You once said you might Drunk-History the factors leading to our modern educational system and I don't care whether or not you're drunk, I really want to hear the story of how our education system was formed. You in?
Hey there pal! Â I would love to do that, but being as I am an Actual Working Teacher irl, I have a shitton of grading to plow through today. ://///
SHORT VERSION: we start (circa the Revolution) with “education is so that you can read the bible & be a moral person”, w/higher education restricted almost entirely to wealthy white dudes who would then become ministers (or maaaaaybe doctors & lawyers).Â
By the early 1900s, we’ve moved to seeing K-12 education as being a) for everybody and b) preparation for the working world, which is often but not only factory work. College is still only for a very few people, but that changes rapidly, partly b/c land grant universities exist, partly b/c of the GI Bill, partly b/c the federal government starts loaning people money to go to school.
obvs US schools are still INTENSELY segregated, racially speaking.  The Civil Rights movement (1950s/60s) leads to school desegregation, which works better in some places than in others; in many cases, white folks just pack up and move to the suburbs, allowing de facto segregation to continue.  Some places handle this with forced bussing, which is a WHOLE other thing, I can’t even go into that. Â
[One side effect of this is that students of color are frequently no longer being taught by teachers of color - rather than have two parallel educational systems, we have one big messy system, and guess which teachers we keep? Â *eyeroll* So, yeah, the whiteness of the American teaching forces is a huge problem, and one that relatively few districts are addressing competently, in my experience.]
ALSO there’s title IX, which actually starts out as a general “stop being sexist dbags” thing, but now is mostly known for letting women play sports, which...cool, I guess, if you like sportsball?
THE OTHER BIG THING we have to talk about is IDEA, formerly the EAHCA, which mandates...actually educating kids with disabilities?  and supporting them? WHOA DUDE. It’s kind of a big fucking deal, BUT it also happens to be why we’re spending a fuckton more on education without necessarily seeing huge growth in grad rates.
BUT while all this is going on, we’ve also got the increase in ROBOTS and the consequent decline and fall of the Good (Union) Factory Job, PLUS the increase in people who have college degrees means a corresponding increase in jobs that expect you to HAVE a college degree, until we wind up more or less where we are now, where everybody “needs to go to college”, but your BA on its own isn’t worth much, so pretty much we’re all fucked.
Plus NCLB and RTTT and the rise of charter schools and high-stakes testing and the fucking Common Core, oh my goddddddd fuck the Common Core, plus also now we’re trying to support LGBTQ students in a meaningful way, which, ahahahahaha mine is a bitter laugh...but honestly I have already spent TOO MUCH TIME YELLING today, so. I hope this was informative?
