A Will To Dogma: Some Thoughts On Criticism Of Community Schools

There is no ideology enabler like a lack of practical experience with the issue under study. Untroubled by any concern about how a proposed policy might play out in the real world, this lack of grounding allows its author to give first principles complete reign without fear of unsettling contradiction or pragmatic consideration. What emerges might be best described as an almost Nietzschean will to unfettered dogma.

Perhaps nowhere is this ‘true believer’ indulgence of ideology more prevalent than in the field of education. Here there are even some who proudly celebrate their lack of practical experience and their ignorance of the classroom, parading it publicly like a peacock strutting his feathers — as if it were an achievement rather than the lack of one.

This will to dogma comes to mind when one considers a number of a recent responses to the proposal Randi Weingarten made in her speech to the AFT convention for ‘community schools’ and to the “broader, bolder approach” to education reform.

Classroom teachers recognize immediately the educational value of providing a comprehensive array of services to students living in poverty. They have seen the effects of undiagnosed and untreated eye problems on a student’s ability to learn how to read, and of untreated ear infections on a student’s ability to hear what is being said in the classroom. They know that the lack of proper medical care heightens the severity of childhood illnesses and makes them last longer, leading to more absences from school for students who need every day of school they can get. They have seen asthma reach epidemic proportions among students living in poverty, and they know that the lack of preventive and prophylactic medical care leads to more frequent attacks of a more severe nature, and more absences from school. They understand that screening for lead poisoning happens least among children in poverty, even though their living conditions make them the most likely victims, with all of the negative effects on cognitive functions. They know that the stresses of life in poverty make mental health and social work services for students and their families all that more important, and yet they are least likely to receive them. They see how the transience that marks poverty disrupts the education of students again and again, as the families of students are constantly on the move. In short, teachers know that the students living in poverty lack the health and social services routinely available to middle class and upper class students, despite the fact that they need them even more. And they know that the absence of these services has a detrimental impact on the education, as well as the general well-being, of students living in poverty.

Far from being an argument that demography is destiny, the call for community schools demands a recognition of what society must provide young people living in poverty to provide them with meaningful opportunities for a successful education and a better life. The suggestion that schools can do it all alone, without these other services, is a cruel denial of how life in poverty impinges in major ways upon the education of students. It is a false promise to young people who have heard all too many false promises.

To claim, as Checker Finn does, that a call for ‘community schools’ diminishes the efforts for educational excellence is to be willfully blind about how life in poverty undermines such efforts. Is educational excellence a virtue reserved for the economically comfortable?

Disingenuous calls for “evidence” that community schools work require a willful myopia on the effect on life in poverty on education — a blindness made possible by a complete unfamiliarity with the real world of the classroom. It is perhaps inevitable that when one approaches the issue in pride ignorance of that world, the debate quickly degenerates into invective and accusation of lying.

When it comes to blind dogma in the world of education, experience in real classrooms and real schools is a welcome cure.

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