Enabling Change

Amid the Flames of the Federal Role in Education: Is Advancing Next Gen Learning a Way to Confront the Tear-Down?

Many of us likely recognized this already, but it is now being proved in front of our eyes on a scale that is unprecedented in American history:

It is far easier to destroy than it is to build.

Supporters of the current effort by the White House to take down the U.S. Department of Education, along with any form of federal support for DEI, many forms of federally-sponsored research taking place in every state, relations with the nation’s deepest historical allies, and the legal identity of an entire population group—trans folks—will say, “Good riddance. We didn’t need it.”

There is a whole lot I would like to say about all of this, but my focus here is on this administration’s wholesale attack on the federal role in public education.

Now, even the most liberal among us might agree that deliberate, on-going pruning of government programming and spending is a good idea, as outcomes become apparent and new technologies or strategies come on the scene. There might also be fairly broad agreement that too many good intentions over too many years have led to far too many rules in far too many places. NGLC is among the many non-profit organizations that generally choose not to pursue federal grants because of the enormous compliance burden they bring with them.

NGLC has also been a loud and leading advocate since our launch in 2011 for the near-total transformation of public education, its goals for students, and the learning experiences all of our children have in their public schools.

Wanting change is not at issue here. Yes! Si! Change it!!!!

Here’s what’s at issue: what kind of change do we want?

• Change that destroys, without consideration of impact? Or change that builds, based on what’s been learned?
• Change that demeans, dehumanizes, and tears people down? Or change that encourages, enables, and raises people up?
• Change that helps us learn, revise, and improve? Or change that shuts down learning, diminishes science, and trashes decades of data, all to make room for politics?

The 2024 Presidential Election was a call from the nation’s electorate for change. Voters on both sides of that race wanted change. But what we’re getting isn’t change: it is the wanton, unthinking, and in many cases likely illegal destruction of a societal and global order that has been in place since FDR and the Second World War. An order at home that made real progress in fulfilling the declaration in our founding documents that all people are created equal. And a U.S.-led order abroad that has kept the world from exploding into a cataclysmic WWIII for eighty years—no small accomplishment.

And: it is also an order that for all of its successes has not been working for far too many, here in the U.S. and around the globe—including in the ways we educate our young. I am not defending the status quo. I am questioning what the heck is being put in its place.

What emerges in the vacuum that results from this administration’s takedown of the federal role in education and the U.S.’s accustomed role in the world may well tell the tale for the next eighty years. In what direction will our schools turn? Since the U.S. now appears to be throwing in our lot with Russia, North Korea, and Belarus, we might learn something from asking people in those countries how they like the public education being offered in a totalitarian state.

In fact: I’ve done that. I spoke at the Mayor of Moscow’s education conference several years back. Russian educators I met there quietly told me they were afraid to speak openly of their enormous dissatisfaction with Russian public education. They feared retribution.

So it’s come to this, here in the United States. We all seem to want change; but is it really Donald Trump’s “End Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” that the majority of Americans are clamoring for?

What would happen if we all paused, right here, and took a breath? (I know: that doesn’t seem to be the preferred pace around the White House these days, but never mind: let’s do it, the rest of us. Breathing is highly recommended.)

The great and tragic irony of the 2020s is that, within the realm of public education, we’re ignoring a vast and incredibly promising consensus on the biggest things… while we fight about very important but, in the end, in many ways, smaller things. That consensus generally holds true across all of our lines of difference—political, geographic, economic, cultural, racial.

The biggest things at the center of this consensus are these:

• The universal value among parents for their kids to lead happy, fulfilling lives; and among all citizens for upcoming generations to be capable contributors to healthy, vibrant communities
• The very broad consensus that this universal value, today, depends on kids experiencing learning that helps them become caring, collaborative, creative, flexible, and resilient thinkers and problem solvers.
• The deep and growing research base affirming that students best learn those skills, as well as core academic skills, through learning experiences they find engaging, relevant, meaningful, and purpose-building. (See the website of the Science of Learning and Development Alliance, along with NGLC’s MyWays project, for more on all of these points.)

If that’s the case: then why, oh why, are we—everyone who’s concerned about the nation’s younger generations growing up to be fulfilled contributors to a safe, healthy, just, free world—not spending basically all of our time on ways we can help that vision come true for all of this nation’s schoolchildren?

What if—even as important and hard-fought battles continue in the trenches of edu-politics—we all insisted on doing that, to the best of our abilities? Across all of our lines of differences? What if we doubled down on striving to catalyze student-centered, next gen learning in our own communities and states, since that’s where almost all policy-making and resource allocation appear to be headed, anyway?

What if we all worked to fill the vacuum resulting from the educational clearcutting being undertaken right now with something far better, instead of something far worse?

“Hope,” said Desmond Tutu, “is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Perhaps we can find that light, as a friend of mine likes to say, by thinking and acting bigly. No matter what your leanings are in national politics: what’s the embiggening thing about transforming learning for the better that you can do this week, this month, this school year, in your own community, that will help that light shine more brightly for you and everyone around you?

Doing so would be the best gift we could offer to the kids. And maybe, just maybe, focusing on what we can do to advance public education’s most important work could be a productive way for the rest of us to confront and get through the current moment, as well.

Photo at top by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages, CC BY-NC 4.0