Making my peace with quitting

I've spent the last week dealing with an insane amount of pressure. Pressure from teachers, pressure from administrators, pressure from kids, pressure from parents.

I've finally decided that if this keeps up, then I am leaving. I will write about the failures of public schools honestly, as well as a whole host of other policy issues, obviously. And I will write about possibilities for reform given a less aggressive posture toward measures meant to reform schools.

Specifically, I'll be writing about more freedom and a stronger non-profit and for-profit market for schools and a public education, with charter schools, vouchers and autonomous public schools of choice being at the forefront of those much more promising measures.

The current emphasis on pressuring and forcing our way to change is doomed. It hasn't worked in any major socialist, communist, Nazi, fascist or any other state organized program or bureaucracy and it will not succeed in public schools or any other bureaucracy, for that matter, in the democratic world, either.

Like with those governments, it will take time for Western democratic governments to face that failure. But the beautiful thing about democracy is that it offers us that opportunity more readily than any other form of government or culture in the history of the world. And figure it out we will.

Choice and markets are not the cutting edge and consensus as the most preferred means of public school reform in the most prestigious universities and scholarly communities for nothing. Terry Moe and John Chubb long ago wrote Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, which is a brilliant primer in the problems of public school bureaucracy, especially with respect to school reform. Public school monopolies limit more decentralized, diverse, innovative, and autonomously responsible efforts to improve and reform public schools and schools of all kinds. And I have gotten a first hand look, these last two years, at why that is so.

I still believe in public schools. And I believe in inner city public schools like Eisenhower.

But they have to prove themselves on their own merits, have to have support from parents and communities in ways that are realistic, forward-looking rather than backwards-looking, faciliate genuine discussion, dialogue and give-and-take, and which solve problems for real rather than hoping that bureaucracy can care for the substance of school failures.

And most importantly, they need more support and less condescension and external mandate from people who don't identify with inner city communities.

Genuine freedom and choice are fundamental to inner city school reform and improving American life, not incidental. As with liberal democratic societies, generally, freedom may be taken for granted, but it is the foundation for the culture whether we acknowledge and nurture that or not. And more of it, not less, if key to our common futures.

If I can't get support in this particular school and school district, I'm moving on to another school district until I fulfill my teaching scholarship obligations -- Desoto is looking like a nice district, these days, given the really wonderful teacher I know who works there -- and writing about the futility of public education reform until I see public school districts that begin to take more seriously the need to embrace freedom and choice as fundamental to their reform efforts and their dealings with families, kids, and teachers.

Inner city school reform has been the love of my life, up till this point. So it will be sad to leave it. But I'm not tied to anyone or anything that would treat me badly and act as if it's no big deal. And my little school district will need to decide in the near future whether or not it can learn to treat me as well as I treat those I work with and for, or learn.

And really, all you can realistically expect from people is that they learn from their mistakes, not that they don't make them:).

I hope everyone has a great week:):).

Love,
Ben