Aaron Regunberg: RI Students Left Out of Education Reform Debate

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Friday, November 04, 2011

Aaron Regunberg, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about what education shouldn’t be. Today, however, I want to write about what education should be. That’s a pretty broad topic, but in the end I think the answer can be boiled down to a single, beautiful principle: democracy. The education that America’s students need and deserve is, above all else, a democratic education.

By democratic education, I mean learning that equips students to participate fully in a healthy democracy. As we all know, a democracy is a system in which the people have the power and are able to exercise it. That’s a really difficult state of affairs to maintain, and it can’t be preserved under just any circumstances. At its core, a functioning democracy requires that its citizens be autonomous, responsible members of their community and the larger world. That, in turn, necessitates an education system that is rooted in meaningful challenge to the learner; that is responsive and relevant to the learner’s community; that cultivates personal and social responsibility; and that helps individuals and communities find their voices.

In addition, an education that is democratic must incorporate the principles of a healthy democracy. That means that students should have an active role in shaping their own learning. Teachers, administrators, and policy-makers must stop thinking of children as passive recipients of knowledge, like empty vessels or products on an assembly line, and instead engage students as the uniquely gifted participants and citizens that they are and that our democracy requires them to be.

Focus on Students

On that note, I think it should be clear that any legitimate attempt to improve our education system must be focused on solving the problems articulated by our system’s students, themselves. Yes, students—not technocratic data analyzers, or billionaire corporate philanthropists, or paternalistic reformers who assume they know what’s best for “deficient” communities, but the students themselves, who (along with their parents and teachers) have the most intimate and detailed knowledge about what works and what does not.

Fortunately, a group of student-led youth advocacy groups have been working since 2009 to identify the problems that are most broadly felt and highly prioritized by young people. These student leaders, some of whom I’ve had the privilege of speaking with, have been holding discussions, workshops, and conferences with thousands of low-income urban public school students in numerous communities around the country (including Providence) to create a National Student Bill of Rights that accurately reflects the struggles and aspirations of America’s youth. With every conversation they continue to develop and hone the list, but their current draft is very interesting, and I wanted to share it here.

The National Student Bill of Rights

1. The right to a free public education shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, gender, disability, ethnicity, religion, poverty, sexual orientation, or place of residence.
To secure the right to a free public education, other rights must also be secured, namely:
2. Students and youth shall have the right to safe and secure public school facilities of equal quality regardless of wealth, poverty, or place of residence.
3. Students and youth shall have the right to free college education.
4. Students and youth shall have the right to study curriculum that acknowledges and affirms the on-going struggle of oppressed peoples for equality and justice, and that addresses the real, material and cultural needs of their communities.
5. Students and youth shall be secure from arbitrary police searches and seizures and from arbitrary arrests and detentions without warrants.
6. Students and youth shall have the right to establish systems of restorative justice in schools and communities, shall not be excluded from educational opportunities except by a jury of their peers, and shall not be charged for crimes as adults until the age of 18.
7. Students and youth shall have the right to safe and secure housing.
8. Students and youth shall have the right to healthy, high quality food regardless of wealth, poverty, or place of residence.
9. Students and youth shall have the right to free health and dental care, including high quality public health and preventive care.
10. Students and youth shall have the right to free public transportation for purposes of education, employment, family and community needs, or recreation.
11. Students and youth shall have the right to employment, to support themselves while they are in school and college.
12. Students and youth with children of their own shall have the right to free day care for their children.
13. Students and youth shall have the right to physical activity and recreation of high quality regardless of their wealth, poverty, or place of residence.
14. Students and youth shall have the right to participation in arts, music, dance, drama, poetry, and technology of high quality regardless of wealth, poverty or place of residence.

Larger Than School Problems

It’s a pretty phenomenal statement, in my opinion. But of course the point is that my opinion doesn’t matter, since I’m not a struggling public school student—what matters is that the young people who are living through these challenges have together agreed that these are the changes that need to be made in order for them to receive the education they deserve.

Interestingly, the issues that come up in the National Student Bill of Rights are very different than the ones at the center of the dominant narrative around educational change today. The first point of distinction that jumps out at me is the significant emphasis students put on larger-than-school problems. The current “education reform” conversation has a strong tendency to dismiss or ignore poverty, covering this omission with the straw man mantra that “every child, regardless of their zipcode, can learn.” Yes, students know that; believe me, in bringing up these issues, young people are not saying that they somehow inherently can’t learn because they’re poor. What they’re saying is that there are consequences to the fact that the United States has the 28th highest rate of child poverty out of the 34 OECD nations (worse than Latvia and Bulgaria,and just a nose ahead of Mexico and Romania—wow). Students know they can learn, but they also know that being homeless or sick or hungry or without access to transportation makes it a hell of a lot harder to do so, and to dismiss that reality is ignorant and offensive.

Demands Are Reasonable

Of course, students are calling for transformations within their schools, as well—transformations that, at their core, center on the principles of democratic education. And their demands are pretty reasonable. They want a curriculum that’s relevant to them, that doesn’t just teach them about how awesome the rich white men who enslaved and raped their ancestors were, or how great the system that’s keeping their families in poverty is, but that actually addresses the needs of their communities.

We don’t have to provide such a curriculum, obviously, but until we do, we shouldn’t keep wondering why so many students are dropping out because they don’t find school worthwhile. Likewise, students want to be able to establish restorative justice systems that can actually engage youth, teachers, and administrators in the hard work of interacting respectfully with one another without crushing anyone’s voice. Again, we don’t have to create such a system, but until we do, we shouldn’t keep asking ourselves why schools have so many discipline problems.

I could go on like this for a while, but I think you get the point. We profess to value democracy in our society, yet we have created an education system that does not support democracy (and “reforms” that do so even less), all to predictable results. Truly reforming our schools means making them democratic, and the first step towards that goal is to listen to the people in our schools’ communities. The youth developing the National Student Bill of Rights have made that first step easy for us; we know, to a certain and growing degree of accuracy, what students say they need. So let’s put the focus back where it needs to be—on the long, difficult, but necessary work of partnering with communities to create the transformative changes our young people deserve. It’s not the easy way, but then again, neither is democracy. We shouldn’t let either fact dissuade us.

 

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