Words are risky things

Fred Klonsky (aka PREAPrez) wrote a nice piece on A Nation at Risk that didn’t get run over at the CEA blog…

Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.

-A Nation at Risk, 1983

I entered my first classroom one year after the publication of A Nation at Risk. I was thirty-five years old.

I have been a teacher for almost a quarter of a century. I have heard and read lots of people using metaphors to describe what I do. In fact, I have probably heard and read them all.

Frequently they are war metaphors. They are metaphors to make us fear global enemies. They are the education equivalent of WMDs.

They are lies.

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In a time of what seems to be endless war and endless global enemies, I grow weary of metaphors like these.

Neither my colleagues nor I teach on the military front lines. We don’t work in trenches. We are not weapons in a global battle. And we have no interest in being part of an army in the struggle for global economic supremacy.

We teach children.

Some of my students are at risk. They struggle to learn to read. Many come into my room with learning disabilities and emotional issues. It is more difficult for local school districts to pay the cost of supporting our students.

Some come from families who are at risk. There are children with no parents around. They are living with an aunt or a grandmother. There are families whose parents are out of work with no prospects of getting work.

In the city where I live, dozens of students have been murdered right outside their schools’ front doors this year. Their classmates certainly feel at risk. All that the local political leaders can offer is calls for gun control and placing computer chips in bus cards so that students can be tracked.

Does this sound like it is competition from India that threatens our young people?

If a Chinese worker’s life is improved through Chinese education and economic development, why should the American people see that as a loss for them?

Looking back twenty five years later, it is the greatest of ironies that A Nation at Risk warns,

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Which power in the world is attempting to impose its will on others? Which power in the world, in defiance of the will of its own people and the people and nations of the whole world, is committed to preemptive and perpetual war?

Nations are at risk.

Our people are at risk.

But it is not the risk that is described in A Nation at Risk.

It isn’t the risk of educational mediocrity that is our greatest risk.

It’s the risk that comes form national political leadership who are bullies internationally and contemptuous of their people’s needs at home.

I was asked to write about what would American public education look like today if “A Nation At Risk” had never been authored?

There have been other government reports in the twenty-five years since A Nation at Risk. They all have said pretty much the same thing. NCLB is the inevitable result.

For those of us who work for a humane, people-centered system of democratic public education, we can resist the drive to make us part of their global economic wars.

Reports or no reports.