Jeff Bryant Refutes the Conventional Wisdom about Public Education

The Education Opportunity Network is a joint project of the Campaign for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign.  Every week on behalf of the Education Opportunity Network, Jeff Bryant publishes a newsletter to which I hope you’ll subscribe.

Jeff writes the central opinion post, and then later in the newsletter he links to important articles you may have missed in the press.

Jeff is a communicator, and his project with the Education Opportunity Network is reframing the national conversation on public education.  Many of us work at that, because in these times, we need to be much better at naming what should be our primary goal:  supporting and improving the public schools in the poorest neighborhoods of our big cities instead of punishing those schools and the teachers who struggle there to educate many promising children without adequate resources.  It is heartening to read Jeff’s posts because most of us are not such skilled communicators as Jeff Bryant.

Jeff’s column today refutes five myths that have become the conventional wisdom of our time:

1. Education is a private, not a public pursuit.
2. America’s system of public education is hopelessly broken.
3. Money doesn’t matter and public investment can’t help.
4. Schools should be run like businesses.
5. Higher standards will solve inequality,

He asks all of us to help change the conversation.  He concludes:  “We can all do something about that.”