The fight in politics and in the streets is now coming to a school near us with devastating results. Political trickery is greatly infecting (and often distorting) what takes place in the hallowed corridors of our schools. Too many educators are fighting conditions that interfere with basic schooling.  

Certain citizens now want to get into the act of schooling because they believe to know as much as educators merely because they once attended school. Such qualifiers are akin to patients knowing equally much about medical practice because, after all, they once were treated by a physician. While such delusion is staggering, we can now rest assured that political infighting and cultural divides are alive and well to enter our schools and spoil the learning of academic subjects. Who among us can now deny that education and politics are bedfellows? And who can truly now deny that education is morphing into political football? We cannot move backwards when we most assuredly need to move forward. So how can we reject such evil?

Political divides are not only paralyzing our schools, but also impeding educational progress. In the social sciences, as an example, there is pushback on Black history and Latinismo, but tacit acceptance in whitewashing slavery, belittling immigration, and shroud the browning of America. By contrast, we must move from remediation to acceleration, transform the educational process, and enliven an educational renaissance. 

If not careful, we can stumble onto a doorstep that rewrites the American story merely because masters of the universe have seized control, devoid of truth and consequences, with the assertion that might makes right because White makes right. We are flooded with dangerous crossroads. Let’s briefly review some issues and bypass semantics. 

While we agree that education needs to be transformed, become more rigorous, where mediocrity is not normalized, such a stance has little to do with the belief that education feeds liberal thinking or that it is having a negative effect on politics. Nonsense! To push farther the entry of religion into the schooling process by mixing church with state is deconstructive at best, and antithetical to the founding fathers.

The other part of sloppy thinking is the belief that school boards and parents should have a greater say on schooling matters and that this will solve the educational dilemma of what should be taught in school is disconcerting. More to the point, accountability from school boards for both management and fiscal issues is rather different from telling educational administrators and teachers what content to teach. The latter is not the role of boards or parent groups. 

If we think these trite conditions create failing schools, then society is barking up the wrong end of civil discourse that will never assure greater learning. Let us hope we have clearer minds that free us from such a morass of educational digression.