Letter From the Editor
Fred Barton, Michigan State University, Chair NCTE/SLATE Steering Committee

Gentle Reader:

In his book, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear, Henry Giroux describes the difference between what he calls “Public Time” and “Emergency Time.” He writes: “Public time provides a conception of democracy that is never complete and determinate, but constantly open to different understandings of the contingency of its decisions, mechanisms of exclusions, and operations of power… Emergency time defines a community against its democratic possibilities, detaching it from those conditions that prepare citizens to deliberate collectively about the future and the role they must play in creating and shaping it.”(8-9)

Giroux’s description is meant to characterize America, post 9/11, but could be applied to the view of schools that has been promulgated in this country since the 1983 report, A Nation At Risk.   Certainly schools have faced criticism before this date, going back to at least 1845 according to Richard Rothstein writing in, The Way We Were? but ANAR upped the ante on schools by putting the government’s power behind the criticisms. And criticism of the schools was the intent of the report. As Chair of the commission, David Pierpoint Gardner wrote in the letter of transmittal to then Secretary of Education Terrance Bell, “Our purpose has been to help define the problems afflicting American education and to provide solutions, not search for scapegoats.”  Later, lip service was given to the strengths of schools, but it was clear from the outset that the goal of the committee was to come to the conclusion that schools were broken.

And thus, public schools formally entered Emergency Time, a time, as Giroux points out, in which resistance becomes subversive, reason gives way to faith, debate is replaced by fiat, and complexity dissolved into simplicity.

Which brings me to this issue’s contributors. First, Richard J. Meyer, Professor in the Department of Language, Literacy & Sociocultural Studies at University of New Mexico, starts us off with a discussion of the unintended chilling side effects of NCLB. As he says, “What I am proposing is that the policies that have grown in tentacle-like fashion from NCLB are a form of censorship that may, at first glance, appear subtle, but it is far from that.” Resistance becomes subversive in this world, but, as Dr. Meyer warns, eventually resistance is extinguished in the most disheartening way possible: We do it to ourselves.

Turning teachers into “educational technicians” who merely apply the corporate curriculum to the units in their charge isn’t enough though, as Steven Miller and Jack Gerson argue in their piece. It seems that only the complete commoditization of education and privatization of schools will sate the corporate beast. Focusing their discussion around Tough Choices or Tough Times, the latest in scaremongering from the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, Miller and Gerson point to the real agenda: dismantling the public school system. As they say, “The significance of the Report is that the march towards the privatization of public schools came completely out of the closet in 2006. No longer is it a hidden agenda. Now the open campaigning will begin, the lobbying and bribery will ensue and laws will be debated to change public schools in the corporate direction.“ Mr. Miller teaches science at Life Academy in Oakland, California, the first small high school in the city--a school for low-achieving children. He has been a union rep for 20 years. Miller was part of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. He also worked in Louisiana with CORE in 1965. Jack Gerson teaches math in the Oakland California school district.

Meyer, Miller and Gerson argue that it is time for teachers to become active, to take a stand for themselves and their profession, and that is just what our third article is about. Anne Cognard, along with the English Department at Lincoln East High School in Nebraska took their school district’s policy manual and used it as a template for a manifesto of sorts that argues for the rights of teachers and students to work and learn in an open, honest, professional setting. They write, “The goal of all educators is to help the young people in our classrooms become fully human: reflective, self-reflective, creative, honorable, tolerant, hopeful, humble, loving, forgiving, ethical.  In short, teachers try to turn loose on the world young women and men capable of making a difference through their capacity for understanding.”  This is a statement of what schools should be and what teachers and students do that has, sadly, been lost in the current rush to quantify, measure and value human beings in a purely economic way. Dr. Cognard is chair of the English Department, Lincoln East High School.  She has a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature and is the author of Advancing Rhetoric:  Critical Thinking and Writing.

So there you have it. A little gloomy, yes, but not without hope. Resistance, my friends, is not subversive, or futile, and underlying each of these pieces is the challenge that we must all, in our own way, find the courage to say we will not be assimilated.