[Header Photo by CDC on Unsplash]

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Let’s always avoid outsized hand wringing about how much worse anything is today than in some idealized past.

If you take a bit of time, you can explore how public education in the US was demonized and attacked in the nineteenth century, primarily by the Catholic Church who saw public education as a threat to their education monopoly:

[P]ublic schools … [are] a “dragon … devouring the hope of the country as well as religion.” Secular public education … [is filled with] “Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism—anything, everything, except religion and patriotism.” (Jacoby, pp. 257-258)

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Yet in 2024, public education is under several waves of assault that, if not unprecedented, is at an intensity that is exceptional.

In literacy education, two waves have targeted schools—censorship and bans as well as the “science of reading” (SOR) movement that has demonized teachers as well as decreased the diversity and quality of texts used to teach students to read.

Although not exclusively but significantly, these attacks on public education and literacy specifically are conservative. And then, beneath those traditional values are deeply harmful beliefs grounded in sexism/misogyny and racism.

The recent Report on the Condition of Education 2024 provides a couple data points to support why attacks on public education and teachers are intensifying, if not increasing:

First, the proportion of white students in US public schools is below 50% and continuing to decrease.

Next, the teacher workforce in the US is over 3/4 women, and among literacy teachers, that number is even higher.

Republican states are again increasing school choice schemes, and at the core of that is another move to allow white flight from public schools, funded by the public. This parallels the rise of private schools and white flight after Brown v. Board (notably across the South).

The nation-wide and often bi-partisan embracing of the SOR movement is grounded in a false but compelling claim that teachers of reading and teacher educators don’t know how to teach reading, a claim made without evidence among journalists and politicians.

That the teacher workforce is almost entirely women drives both the attacks on teachers and why that attack is uncritically embraced.

The result is so-called “structured literacy,” which is a veneer for scripted curriculum.

Scripted curriculum de-professionalizes teaching as a profession and centers instructional authority in commercial programs and not teachers.

Public education and public education teachers deserve better, primarily because they both serve our children and if allowed our democracy.