Borsuk’s essay and all colleague reactions are available at this link.
Let me begin where Alan Borsuk’s article ends: “[I]f the goal of education policy is to build a future of thriving adults—which is to say, to boost today’s children—a lot more needs to be considered than what public policy usually considers now.” What is this “lot more”?
In my opinion, there are already a lot more ideas (some good ones) out there on what needs to happen both in the schools and in the homes and communities of our country’s children, who most need “a lot more” not just to be considered but to actually be done.
Borsuk is quite clear and correct that attacking only one side of the equation of all that happens inside schools and outside of schools would only continue to lead to the dismal results that supposedly “we” want to change.
All of the children in this country need our help and support when it comes to education and other elements of their lives. But the children who need our help the most are the children from the families of the disinherited. As the late theologian and educator Howard Thurman said, these are the masses of people who “live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed.”
For the children from these families, we must tackle the difficult issues facing so many of them before they get to school—lack of health care, hunger, poor housing, sexual abuse in their homes, etc. And we must simultaneously take real actions to make sure that we’re getting the best teachers we can to be with them every day. We must have better recruitment strategies, better support, better pay, better benefits, changes in the way teachers are prepared, the elevation of the teaching profession in the public discourse, etc. But if we have the best teachers in the world, with all of the support they need, and yet the kids are coming to school hungry or are dealing with some of the issues cited above, we will still see minimal impact—on individual students and on a large collective of students.
It is my fundamental belief that, unfortunately, more has not been done and will not be done because there is no real urgency in this country’s body politic writ large to seriously attack the problems on both sides of the equation—in school and outside of school. There are and will be more speeches, more commissions, more tepid and underfunded actions, but there will be no relentless pursuit of actions that will lead to real solutions. There is no real anger, no real commitment to the children being discussed. We are willing to accept that millions of children in this country will indeed be “left behind.”
The kind of deep systemic change that is needed is unlikely to occur because it would require a true “grand bargain” on all sides of the political spectrum. And given the deep level of polarization that exists in this country, that “grand bargain” is as far away from happening as it has ever been.
So the only possibility that I see for making any difference now is for people doing what they can at the level where this all matters—in individual classrooms, in individual schools, in neighborhoods, and in small nonprofit organizations. The goal should be to save as many kids as we can.
How can we pool our limited community and school-based resources to support our teachers? How do we use our limited resources to work with community-based agencies that are attending to the hunger issues or the housing issues or whatever issues our children are facing? This approach will not lead to broad systemic change, but it can potentially change the trajectories of the lives of so many children from the families of the disinherited.
We need small groups of dedicated, committed, and relentless people who will refuse to accept the situation now existing. That is the only hope that I see at this moment in history. Yet it is a hope: Margaret Mead was correct when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world . . . .”
Illustration by Robert Neubecker
Howard Fuller has been a national leader since the 1980s in advocating for changes in education policy, including support for school voucher programs and charter schools. He was superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools from 1991 to 1995. From 1995 to 2020, he served as Distinguished Professor of Education and director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University.
