“Teach”: The useless tears of Tony Danza

The well-intentioned actor takes a teaching gig for a reality show, but his histrionics overshadow the real story

By Aaron Traister

FILE - In this Sept. 18, 2009 file photo, actor Tony Danza makes remarks at a news conference to promote the Fallen Hero Tribute Concert in Philadelphia. When Danza began teaching English at a Philadelphia high school, no one really knew what to expect. Not even Danza. Certainly school officials were holding their breath after the district greenlighted "Teach," an A&E reality show premiering Friday, Oct. 1, 2010, that chronicles Danza's year at the head of a class. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) (Credit: Matt Rourke)

Topics:Education, Reality TV, Television

At a time when public schools are on the ropes, teachers unions are less popular than LeBron James, and everyone is waiting for a Superman to save our floundering education system, one man has accepted the challenge. Unfortunately, that man is Tony Danza.

The 59-year-old actor brought his trademark mug — and a few TV cameras — to a year-long job teaching 10th-grade English at Northeast High School for an A&E reality show called “Teach” (Oct. 1, 10 p.m. EDT). The school is situated in a sprawling section of Philadelphia known locally as the Great Northeast, which houses both bombed-out buildings and manicured suburban lawns, with a mixture of not just black and white students but Asian and Russian immigrant populations as well. You can say Danza is guilty of naiveté or narcissism, but you can’t say he doesn’t try; he brings more showmanship to the classroom than the second-stage headliner at Harrah’s in Atlantic City. Much of “Teach’s” first seven episodes are devoted to Danza’s efforts to become more involved in and out of the classroom: He tap-dances, he sings. He even cries. If he were a better actor, I might doubt his sincerity. But I’ve seen “Who’s the Boss.” He ain’t that good.

I spent most of my 20s working with at-risk and incarcerated teens in Philadelphia, and while I wouldn’t dare to call myself a teacher, I can only describe what I did as “teaching art.” My job was relatively easy, since the expectations for my dropouts, reintegration cases and felons were so low that any meager accomplishments made in my classroom were met with resounding approval from funders and city officials. I’m not trying to take away anything from my former students — some of whom accomplished amazing things in my classroom — I only mean to point out that it was never me who deserved the credit, and ultimately, whatever they did achieve didn’t matter in the face of a life sentence or the fact that they dropped out again before getting their GED. To say that I saw parallels between Danza and myself — moonlighting in a world that demands real commitment, easily frustrated by what you discover in that world, and eventually reaping undeserved credit for any achievements made by others — would be an understatement. All of which is a way of saying, I wanted to hate “Teach.”

I didn’t want to see complicated issues that led to my painfully smart students dropping out reduced to the insipid platitudes of “Dangerous Minds” and “Freedom Writers.” I didn’t want to see Tony Danza portrayed as the great white hope encouraging his students to rage against the dying of the light or some nonsense like that. I didn’t want to see Tony Danza portrayed as a hero for showing up briefly and impersonating a teacher while the real teachers and administrators, who have dedicated their adult lives to bailing out the sinking ship of urban education, get portrayed as a lazy greedy horde by politicians and talking heads who know that because of systemic failures on state, local and federal levels (and yes, within the teachers unions themselves) teachers are left as the punching bags for a restless and frustrated population. Most teaching experiences don’t end with a perfect graduation rate like that of Jaime Escalante in “Stand and Deliver” or with your classroom breaking into song, and I didn’t want to see another program that tricked people into thinking it was the other way around.

That wasn’t what I saw. Apparently I was suffering from the soft bigotry of low expectations for Tony Danza.

In “Teach,” Danza often looks far from heroic. He bursts into tears after his teaching coach ever so gently busts his balls — for breaking into tears. He’s so culturally tone-deaf that he jokes about living in Malibu, expecting the Northeast High School football team to actually get what “living in Malibu” implies (I don’t even get what that implies). His students rip on him for sweating too much and suggest that he should wear a double layer of undershirts. Actually, the kids rip on Danza about a lot of things, from his grasp of the material to his classroom management, to his crying. Danza comes off as socially awkward around the other teachers and the students. He insists on singing a birthday song of his own creation instead of just singing “Happy Birthday.” It’s weird.

But these gaffes feel surprisingly honest. Another less scrupulous reality show could have edited out these moments, or manipulated them to make Danza seem in control or valiantly struggling. Instead “Teach” lets it all hang out there like a desperate squirrel on a broken branch on a windy day. Danza looks neither valiant nor in control. He looks kind of silly and awkward. And as anyone who has ever stepped in front of a classroom of students for the first time knows, looking silly and feeling awkward are job requirements. Even Danza’s insistence on performing his way through classes trying to keep the kids entertained rather than educated is a cringe-inducingly accurate portrayal of a common trap for young teachers.

It’s oddly endearing, because for all of Tony Danza’s classroom and social failings, I don’t doubt his sincerity in wanting to do a good job. I also get the sense that he showed up every day ready to work, which strikes me as unusual in the pantheon of celebrity do-gooder reality shows.

But “Teach” also has terrible drawbacks. While most reality TV shows deliver their message with the subtlety of a hammer to the head, “Teach” seems unsure of its message, as though the show still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.

Is it a call to service for baby boomers wondering what to do with their retirement? Maybe. Is it a show about the challenges facing first-year teachers? Probably. Is it a show about Tony Danza being a socially awkward weirdo and desperately trying to win over a skeptical group of 16-year-olds? Definitely.

Make no mistake that this is tangentially a show about teaching. But it’s primarily a fish-out-of-water show about a person who’s been given too much money, too much fame, too much attention, trying with all his might to do something good in the only way he knows how: with cameras, tap-dancing, overacting and catchphrases. As likable as Danza is, as central as his fame is to the premise, he is also the biggest roadblock to making a show with anything real to say.

If reality TV ever wanted to rise above being a mockery of its name, the students and the staff of teachers and administrators are the ones who would really be the stars of this show. They are beautiful and, in a bizarre twist, far more natural in front of the camera than Danza. They look and sound like actual humans. When Danza gets out of the way long enough, we catch glimpses of a big city high school and how it operates.

These don’t appear to be educators ready for the rubber room. They aren’t the greedy union horde. These people are professionals, real people who wake up every morning and try to help kids learn and grow, trying to nudge kids away from their comfort zones and into a world that doesn’t revolve around them. It would be great to get a glimpse at what they’re doing and the grace with which they are doing it, because it seems that a lot of Americans have forgotten what they look like. If only Tony Danza would just step aside.

As Danza frets and worries about his teaching method, his fellow teachers keep trying to tell him to stop making the classes all about him. He doesn’t need to constantly perform to keep the students’ attention. By taking a step back and ceding some responsibility to his class, the lessons he’s trying to teach will be more deeply understood. They are talking about the moments when you’ve given the students all the information and they begin to learn from each other, when they become teachers themselves, bringing the lessons into their own worlds. It is not a moment that saves anyone from prison, it is not a moment that inspires a classroom to break into song, it is not a moment that even guarantees graduation. But it’s those moments that make people want to teach, or understand that what’s great about teaching isn’t the Big Finish. Sadly, for Danza, his class and the television audience, he can’t get out of the way long enough to let that lesson sink in.

: Aaron Traister is a proud graduate of the Community College of Philadelphia. He writes a monthly column for Redbook. More Aaron Traister

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Santorum’s “snobbery” red herring

Increasing university funding isn't elitist. Backing a system where college has become a huge class barrier is

By David Sirota

(Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Topics:Education, Rick Santorum

Say what you will about this era’s Republican presidential candidates, they at least have chutzpah.

Millionaire blue-blood George W. Bush pretended to be a down-home cowboy. Two-time divorcee and longtime Washington influence peddler Newt Gingrich struts around preaching about traditional family values and insisting he’s a D.C. outsider. Now, topping them all is Rick Santorum, who last week declared that only “snobs” support efforts to make a college education more accessible to all Americans.

Santorum, of course, has not one, not two, but a whopping three separate degrees, two of which come from public universities – that is, two that were taxpayer-subsidized, courtesy of the “Big Government” Santorum now claims to loathe.

Hypocritical — and dare I say, snobbish — as it is for someone with such a pedigree to attack President Obama’s college affordability initiatives, Santorum did inadvertently stumble into a significant question: Is higher education for everyone? The answer today is not necessarily, but that’s precisely because of the affordability problem Obama aims to solve.

N+1 magazine notes that since the late 1970s, when Santorum was enjoying his taxpayer-subsidized higher education, “the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900 percent.” In 2011, that meant the average total cost of a year at a public university was $21,477, up 5.4 percent in just 12 months. Thanks to cuts to programs that make college and vocational education more affordable — cuts Santorum supported in Congress — those tuition increases promise to get even steeper in the coming years, all but ensuring that a future college student will have even more than the $25,250 in education debt that today’s average student carries.

With higher education this unaffordable but with most decent-paying jobs in our economy still requiring a degree, the trends have created another bubble scenario. Those lucky enough to get a job out of school can barely pay back their now-massive loans, and those left jobless in the recession can’t pay back their loans at all, leaving us facing the potential of mass defaults and yet another financial meltdown.

Not surprisingly, this frightening situation has initiated a debate over whether college remains a good investment. Most of the data say that on average it still is – that the money typically spent on higher education is made back in comparatively higher wages during a career. However, that data is less clear than it once was, and that typical experience is no longer such a guarantee. Indeed, there are more and more situations where college might not be such a solid financial investment, not because it’s wrong for a particular student’s interests, but because the economics of tuition prices and the anemic job market make it too risky a gamble.

Those economics are an obvious symptom of a larger crisis involving all sorts of cuts — revenue-draining tax cuts, cuts to education budgets and cuts to public programs that sustain decent jobs. But because any critical discussion of those policies offends the GOP’s corporate financiers, Santorum is trying to define the crisis on unrelated, culture-war terms. He would have us believe the emergency is about “snobbery” from Democrats arrogantly pressuring Americans to get degrees. In this, he gets a two-fer: he can both avoid tough issues and pander to the anti-intellectual, anti-elitist sensibilities of Republican primary voters.

As the facts prove, though, the real crisis is about a conservative economic agenda whose anti-government extremism is making the path to a degree and a decent job even tougher than it naturally is during tough times.

Trying to make that path just a tad easier — like it was when Santorum got his three degrees — isn’t snobbery. It’s the opposite.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

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My teaching job is a nightmare

The atmosphere is toxic and I can't breathe

By Cary Tennis

(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Topics:Since You Asked, Education, Stress

Dear Cary,

I feel ungrateful for complaining about my job while so many are desperate for work, but this is where I find myself. I am a teacher, and have been in the same school for five years. During that time, I have felt the atmosphere turn toxic. Things have spiraled out of control, and it is a top-down spiral. It is out of my hands. This toxicity has left me bitter and I dread coming to work for another day of feeling useless. I try to just focus on my students and what is happening in my classroom, but the atmosphere is smothering us all.

I am trying to find another position for next year, to try to find a place where I can breathe, but this is a tough time to try to find a job in any profession, and teaching is no exception. Almost all of my colleagues that I like working with left after last year or are trying to leave now.

Quitting is not an option for me as my husband does not make enough to support both of us. How do I survive in a toxic environment? What if I am stuck here again next year? I am worried for my health and sanity.

Sincerely,

Trying to Breathe

Dear Trying to Breathe,

At the risk of sounding simple-minded, I would suggest that if you are trying to breathe, just breathe.

Breathe. Literally.

Take 15 minutes and sit quietly and breathe in and out, watching your breath, paying attention to the column of air that rises and falls. Do this every day in the morning and in the evening.

It is often useful in situations of great stress to take the body at its word. You say the atmosphere is smothering you. Something is going on with your breath. So breathe. Let your breath heal you.

There will be time to address the complicated matters of workplace power and change, and education policy and hierarchy and bad behavior soon enough.

But for now, just breathe.

The trauma, disruption, betrayal, confusion, uncertainty and general nastiness you refer to are being replicated in countless schools all across this great nation of ours. It is mind-boggling. Every teacher says the same thing.

But for now, just breathe.

We cannot control with our minds the chemical processes that take place in our cells. But we can, to some extent, control the psychological processes that take place when other people treat us in certain ways. So when you say the atmosphere is toxic, I think to myself, well, identify the toxins; identify our reactions to them; then eliminate the toxins or learn new responses to them.

We can choose how to respond to conditions and situations and words. It takes practice and conditioning but it can be done.

Breathing helps.

We can replace our learned reactions to people with new learned behaviors. This may involve setting aside some cherished assumptions and beliefs. For instance we may have a cherished belief that people should not be nasty, vindictive, sinister, manipulative, lying sacks of garbage. We might think that this is a given but it is only a cherished belief. In fact, one often finds in the real world that people are indeed nasty, vindictive, sinister, manipulative, lying sacks of garbage.

We must learn to accept with love all the nasty, vindictive, sinister, manipulative, lying sacks of garbage we are privileged to serve in our day-to-day lives.

This helps us in our spiritual growth.

OK, enough attempted humor.

Seriously, I asked some teachers I know about your situation. Their responses appear at the end of this letter.

My bottom line is that in human interactions we can bear almost anything. If you are not being tortured, or literally poisoned, or deprived of your liberty, then these are relationship issues that can be managed and tolerated. That’s not to say that they aren’t outrageous or that you shouldn’t be outraged. You should be outraged.

There might be things you can do to change the situation. Many Web pages like this one offer steps intended to help you do that. You may be able to find one that works for you, or a book to guide you through this. This site might also be helpful. Since it’s called the Toxic Co-Worker, I thought it might have some useful stuff in it, but you’ll have to look at it and decide for yourself, as I haven’t been able to study it in detail.

Basically, my advice is to breathe deeply and accept the fact that schools all over America are in chaos and everyone there is under great stress and so certain people at work are apt to lie, manipulate, fabricate, equivocate, undermine you, etc.

But don’t just lie down and take it. Identify areas over which you have some control. Is it possible, for instance, to create rituals in your day that give you a little inner peace? Is it possible, for instance, to meditate for 15 minutes before every class day? Is it possible to take even five minutes of relaxation time before class? Can you walk to work or work out before work so that you feel at least physically refreshed and invigorated? What areas can you still control? Who are your allies? Can you spend time with your allies in the school? If you have no allies among the teachers then perhaps you can form alliances with one or two of the parents.

The other part of it, the policy part, looks like this to me: We might argue reasonably about different approaches to teaching. But no matter whose educational philosophy is correct, if many, many teachers are desperately unhappy in their jobs, then we have a serious social problem.

If this joyful collective activity of learning and teaching has become a drudge and a nightmare, then something is wrong.

If teachers are unhappy then the transmission of knowledge, that most rare, joyful and fundamental process of society, has become diseased, and we are doomed as a culture. We are doomed as surely as if our blood were diseased, for a body does not thrive out of duty but out of joy; a body does not aspire to obedience and regularity but to excellence and grace. Likewise the mind aspires to novelty and discovery.

If we are forcing teachers to grind their students down into mediocrity and conformity then we will inherit a generation conditioned to mediocrity and conformity.

As an aid to discussion, I asked a couple of teachers I know about this situation.

Read and discuss:

Teacher A:

I know exactly what this person is talking about. Many teachers feel this way. It makes me sick to acknowledge that we are all in the same boat.

I started teaching in 1985. When I began, teachers were free to create a curriculum that matched their students’ needs. Teachers worked together to create projects that would reach and inspire all their students. Now, the environment has become competitive. Teachers worry if their scores are not as high as their colleague’s scores. Scores differ because classes differ.

All we do is test. Math teachers at our school are being raked over the coals this week because their latest Benchmark scores were too low. Their scores were low because the Benchmark that the district created did not match the sequence of the textbook. It tested info that had not yet been taught.

Just this last weekend, I was with one of my fellow teachers and, of course, the conversation turned to school. I know firsthand what an excellent teacher she is. We ended up talking about how to get out of it: the constant testing, pressure, criticism from the district.

She’s thinking about moving into administration — not because she wants to be one of them, but to get out of being one of us.

Another excellent classroom teacher moved to PE to avoid the testing nightmare. We are all considering our options. The problem is, we love the jobs we signed up for, not the jobs they have become.

Teacher B:

It helps to have a strong sense of self, a belief in yourself, and yes, in some cases it means moving on.

My teaching partner became my best friend and taught me so much. We worked together for 18 years. During that time, there were mean teachers, bad principals, an uprising of parents who retaliated against the district and started a charter school when our school was closed. But having a close friendship with a colleague provided support and that helped me weather the storms.

When I was asked to become a principal, my teaching partner was very upset. It was hard, and I lost that support. I don’t think I realized how important having that was, especially since she not only was a co-worker but a friend.

As a leader I tried to get my small staff to cooperate and work together. That was part of my job as a leader. Even though I was given teachers that no one else would work with, we made it work.

The last thing I wanted was what the LW described, a toxic environment. I would have done anything to avoid it, and I did. I pitched in and taught and picked up their classes to give them time together to make them feel less stress. But I could do that. The program was small and I could get to know them individually. It wasn’t always smooth, but it was successful for everyone.

Cary, I said all this to show you that this is not easy, but things change. What this person has to figure out is, Can she get support and figure out a way to make this work, or change schools? Do something to mitigate the situation until there is a change for the better? Get union help? If there is really no way out then perhaps another district, but as you can see, it may not be any different somewhere else.

This isn’t an easy job; it drains us emotionally, physically and intellectually. No one seems to understand this; it’s unlike any other profession.

Cary Tennis is Salon's advice columnist. He leads writing workshops and creative getaways, and occasionally tweets as @carytennis.

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Rick Santorum: Liberal Penn State punished me for being conservative

An anti-college crusade with a dash of persecution fantasy

By Alex Pareene

RIck Santorum in his 1976 high school yearbook photo.

Topics:Rick Santorum, 2012 Elections, Penn State, College, Education

Rick Santorum hates college. The former senator from Pennsylvania and current presidential candidate has lately taken to declaring that Barack Obama’s promotion higher education is both elitist snobbery and a insidious attempt to “indoctrinate” the children of America’s hardworking conservative parents into socialism. His crusade against the ivory tower took an even weirder turn last weekend when he told a radio station that he was discriminated against at Penn State for his conservatism.

Will Bunch highlighted the… slightly dubious claim, as reported by a Detroit CBS affiliate (emphasis Bunch’s):

“I’m very careful about the colleges and universities our children go to,” Santorum said. “There are schools, I went to one — Penn State — that’s one of the liberal icons, unfortunately it’s gotten a lot worse. I can tell you professor after professor who docked my grades because of the viewpoints I expressed and the papers that I wrote, there’s no question that happened.”

“Your grades suffered because of your views at Penn State?” Langton asked

“Absolutely, absolutely,” Santorum said. “I used to go to war with some of my professors, who thought I was out of the pale, these are just not proper ideas. This is not something that’s not unusual, folks, I know this may be a surprise to some people … There is clearly a bias at the university.”

Liberal icon Penn State. It’s central Pennsylvania’s own Frankfurt School, really.

Santorum hasn’t released his college transcripts, so we can’t know how bad his grades were, but according to the New Republic and the Philadelphia City Paper Santorum was actually not that conservative in college. (Or maybe he was hiding it to escape the vicious persecution conservatives suffered at Penn State in the late-1970s?)

Santorum’s Penn State experience was so traumatizing that he remained a fan of the football team and called himself a “friend” of longtime coach Joe Paterno as recently as last November.

Santorum’s claim is pretty obviously just an attempt to add a dose of self-proclaimed victimization to the anti-elite tack he’s been taking with his recent focus on the dangers of higher education, but it’s a silly one, considering that, well, he is talking about Penn State, not Penn or something. But Santorum’s entire “college is awful” tour has been a bit of a puzzler.

Now I don’t have a highfalutin’ “degree” from some fancy “college,” unlike Rick Santorum, who has three, but I do know that a lot of people seem to think “education” is a good thing. I know this because I read an article in which a guy from the Pew Research Center explained that nearly all American parents hope their children will attend college.

Anti-college talk is a fine rhetorical strategy when your target is snobbery against adults without college educations, but basically all parents — even blue collar parents who work with their hands like real Americans — want their kids to get degrees and good jobs because that is part of “the American dream.”

This is conservative class warfare totally backfiring, basically. Maybe Santorum’s grades were actually docked because he is dumb?

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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The way to save the shrinking middle class

Public universities used to provide an affordable path to prosperity. Funding cuts have changed all that

By Robert Reich

(Credit: Everett Collection via Shutterstock)

Topics:Education, Rick Santorum, College

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

Last week Rick Santorum called the President “a snob” for wanting everyone to get a college education (in fact, Obama never actually called for universal college education but only for a year or more of training after high school).

Santorum needn’t worry. America is already making it harder for young people of modest means to attend college. Public higher education is being starved, and the middle class will shrink even more as a result.

Over just the last year 41 states have cut spending for public higher education. That’s on top of deep cuts in 2009 and 2010. Some, such as the University of New Hampshire, have lost over 40 percent of their state funding; the University of Washington, 26 percent; Florida’s public university system, 25 percent.

Rising tuition and fees are making up the shortfall. This year, the average hike is 8.3 percent. New York’s state university system is increasing tuition 14 percent; Arizona, 17 percent; Washington state, 16 percent. Students in California’s public universities and colleges are facing an average increase of 21 percent, the highest in the nation.

The children of middle and lower-income families are hardest hit. Remember: The median wage has been dropping since 2000, adjusted for inflation.

Pell Grants for students from poor families are falling further behind; they now cover only about a third of tuition and fees. (In the 1980s, they covered about half; in the 1970s, more than 70 percent.)

Student debt is skyrocketing – the New York Federal Reserve Bank estimates it at $550 billion. Punitive laws enforce repayment, and it’s almost impossible to shed student loans in bankruptcy. There is no statue of limitations for non-repayment.

Santorum’s rant notwithstanding, good-paying jobs in America are coming to require a college degree. Globalization and rapid technological change are putting a premium on the ability to identify and solve new problems. A college degree is also a signal to prospective employers that a young person has what it takes to succeed.

That’s why the median annual pay of people with a bachelor’s degree was 70 percent higher than those with a high school diploma in 2009 (the latest Census data available).

Yet public higher education isn’t just a private investment. It’s a public good. Our young people — their capacities to think, understand, investigate, and innovate — are America’s future.

We used to understand this. During the great expansion of public higher education from the 1950s to the 1970s, tuition at public universities averaged about 4 percent of median family income (compared to around 20 percent at private universities).

Young Americans received college degrees in record numbers – creating a cohort of scientists, engineers, managers and professionals that propelled the economy forward and dramatically expanded the middle class.

But starting in the 1980s, as in so many other areas of American life, we took a U-turn. Tuition at public universities began climbing. By 2005, it was more than 10 percent of median annual family income. Now it’s approaching 25 percent – still a good deal relative to private universities (where it’s nearly 70 percent), but high enough to discourage many qualified young people from attending.

Public higher education has been the gateway to the middle class, but that gate is shutting – just when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s, and when America needs the brainpower of its young people more than ever.

This is nuts.

What’s the answer? Partly to make public universities more efficient. Every bureaucracy I’ve ever been associated with (and I’ve been in some very big ones) has some fat to be trimmed. Yet universities are necessarily labor-intensive enterprises; research and teaching can’t be outsourced abroad or turned over to computerized machine tools.

Another part of the answer is to raise tuition and fees for students from higher-income families and use the extra money to subsidize medium and lower-income kids. Even now relatively few pay the official sticker price; many receive some discount proportional to family income. But this won’t solve the underlying problem, ether.

A big part of the answer has to be more government support for public education at all levels. This requires more tax revenues – especially from Americans who are best able to pay.

Most Americans still believe in the ideal of equal opportunity. And most harbor the patriotic notion that we have responsibilities to one another as members of the same society.

The two principles lead to an obvious conclusion: America’s richest citizens have a duty to pay more taxes so kids from middle and lower-income families have chance to make it in America.

: Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." More Robert Reich

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Santorum flunks the history of home-schooling

The poorly educated candidate says U.S. presidents taught their kids at home for 150 years. He's wrong

By Andy Horowitz

Republican presidential candidate Santorum

Rick Santorum (Credit: Jason Reed / Reuters)

Topics:Education, 2012 Elections

At the Republican debate Wednesday night, Rick Santorum repeated a claim he’s been making, that the federal government, and the state governments, should “get out of the education business.” Last weekend, Santorum declared public education “anachronistic.” If elected, he would home-school his children in the White House, just like – he claimed – most presidents did in the first 150 years of our national life.

“Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America?” he asked. “Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.” The presidential candidate suggested that America should look to its 19th-century educational system to prepare this generation to meet 21st-century problems.

“Yes, the government can help,” he said, “but the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools … goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”

The fraudulence of almost every single one of these claims makes Santorum himself a cautionary example of the failures of the American education system. (One wishes that as a former U.S senator, Santorum would at least know that state and local boards of education, not the federal government, run public schools.) Santorum makes up facts, misunderstands education in early America, and manages to invoke the legacies of both racists and secularists, neither of which, I assume, he wants to claim as his forebearers. The solution to our education crisis must not be to withdraw public interest and investment from education, leaving people like Santorum to pass on these misunderstandings to another generation.

First of all, Santorum’s assertion that for the first 150 years, most presidents home-schooled their children at the White House is unfounded. I checked, and it turns out there were very few presidents during that period who had school-age children while they held office.

But even if you give Santorum some leeway, things still don’t pan out. Santorum may find it pleasant to imagine George and Martha Washington sitting by the hearth with her son Jacky Custis, helping him read from a primer, but in fact, Washington imported a Scottish tutor named Walter Magowan to live in Mount Vernon and provide the classical education his stepson needed to enroll at King’s College (today’s Columbia University).

John Quincy Adams sent his son Charles Francis to public school at Boston Latin.

Andrew Jackson’s adopted son Andrew Jr. went to the Davidson Academy in Nashville.

Martin Van Buren’s son Abraham attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and Zachary Taylor’s son Richard attended private schools in Kentucky and Massachusetts. (Both later became Confederate generals.)

Ulysses S. Grant sent his sons to the Emerson preparatory school in Washington, D.C.

So Santorum’s just plain wrong on the home-schooling in the White House thing. He seems to have invented his home-schooling history in order to make the broader assertion that America did a better job teaching children in the 18th and 19th centuries. He’s correct that the role of government was smaller, but does he really want to return to a time when very few children got a decent education?

In 1840, only around 55 percent of white children attended primary school, and in most Southern states, educating African-Americans was a crime punishable by fine, prison or whipping. It wasn’t until 1918 that Progressive-era reforms ensured that children in all the states completed elementary school (in part to keep them out of the factory).

If Rick Santorum had been a better history student, he would know that presidents spent the first two centuries of American history working to support the education system he now wishes they disliked. Take Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia and patron saint of today’s small government conservatives: He consistently expounded the virtues of public education. In his 1779 Virginia “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson argued that without public schools, only the rich would be educated, leaving poor but potentially productive citizens unable to participate effectively in the democracy. “It is better that such should be sought for,” Jefferson wrote, “and educated at the common expence of all.”

In light of his comments Friday that President Obama wants to send students to college in order to “indoctrinate” them with a secular worldview, Rick Santorum might be especially chagrined to learn that in the Elementary School Act Jefferson proposed in 1817, he insisted that “no religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practised.” Similarly, in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson advocated for teaching “the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history” instead of the Bible. The point is, the American president who most eloquently promoted public education did so specifically, in part, to try to prevent the religious fundamentalists of his day from being able to use schools to indoctrinate children with religious beliefs.

In the end, it’s not the early presidents like Jefferson that Santorum evokes, but rather the four-time presidential candidate George Wallace. Not long ago, hearing a politician rail against federal involvement in public education would have put every listener in mind of the Alabama governor who pledged in 1963 to “stand in the school house door” to prevent the “unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion upon the campus … of the might of the Central Government.” Wallace refused to “submit to the illegal usurpation” of the “right of state authority in the operation of the public schools.” Wallace was referring to the Supreme Court’s 1954 order that black and white children be educated together. There’s no evidence Santorum favors racially segregated schools but he certainly echoes the “states’ rights” arguments of people who did.

The Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education is just one of the federal interventions that has made American education better, fairer and more equitable. Think also of the Morrill Act, passed by the Republican Congress in 1862, which created the land grant colleges (and helped support Santorum’s alma mater, Penn State). Think of the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, which taught former slaves how to read after the Civil War, and the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, which created vocational programs in high schools. Federal initiative created the GI Bill in 1944, which sent veterans to college and paved the way for decades of American economic primacy. These weren’t preemptions of state sovereignty or individual liberty; they were bold statements about the essential importance of education to our democracy’s economic and civic life.

There are, no doubt, terrible problems with American education today, and we need big ideas. But those ideas shouldn’t be drawn from an ignorant, if not dishonest, view of the past that imagines presidential home-schooling or a pre-industrial golden age. From Jefferson to Horace Mann to “Freedom’s Teacher” Septima Clark, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to the GI Bill, there is plenty in our real past to inspire us to action today. But getting himself tangled up with the legacy of George Wallace, Rick Santorum has gotten himself on the wrong side of history.