The pages that follow are part of The Clearing House 100 year celebration. Like so many articles before them, they represent current thinking and best classroom practices available. All of these authors offer practical solutions and unique perspectives that our readers will find engaging and useful for their experiences.
Each of the issues for 2020 looks back to the challenges poking at the fabric of teaching and instruction. For someone fascinated by the past and how it has shaped our present, I have found reflections in this year’s issues fascinating. They act as a time machine returning me to the 60 s and 70 s, a period of innovation, curricular freedoms, and teacher trust. Such an environment drew young teachers into a world they controlled. As a teacher beginning his career, I remember fondly about the age of moon shots and Woodstock. While energy and vision consumed classrooms inside the school during those decades, outside, politicians, economists, and pundits began to coalesce around different ideas. Decades beyond the 70 s, schooling came under scrutiny for complacency and unaccountability for what students were learning. Suddenly, almost without warning, schools represented a national security threat. A Nation at Risk, among the first damning federal reports, put it this way, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America a mediocre education performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Other condemnations such as No Child Left Behind legislation and its reauthorization Race to the Top gave federal mandates. These legislative measures put assessment at the center of student learning and set arbitrary achievement benchmarks that narrowed curriculum and threatened school closures.
An uncomfortable truth emerged from measuring academic progress. Data spilling into the public consciousness from student assessment research discovered that too many minority city children were not progressing at the same rate as their white suburban peers. A learning gap between high poverty, minority children and the more privileged suburban middle-class white students presented a troubling contrast. Schools from earlier decades rarely considered a racial gap challenging America’s moral authority in the world. Brown v. Board of Education solved the stain of racial separation. The court decision fully embraced the Fourteenth Amendment's "Equal Protection Clause," bringing everyone under the tent of equality. Brown, in the end, failed its promise to balance the color of learning. Racial justice remains elusive and continues to manifest a learning divide along the lines of color. The injustice behind access to quality schools unmasks America’s underlying problems of economics, policing, housing, and opportunity.
Public education has become a battle ground over funding, accountability, and today a fight about how schools reopen during a pandemic. A deadly virus has done more to reform schools than any legislative initiative or judicial decision. In this issue, Elizabeth Meador looks back to a 1974 article, Alternative Schools: Can they Survive? by Gerald Brunett. Brunett calls to us from the 70 s and asks if schools can continue to serve students in their traditional structure, dating back hundreds of years. He offers alternatives and argues for a more student-centered approach. Meador pulls Brunett’s conundrum into a contemporary context when she observes “Nothing has been quite so rapid as the onset of Covid-19, with the closure of every school in America …” Indeed, decision makers face an uncertain fall of 2020 as they push to reopen schools safely for all students and teachers.
I invite you to explore the ideas, values, and perspectives of the authors found in this issue.