Forty-four of seventy-seven students did not pass the eighth grade at Bradwell Elementary School, a Chicago public school. The author of the article invokes an age old question: when students fail, who do we blame? This question irks me; the answer is always “everyone.” We live in a democratic society, which means equal participation and equal responsibility.
In this scenario, the parents lament their students’ failures, saying they had no idea of their children’s standings. The Board displaces blame, saying, “Bradwell school did everything possible to keep the students’ grades up, offering extra credit and school on Saturday…written notices did go out.” After only reading the short article, I do not know enough of the particulars. I can not indict one side more than the other. Recalling my own experiences as a teacher, however, the majority of parents wait for teachers to contact them, and the majority of teachers would rather not contact parents. Written notices, such as the ones cited in the article, are usually the de facto, impersonal way teachers communicate without actually communicating and fulfill and document an arbitrary standard of doing just enough to keep parents abreast of their children’s progress (or lack thereof).
I recently read Lawrence Cremlin’s Popular Education and Its Discontents. In it, Cremlin describes a conversation he had with a friend about popular education as an ideal: “What an ideal does hold out is a goal, which people can then approach more or less successfully. And I argued that the ideal of popular education, at least as it had developed in the United States, was one of he most radical ideals in the Western world, that we had made great progress in moving toward the ideal, but that the attainment had been wanting in many domains, and that the institutions we had established to further that attainment had been flawed in many respects. We had, to be blunt, a long way to go, but it was worth trying to get there” (p. 35). I believe Cremlin is exactly right.
Critics will use the Bradwell incident to support their cause du jour, whether it be social promotion, poor public education, or possibly lazy teachers and/or lazy parents. Maybe that’s human nature; we tear down someone else in order to build ourselves up. I quote Cremlin because he is realistic yet hopeful. All too often we levy blame and want blood. Education is an easy target; it could and should be better.
We will never fully realize education as an ideal, I know. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And to state the obvious, exacting blame is never the first step.
Randy Clemens
