by Alexandra Laing
A Worthy Educator and Champion
Edited excerpt from Solving School Challenges: The Everything Guide to Transformative Change
While mainstream society may be “controlling the channel” and deciding how we view education in the country, the political intersection with education is controlling the experience of education in the country. Education is a non-partisan issue with bipartisan influences. It doesn’t matter your political affiliation - we all want our children to be successful, educated, have an opportunity for a future, and be well-cared for.
We should be in agreement that we want a high quality of education provided to our nation’s students. We should want every student, regardless of race, identity, family structure, financial means, or neurodivergence to be challenged, respected, supported, and provided with a high quality education. But instead we argue over public school versus school choice and completely miss the fact that BOTH public and choice schools can be amazing and BOTH public and choice schools can be terrible.
We should be in agreement that we want education to prepare our nation’s students to be effective, informed, and thoughtful citizens of this country. We should all agree that cognitive processing skills and critical analysis of knowledge and opinion is tantamount to being able to engage in effective dialogue around critical issues. But instead we argue over book titles, book content, divergent opinions, semantics of terms, the definitions of words, othering, and the retelling of history instead of seeking to understand.
We should be in agreement that we want our children to be safe while they are in schools, protected from violence between each other and from external influences. But we argue over amendment rights, strip funding away from mental health care supports to fund security measures, and provide our teachers with special locks to bar their doors to keep our children “safe.”
We should be in agreement that all students should have a fair and equal right to education, but money flows differently in different communities, and the communities that are most likely to be burdened with food or home insecurity are the same ones that struggle with educational access. In the general public perception, the term Title I is seen as equivalent to being a “bad school” when the intended purpose of Title I is to provide “supplemental financial assistance to school districts for children from low-income families. Its purpose is to provide all children [the] significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps by allocating federal funds for education programs and services” (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.).
The political intersection with education is most evident in these and other arguments that surround the educational landscape. So, politics or practice - which should rule?
The role of politics in education is complex but needed. Instead of striving for neutrality which stifles productive engagement and pushes critical topics off the table because of “sensitivities” or “uncertainties," political players in education should seek balanced and informed perspectives, focus on funding mechanisms for equitable educational accessibility, and seek a balance of power within the educational bureaucracy. Only policy and legislative action can prioritize funding for mechanisms that address critical infrastructure, access, and system-wide needs, and educators can contribute to the collective knowledge and influence that guides such legislation. Dr. Alexandra Laing experienced this influence as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Congressional Fellow when she served in U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen's office, handling her STEM and Education portfolios. While there may be a distinct version of public opinion surrounding policymakers, what she found to be true in the United States Congress was that the majority of individuals who walk the halls of Congress are brilliant, driven, and level-headed policymakers who want to do best by the American people. However, the public doesn't always get this perception because the shock-and-awe factor of the rare few tends to overwhelm the airways.
In the same way that politics in education is needed, educators are needed in politics. The majority of policy-makers' perceptions of education come from their time in classrooms as students. While this is a valid and reliable source of information for education policy, it's only one stakeholder perspective. Educators have a responsibility to the profession, to their students and families, and to each other to engage in thoughtful dialogue about the institutionalized, innovative, and inane systems in education - the kind of dialogue that recognizes that disagreements can become debates because there aren't simple problems to complex solutions. And yet, education is non-partisan. Educators must be the front-line advocates for non-partisan solutions to effectively care for, support, and provide opportunities for deep and meaningful learning for the students in our classrooms. Join advocacy groups, develop a caucus of like-minded educators to form opinion papers, and connect with your members of your state delegate and your members of congress. Engage students in critical conversations about the civic responsibility and honor of being able to vote in a democratic society. And research candidate priorities, past voting records, a candidate's alignment to your vision of the best of everything in education. Then go vote. Educators have a responsibility to help legislation and policies align with the reality that the nature of human intellect is to innovate, iterate, question, expand, and seek.
We should agree that being human is to be compassionate, respectful, caring, and considerate. Being human also means being fallible and prone to error. Educational leaders, teachers, students, and families all join around the same table in schools and bring different religious, political, and personal viewpoints. We should want our students to understand that to be human is to be empowered to hold personal perspectives and value our differences. We should want our students to understand that everyone makes mistakes and that mistakes aren’t fatal flaws unless we refuse to acknowledge them. And we should want our students to feel free to hold perspectives, change perspectives, and develop new perspectives. By appropriately grounding ourselves in the roles we each hold within the political intersection with education, public education can navigate complex political challenges while advancing principles of equity, inclusion, and social justice for all students.
Routledge's upcoming book, Solving School Challenges: The Everything Guide to Transformative Change, is a resource you’ll return to again and again and mark up with your favorite sections. The Everything Guide addresses big challenges in education by bringing tried and tested actionable solutions to everything from teacher salaries, retention, and professional learning to innovation in curricula and building trust with stakeholders. Full of graphic organizers and reproducibles and a comprehensive appendix with additional resources for each chapter, The Everything Guide is co-edited by authors Starr Sackstein and Dr. Alexandra Laing along with authors Dr. MaryAnn DeRosa and Dr. Tiffany Turner Hall - all Worthy Educators and Champions! The Everything Guide is expected to be released this fall and is not yet available for preorder.
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