privilege clear to them.”
She was also clear that “what they think is a joke is life or death for others, and it’s all hidden behind a thin veil of being ‘patriotic’,” the idea being that many people justify their hateful speech by proclaiming it to simply be an alternate but equal political view and denouncing criticism as contempt for country. She ended by asking her teachers to
“call students out for the sake of educating them.”
As I sat and pondered her words, just the latest in a long series of poignant discussions that she and I had in a school year that was cut painfully short, I could not help but sit and just digest the shame of knowing that I am part of a system that is not doing right by all of its kids, and if we’re being honest, all of the stakeholders in public education (teachers, administrators, community leaders, parents) are all part of the problem in some way or another.
One of the great truths about school buildings is that by the time something reaches the kids, it’s because it has trickled down from the top, so if kids are complaining that microaggressions, micro-inequities, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and sexual prejudices are going unchecked in the student body, you can rest assured that is it going on among the staff. My experience has been no different. In the 10 years that I have worked in public education, in multiple buildings, I have seen many things that perpetuate a system of ingrained privilege that largely has gone unnoticed, unspoken, and, unfortunately, unchecked. Just a short sampling the of things that I have borne witness to that perpetuate systems of oppression in my sphere include:
A colleague coming to me enraged that another colleague tried to pawn a Jacqueline Woodson book off on her because she felt that it was inappropriate for elementary school-aged kids to learn about racial identity and the value associated with teaching and understanding racial identity.
A colleague telling me how she was forbidden to teach another colleague’s daughter the book I Am Malala for the same reason.
People (including those in school leadership positions) frequently using the word “tribe” to describe their friend and colleague groups on personal and official school social media channels.
Watching multiple colleagues tout their experiences doing mission work in African countries and then complaining about having to buy a house in a predominantly black neighborhood, visit predominantly black neighborhoods for purposes of business or entertainment, or work in predominantly black environments.
Multiple colleagues commenting that some of their teacher friends must be crazy for transferring to work in Title 1 schools (the not-so-subtle subtext being that Title 1 schools are so filled with ill-behaved and difficult children and parents that experienced teachers should be transferring away from them as a rite of passage).
Drama teachers and chorus teachers staging adaptations of plays and musicals and including songs in concerts with heavy and overt fundamentalist evangelical Christian themes. These songs and plays are usually justified with a wink and a nod to their “historical importance” (as if white European Christians were the only ones who ever wrote choral music of any historical significance). Now, I love Jesus and his Mother Mary just as much as the next guy, but even I could see how this might have a divisive effect on our students who share different faiths or who have no faith at all. Representation matters.
Male colleagues who continually violate the personal space of their female students by making inappropriate comments and subjecting them to inappropriate touching and hugging.
Female colleagues who openly discriminate against males in their classrooms by applying disciplinary practices and standards of behavior that are unequal.
Inappropriate sexual and body comments by fellow teachers or members of the support staff. Both myself, my wife (who was pregnant at the time and deeply affected), and many of my friends have fallen victim to this one at some time or another.
Colleagues questioning the presence of or extent of a student’s disabilities because it means that they will have to alter their teaching methods to accommodate a 504 or Individualized Education Plan.
It would be easy to look at all of this and say that these are the actions of egregious bad apples who are easily recognizable, but that is not the case at all. Some of these people are major award winners or people who are held up as pillars of the profession — the point being that these things can come from everywhere, and often do.
In many of these instances, I knew about or witnessed the misdeeds and did not do a sufficient enough job of calling them out; this is an area of some personal shame for me because it means I was not doing enough to protect my colleagues and students. I’ve told myself many times that I could hide in the shadows with the rest of those not taking action, under the thin excuse that “nobody reports these things,” because why would anyone bother to report them? The reasons for silence are numerous and predictable: fear of reprisal from colleagues and administrators, fear of nothing being done at all, fear of being branded as the “troublemaker,” fear of being passed over for leadership positions or promotions, or even fear of not being believed. To be fair, this should not be misconstrued as a blanket indictment of school administration, there are plenty of those in leadership positions that take decisive action when problems are brought to their attention, but enough anecdotes of people suffering the aforementioned consequences prevail to cause most to simply keep their heads down and accept the status quo.
There is another underlying cause, however, that I feel is really at the core of all of this inaction. You see, when people don’t want to engage with uncomfortable topics that cause us to have to examine our misdeeds or prejudices, we have learned that the nuclear option is just to brand those things as “political,” like it is some sort of filthy and taboo word. It causes people to hiss and to run like a vampire in the sunlight. School systems are notorious for this. Year after year, teachers and staff receive the same set of emails, memoranda, and staff meeting reminders that we are to be apolitical in our dealings with one another and with students. Ostensibly, this is meant to cause a more unified and less divisive environment, but it achieves the exact opposite because it means that the ones who are prone to dealing in micro-inequities, microaggressions, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and sexual prejudices can shut down the ones calling it out by accusing them of playing politics.
This completely ignores the fact that none of the aforementioned “isms” should be considered a matter of politics (definitely a litmus test for human decency, but I digress), and also the fact that public education inherently sits directly in the center of American political life.
As I said before, we love to try and to pretend that the education system is an apolitical egalitarian utopia, but it never has been, nor is it now any of those things, and that is of our own doing. Here is just a sampling of the ways that education has been political since before I was born, much less a classroom teacher.
We made education political when we redlined black people out of the suburbs.
We made education political when we tied school funding to property tax assessments.
We made education political when we created draconian dress codes that punish minority culture and female bodies.
We made education political when we allowed the slow creep of fundamentalist evangelical Protestant Christianity into our buildings in the form of organizations like Young Life or events like See You at the Pole Day.
We make education political when we defund mental health and special education services, but always have money for new athletic fields and uniforms.
We made education political when we made the school cafeteria the major meal source for hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids and then served them processed trash out of a sealed plastic wrapper so we could save a few pennies.
We made education political when we started utilizing street cops to enforce school discipline codes in buildings, and we definitely made education political when we decided that it was acceptable to sacrifice the lives of a few dozen school-aged children every year so that people could continue to feel like heroes cosplaying in the streets with their AR-15s.
The school building is ground zero for what American political life looks like on a day-to-day basis, and to continue to stick our heads in the sand about this is to perpetuate a system that is broken and inflicts its brokenness on the most vulnerable in our population.
So, in essence, it’s time that we got real with ourselves about what we are trying to accomplish here. A respected colleague of mine once told me in a podcast interview that we lie to ourselves every day in this country by telling ourselves that we run a universal public education system when we actually run a universal public daycare system. This can be jarring for some, especially educators, to accept, but when statistics show that kids are only retaining about 30% of the information that they receive in a classroom up to the next grade level, then we really can’t sit back and act like education is the end all and be all of what we do, especially because it would force us to accept the fact that we are not very good at it. If I’m being honest, I’m okay with that. I’m not sure I would enjoy seeing what we come up with if we ever muster up the will to try and significantly change those numbers.
What I’m not okay with is the fact that even though we all secretly know that hard education is not necessarily our primary function, we still devote little energy and resources to developing the holistic human being. If we did, then maybe we would see a change in the things our students are pointing out to us. Maybe we would be able to put aside our fear and finally speak out against the elements in our system that seek to do harm and divide us. Maybe we would finally stop being afraid of being called “political” and just boldly stand for what’s right.
At the moment, the young and most oppressed of us are speaking that truth in the streets of cities all across America. The sleeping giant is awake; here’s me hoping it wins this time.
