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When my daughter was about 6 months old, I discovered a little trick to make her laugh. If I tossed her in the air just a few inches, she got adorably happy. As she ascended, she grinned from ear to ear. Then, there was a moment when she felt the transition from rise to fall. She instantly panicked. Suddenly, I caught her from the sky. She let out a hearty giggle, knowing that she was safe in my arms. She knew, in her own way, that she had just done the impossible: She had just defied gravity.

I tell this story because the ubiquity of gravity’s pull can help us better understand the severity of what’s happening right now with public education. Essentially, a massive geophysical force constantly pulls our poor and/or Black and brown students to the bottom. It’s so omnipresent that they feel the tugs on their legs as soon as their educational journeys begin — arguably before. Those of us who are policy enthusiasts tend to see this gravitational pull as a product of bad policy, but I argue that the force is made up more of the politics surrounding public education. The explicit political organizing around the maintenance of racial and class advantages has been acting like quicksand to our children. The biggest threat to an equitable and prosperous American society is not a particular educational policy, but these orbiting politics — what I am calling the gravitational pull.

I want to make it clear from the start that policy matters. After all, this is a column about policy solutions. Throughout our journey together, we’ll be learning more about new evidence-based policy reforms, models, and interventions that school districts and states can adopt to better support K-12 students, particularly our most vulnerable ones. But I start with politics at the forefront because our ability to steer a sailing ship rests on our command of the tides of the sea.

The destructive power of politics

The politics of our education system have indeed been raging. My home state of Tennessee is on the verge of experiencing partisan school board elections in some of its school districts for the first time in modern history (Aldrich, 2022). The Virginia gubernatorial election was decided, to some degree, by a political crusade against the idea of critical race theory (Beauchamp, 2021). Speaking of critical race theory, many state legislatures have a bill at some stage in the legislative process aiming to ban it from being taught in public schools (Schwartz, 2021). More than a dozen of these bills have become state law. Thousands of teachers now face the prospect of being fired should the content of their classroom instruction be deemed guilty of making kids feel uncomfortable or ashamed because of their race. All these political actions distract from the most pressing problems facing our public education system. This is what I mean by the gravitational pull.

The demonizing of any discussion of racial privilege in the most recent politicization of education means that our politics have become a force that augments advantage. What do I mean? Evidence shows that during the COVID-19 pandemic, public school students suffered massive degrees of learning loss. Students were receiving only a fraction of the instruction during the pandemic that they had received before (Engzell, Frey, & Verhagen, 2021). A study by McKinsey & Company estimates that the average impact on mathematics is about five months of learning loss (Dorn et al., 2021). That average creeps up to an average of six months for children enrolled in majority-Black schools. As a result of COVID-19 learning loss, experts have placed some of our children on a trajectory to earn less as adults, and the racial and economic earning and wage gaps are likely to worsen. A major educational crisis, with the power to drastically increase inequity, is staring us right in the face. Yet, our public discourse is ignoring it.

All these political actions distract from the most pressing problems facing our public education system.

Instead, our public discussions are steeped in racial animus and self-interest, which weighs down our kids. Unfortunately, this situation is not new. During the Jim Crow era in the U.S. South, we had the White Citizens Council, whose ideology was white supremacy and whose main political objectives were preventing Black Americans from voting and attending schools with white children. In fact, council leaders typically made sure that any Black citizen who registered to vote or signed a petition to desegregate the schools had their name displayed in the local newspaper. This publishing signaled to fellow white residents which Black citizens should be fired, have their property destroyed, or even be killed.

Protecting privilege through politics

It’s noteworthy that the strategy to maintain and even advance white supremacy has been rooted in public shaming and violent threats. Moreover, the public nature of these acts and their direct aim to influence state and local policy makes these acts part of an explicitly political project to preserve white privilege. Charles Mills calls it the “racial contract” or “an in-group agreement among the privileged to restrict moral and political equality to themselves,” while maintaining the “subordination of unequals to the out-group” (Mills, 1997, p. 11).

An example: California voters passed a public referendum in 1998 called Ballot Proposition 227, which mandated that all K-12 instruction be conducted in English. This was a political project that outlawed English-Spanish multilingual learning. During the campaign, supporters, including an organization called English for the Children, spread false attacks and misinformation about the effects of bilingual instruction; raising fears among California residents over the potential effects of empowering Latinx kids who speak Spanish (Kinney, 2018).

This political strategy is an agreement that has been preserved by any means necessary. It led to the swinging of bats and sticks on school grounds in Boston (Gellerman, 2014) and the torching of empty school buses in Louisville (Quick & Damante, 2016). It motivated the violent harassing of little Black children throughout the South, where Ruby Bridges infamously had to be escorted to the doors of an all-white school by the collective shield of the U.S. National Guard. The violence. The carnage. The rage. These were the outcomes of our education politics at its darkest period. This is the force of the gravitational pull.

Fast forward to today, and the parallels are clear. Violence is erupting at school board meetings across the country over mask mandates, book selections, and critical race theory. Meanwhile, as was the case before, the political division and vitriol are distracting us from ensuring that our most vulnerable children are getting needed academic support. There continues to be more political organizing around preserving the power of whiteness than around helping our students become scientists, engineers, or the next generation of activists who could find solutions to our most pressing societal problems.

Time for a politics of solutions

The solution to this moment is a politics of solutions. We need a public recommitment to mass political organizing around solving our most pressing problems. We need to collectively refocus on addressing the effects of learning loss. We need to renew the quest to reduce classroom sizes and provide wraparound social and mental health services. We need to do all the things that make schools capable of being the cornerstones of community empowerment and improvement.

The gravitational pull of politics extends beyond education. It pulls poor and/or Black and brown folks into not just failing schools but also jail cells, inadequate health facilities, overpoliced communities, and communities without access to clean water. Those of us committed to education must believe policy can help us push back. We must believe that, together, we can catch our kids being pulled down by politics. We must believe that we can defy gravity and do the impossible.

We know we can.

References

Aldrich, M.W. (2022, July 12). Tennessee’s shift to partisan school board elections faces its first big test. Chalkbeat Tennessee.

Beauchamp, Z. (2021, November 4). Did critical race theory really swing the Virginia election? Vox.

Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J., & Viruleg, E. (2021, July 27). COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning. McKinsey & Company.

Engzell, P., Frey, A., & Verhagen, M.D. (2021). Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. PNAS, 118 (17).

Gellerman, B. (2014, September 5). “It was like a war zone”: Busing in Boston. WBUR.

Kinney, E.E. (2018, Spring). The controversial passage of proposition 229 [Departmental honors project, Hamline University]. Digital Commons @ Hamline.

Mills, C.W. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University.

Quick, K. & Damante, R. (2016, September 15). Louisville, Kentucky: A reflection on school integration. The Century Foundation.

Schwartz, S. (2022, July 15). Map: Where critical race theory is under attack. Education Week.


This article appears in the September 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 1, pp. 62-63.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan E. Collins

Jonathan E. Collins is an assistant professor of political science and education and the associate director of the Columbia University Center for Educational Equity, both at the Teachers College, Columbia University, NY.