ABSTRACT
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges our public schools face results from one of their most significant strengths: the fact that the vast majority of our nation’s citizens have access to free public education and are able, at a minimum, to graduate from high school. Unfortunately, the fact that most of our nation’s residents at one time—and for an extended period—attended some version of school (public, private, religious, independent, even home) has given rise to what have become increasingly dangerous assumptions that we all know what constitutes a “quality” school and that we all appreciate, almost by birthright, what effective teaching looks like. The positive outcomes of this near-universal schooling reality are that education is a topic that rarely leaves the public imagination and that we as a society seem to care enough about schools—at least in our own communities— to discuss and debate them ad nauseam. Even if most of these discussions about schools’ and teachers’ effectiveness are rooted in our narrow experiences, with pre-K–12 educators and our educational institutions critiqued by our untrained eyes, and the ways we manage and judge the teaching profession unapologetically shaped by our personal biases. I imagine the alternative—a nation that never engages in a conversation about its educational system—would be a likely indicator that schools and teaching were irrelevant afterthoughts, receiving considerably less attention but also likely less susceptible to manipulations and abuses. So the fact that our schools have such a ubiquitous presence in our national public dialogues is probably a very good sign.
