Dear Editor,
I started my association with schooling as a kindergartner in the 1950s, in a town 60 miles west of Topeka, Kansas. In 1954 in the landmark case, Brown vs the Topeka Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared that “separate but equal” schools segregated by race were inherently unequal. I remember seeing in the news how desegregation played out across the country, with minority children having to be escorted past people shouting hateful slurs at the children.
So began my sojourn through seven decades of being inside schools. Twenty of those years I was superintendent in three different districts. What energized and fascinated me and made me proud to be an educator was the way the profession, in service to the original vision of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, incrementally evolved as the consciousness of the nation evolved toward “a more perfect union.” As I became an educator, the first graduate credits I took toward a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction at Kansas State University were in multi-cultural education. In the context of desegregation, it was necessary for educators to become more familiar with the cultures, traditions and history of all learners we taught. Today such training and perspective is derisively labeled, condemned and now virtually outlawed as “woke.” Teaching our history is now seen as a threat to a fragile majority ego, rather than as a means to advance from, rather than repeat, our darker moments as a nation.
As I began teaching, Congress passed Public Law 94-142, also known as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA). It requires that public schools provide education for all children, regardless of circumstances. When I attended elementary school, children with such needs were typically excluded or secluded, to their detriment and to the detriment of the capacity for empathy and respect from their “typically developing” peers. My heart warmed that first year to see my students argue over who got to wheel cerebral palsied Mayumi’s wheelchair to her next class. Fast forward now, and I have witnessed a President of the United States writhingly mock a similarly affected reporter to laughing and cheering throngs of his supporters. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) provides funding for a wide range of programs and services overseen by the Department of Education such as Title I that help children from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve in school. Now it is the expressed goal of the administration to abolish that department.
Relegate these duties to the states? Note the pattern in my journey. It took federal court action or legislation to overcome the biases, prejudices and outright hatred at local and state levels that blocked equal access to education in our past. Now those same judicial and legislative mechanisms seem poised to undo so much of the progress that invigorated me as an educator. That progress is incapsulated in Martin Luther King’s observation: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That hard-won bend in the arc of the moral universe is now under attack.
Now retired and in my 70’s, rather than looking back with pride on my small contribution as an educator, I am painfully aware that all of it is unraveling. I am broken-hearted for our current educators and learners, and for the backward steps now being celebrated, cheered and institutionalized from the highest levels of government. I fear it will take a generation or more to regain the progress we have made, and only then if we awaken to what we are losing.
David Flowers, Ph.D. , Retired Superintendent, Fargo Public Schools 1999-2007 , West Fargo Public Schools, 2010-2018
Verified by telephone – LAO
