The Board Of Education (The Board) Of The Public School District: Fill & Download for Free

In the US, school districts make their own curriculum, and private schools are in their own districts, so it’s impossible for there to be a “clash” between religion and curriculum. The school can just leave it out of the curriculum before it gets to that point.If, for example, a private school was founded by an organization that believe in Creationism, that school could teach Creationism and would not have to teach evolution, because the state doesn’t make the curriculum… the private school district does.Some private schools are their own district. Here in Illinois, some public schools are too.Most public school districts within a state align with that state’s board of education curriculum. Many of those states align with Common Core these days.The Catholic school where I teach is part of the Archdiocese of Chicago school district, which has hundreds of schools. The schools are given curriculum guidelines from the Archdiocese. Catholics aren’t Creationists, and the Catholic high schools teach evolution. We teach sex ed beginning in fifth grade, but it’s not called that… it’s called “Family Life.” It’s the same thing you’d get in a public school, but with a sprinkling of morality and “respecting your body as a reflection of God” mixed in.In many cases, private schools try to mirror the curriculum of the public schools in the state, because:It makes sense.It’s easy to omit the small fraction of a percentage of the state’s suggested curriculum that doesn’t fit well with the school’s religious teachings.In the end, students from both public and private schools are vying for positions in the same colleges and workforce.

“I don’t get paid enough to deal with this.”If you talk to many teachers who’ve quit the profession, you’ll likely hear that a few times.So, if you want to retain teachers and attract more people into the profession, there are two good options:Pay them more.Give them less of “this” to deal with.In the United States, teacher salaries are set by the individual school districts. There is nothing stopping them from being paid more other than the will of the voters in the places where there are teacher shortages. (Alternatively, a significant tax reduction would have the same effect as a pay raise.)But what about the “this” that teachers aren’t paid enough to deal with? It’s not lesson planning and instructional time in front of students… the stuff many people think of when they think of teaching. It’s things like teaching to the test, dealing with students with behavior disorders, unrealistic expectations, constantly documenting everything for fear of lawsuits, adversarial parents, ridiculous professional training and certification hurdles, etc…According to this website, 200,000 teachers leave the profession every year for reasons other than retirement. For many of them, compensation wasn’t the big problem. It was dealing with things teachers shouldn’t have to deal with.Why Good Teachers Quit TeachingThe only reason I enjoy teaching so much is because I teach at a private school, so I avoid a lot of the crap the public school teachers have to deal with from students, parents, administrators, and the state board of education. I spend most of my time doing what teachers are supposed to do: teaching (mostly) motivated students with (mostly) supportive parents and a (mostly) hands-off administration. Consequently, students from private schools like mine routinely out-perform their public-school counterparts on standardized tests.

Liberals are fine with there being choices when it comes to schools.Want to send your kids to a private school? Great. Liberals are fine with that.The thing they don’t like, that lurks under the surface of the moniker ‘School Choice’, is the systematic de-funding of public schools that goes with it.The way this sort of thing works (there are many variations) school funding becomes a ‘voucher’ issued to parents, which doesn’t quite cover the costs of private schooling- but which the well-heeled could use to offset their costs and enroll their kids in private schools. That, combined with the convenient crisis (the schools are failing!) creates motive and opportunity for folks like me (professional, worried about our kids getting a good education) to support policy that will sabotage public schooling, by de-funding it.When enough wealthy parents opt out of public schooling (and take public money with them), it would further deepen the problem public schools have in terms of funding. In this sense, the ‘voucher’ system allows the well-heeled parents to simultaneously advantage their children with better education, while hindering their ex-classmates (who will be left in schools that have been set up without the resources necessary to fulfill their mission).Liberals like the idea that education is the key to opportunity and they realize full well that separate is not equal, and this movement to de-fund public schools (while leaving escape avenues for the well-off, but not for everyone else, into private schools) has a specific political motive: to further deepen the divide between the well-to-do (and their children), and everyone else. When a critical mass of well-heeled voters can be convinced that the public schools are a sinking ship, they can be convinced to pull their kids (and their money with them) away from public schools, if a reasonable escape avenue is presented. Then, if enough people’s kids don’t have a stake in successful/funded public schools, it makes the politics to de-fund them/privatize them completely a lot more viable.Liberals also recognize (as do conservatives) the role of having a set of facts and history in common as a unifying thread in American life. Tension over just what those facts are (or could be) is underneath the brawling we see about ‘common core’, what it means, what it could potentially mean, and what some folks are afraid it could be. Control of schooling standards is so jealously guarded in some quarters that some folks would rather not have public schools at all if the alternative is to have curriculum standards with even the vaguest of federal guidelines on them.It’s also worth noting that the movements to establish public schools in the United States foundered repeatedly over the objections of sectarians concerned that schools would become a means of funneling taxpayer money into parochial (Catholic) coffers, or that these schools would be used to indoctrinate children. Remember, most secondary schools before the public school movement were parochial, for religious instruction. The Everson v. Board of Education ruling (which more or less staked out the notion that public schools could not be for proselytizing) was at the time seen as being motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment, and established the public school as neutral ground, in sectarian terms.Public school is, in addition to being a place where students receive instruction in practical skills and civics, a source of common experience in American public life (virtually all of us share these experiences), and this is not just a source of common identity, it is also the basis for substantive social mobility (in essence, giving the children of poor people a shot at moving up the socioeconomic ladder alongside the children of wealthier parents). As a functional public institution, it becomes the focus of unifying politics (in which we can all agree we want better for our kids) so long as it’s all done together. And that’s what the ‘school choice’ movement is about- splitting it up.U.S. public schools, which became widespread in the 1800s, were promoted with the idea that putting students from families of different income levels together—though not black Americans and other racial minorities until the 1950s—would instill a common sense of citizenship and national identity. But today, large corporations are scoring huge successes in replacing this system with a two-tiered model and a whole new notion of identity.~[The Corporate Plan to Groom U.S. Kids for Servitude by Wiping Out Public Schools]This movement to dismantle public schooling (and replacing it with a taxpayer-funded, tiered system) is about simultaneously securing a future workforce that’s just educable/trainable enough to do their soul-crushing jobs, and has been conditioned not to expect anything more than that.The architects of this movement (it is explicitly a deliberate movement) are engaged in a long game to overcome the obstacle American democracy presents to their agendas. See, the policies they want (an oligarchy, with themselves and their cronies at the top, with everyone else as plebes) aren’t democratically viable, (people won’t vote for them if they understand what’s on the table) so they’ve engaged in politics of deception and leverage [1] [2]. It turns out that going after public schools creates opportunities (and recruits allies) for them to advance their anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian agenda. After all, there are still folks out there who chafe at the fact of racially integrated schools, and not being allowed to proselytize with taxpayer money in them. There are also folks who are just tired of hearing the constant outrage about common core, the new math, how the schools are failing, how they’re under-funded and bad teachers cannot be fired. (these are all pieces of a narrative designed to persuade more people that anything different would be better).Gordon Lafer (Associate Professor at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon) provides research to illuminate:why this is happening,who is behind it, andwhat’s at stake.The bottom line, of course, is that the public education system used to both unite Americans, and prepare them for a life of social and economic mobility- and that system has been (for decades now) under sustained pressure, political and economic:When Lafer began to study the tsunami of corporate-backed legislation that swept the country in early 2011 in the wake of Citizens United—the 2010 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the green light to spend unlimited sums to influence the political system—he wasn’t yet clear what was happening. In state after state, a pattern was emerging of highly coordinated campaigns to smash unions, shrink taxes for the wealthy, and cut public services. Headlines blamed globalization and technology for the squeeze on the majority of the population, but Lafer began to see something far more deliberate working behind the scenes: a hidden force that was well-funded, laser-focused, and astonishingly effective.Lafer pored over the activities of business lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – funded by giant corporations including Walmart, Amazon.com, and Bank of America—that produces “model legislation” in areas its conservative members use to promote privatization. He studied the Koch network, a constellation of groups affiliated with billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. (Koch Industries is the country’s second-largest private company with business including crude oil supply and refining and chemical production). Again and again, he found that corporate-backed lobbyists were able to subvert the clear preferences of the public and their elected representatives in both parties. Of all the areas these lobbyists were able to influence, the policy campaign that netted the most laws passed, featured the most big players, and boasted the most effective organizations was public education. For these U.S. corporations, undermining the public school system was the Holy Grail.After five years of research and the publication of The One Percent Solution, Lafer concluded that by lobbying to make changes like increasing class sizes, pushing for online instruction, lowering accreditation requirements for teachers, replacing public schools with privately-run charters, getting rid of publicly elected school boards and a host of other tactics, Big Business was aiming to dismantle public education.The grand plan was even more ambitious. These titans of business wished to completely change the way Americans and their children viewed their life potential. Transforming education was the key.The lobbyists and associations perfected cover stories to keep the public from knowing their real objectives. Step one was to raise fears about an American educational crisis that did not, in fact, exist. Lafer notes, for example, that the reading and math scores of American students have remained largely unchanged for forty years. Nonetheless, the corporate-backed alarmists worked to convince the public that the school system was in dire condition.~[The Corporate Plan to Groom U.S. Kids for Servitude by Wiping Out Public Schools]In essence, the ‘school choice’ movement is about dismantling the modern education system and restoring some version of the segregated one that came before. To be fair, not everybody with an eye on putting their kids in private schools overtly wants segregation, but that is an inescapable feature of what will happen if public schools can be made to fail.It’s probably helpful to appreciate that schools tend to be some of the largest budget-items at the local level of government; and if you’re in the business of selling tax cuts in your state-level politics, going after their budgets is where you’ll find the money:The federal government, as an old line puts it, is basically an insurance company with an army: nondefense spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. State and local governments, however, are basically school districts with police departments. Education accounts for more than half the state and local work force; protective services like police and fire departments account for much of the rest. ~[Opinion | We Don’t Need No Education]The ‘school choice’ folks draw in a variety of constituencies; segregationists, libertarians, would-be free-market education providers, religious folks who want taxpayer-funded religious schooling, right-wing politicians keen to make budget room for their next tax cut, and the plutocrats writing their campaign checks.No matter their motives; in the end any tiered education system amounts to segregation. (it’s arguable that Americans’ choice to fund education based on home values in their districts amounts to segregation, given the way that home price and race are so strongly correlated.) That’s a thing that liberals aren’t keen to support- we’ve had that sort of division before, and found it to be constitutionally and democratically unacceptable.Footnotes[1] Misinforming the Majority: A Deliberate Strategy of Right-Wing Libertarians[2] What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority.