Jose Vilson, educator, blogger, poet...... on the
education boogeymen among us, transforming our public schools without really understanding the context or consequences......
The boogey men use words like “accountability” and “executive decision” to siphon monies to third-party vendors and call the “support” an in-kind trade of thousands of dollars. The boogey men make up a set of neologisms to describe archaic and corporatist ideas in the hopes of pushing ideas that make no sense for the reality of millions of students across the nation. They’ll make unfair comparisons to other countries who’ve limited their educational opportunities to a certain sect of their population and boil their decisions down to “biology.” They’ll move the cursors on their graphs and charts just to make gains look greater than they actually are. just before election time.
What’s more, these boogeymen haven’t addressed education as a whole. After reading the plans, it makes me wonder if they’ve spoken at length and candidly to teachers, and not just to professors who haven’t taught in a long time, or people who’ve barely smelled a classroom or have kids going to school. This sort of work can’t be done while sitting in a little corner cubicle with a little reading light for weeks straight.
Like the ones we see in the movies or, for some of us, under our beds as children, these boogymen never see light. Or the light. That’s why we’re here. To illuminate as much as possible.
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