For this special issue, The Nation asked a range of experts and activists to answer a series of questions on race, politics and educational inequities. The interviews, excerpts of which follow, were conducted by longtime progressive educator Herbert Kohl.
How can we respond most effectively to right-wing assaults on the premises of public education?
The way that you deal with the right is by fixing the schools. The first thing we have to do is admit the truth, that the schools are underserving important populations of kids, primarily kids of color and low-income kids. Too much of the left’s rhetoric around public education has been: Everything is fine. Everything is getting better. SAT scores are going up. More people are going to college. We haven’t talked about the serious problems–the problem, for example, of the wide and growing achievement gap that separates low-income students and students of color from others. And it’s an utter disconnect. Parents hear our voices and then they see what’s going on in their schools, and they say, These guys are on Mars. What schools are they talking about? That’s not what’s happening in my schools.
You see things like 94 percent of the African-American parents in LA Unified [School District] rate their schools as fair to poor. And we keep saying, No, everything’s fine. So the left has to re-establish credibility with folks by saying that we recognize these schools aren’t doing what they should be doing. And we should also admit that more money won’t answer all the problems. That there are structural changes that have to be made.
Luis Garden Acosta:
As people who care about democracy, we ought to be careful about how we look at those who seem to oppose what we stand for. My own life in the Catholic Church and growing up in Brooklyn relating to different cultures and ethnicities and classes has taught me that there is no monolithic conservative movement. Often when I sit down with parents who sound like they are are right-wing, I begin to realize that what they are really saying is, “I’m afraid for my child and I don’t have respect for the system. I can’t believe in it anymore because it hasn’t protected my neighbor’s child and maybe my child will be next.” And we find that we have common ground, we share a commitment to the development of our children and to principles of democracy.
It’s just that the discussion is so politicized and so polarized by opportunists, political leaders who really don’t want to do much about anything besides talk about it. Of course, there are some who really believe that there ought not to be a public school system, who really believe that public money should be used for the expression of religious tenets and on and on, and we would have real difficulty creating any kind of united front with them. But I do believe that we have suffered, our movement has suffered, from not trying to reach out more effectively.