Monday in Get Schooled, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Bridget Gutierrez asked,
But will public education ever not be political?
This is a classic statement that gets a mental “facepalm” reaction from me. How can you have education connected to citizenship (either education for citizenship or education attached to citizenship as a right) and then expect that somehow there wouldn’t be a politics of education?
Historically, the desire for “removing politics from education” has been a rhetorical trump card, most famously in the Progressive Era (see David Tyack’s The One Best System, 1974, for the most famous history of Progressive-Era bureaucratization). Usually, it hasn’t removed politics from education so much as shifting education policymaking to a different political arena.