Recently, The Phantom Stranger wrote and asked me what I thought of the race for the Wisconsin Department of Instruction’s meddlesome bureaucrat superintendent post. Today’s the primary, and there’s no better day to run down the compelling choices that await Wisconsin voters. There are five candidates running. The Oshkosh Northwestern offers a “Q&A: State school superintendent candidates” article on its website. See,
Q&A: State school superintendent candidates .
The two-highest vote-getters will advance to a spring general election. The current DPI superintendent, Elizabeth Burmaster, is not running for re-election. Two candidates are interesting to me as opposites, although I support neither.
Tony Evers. A Madisonian, Evers graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a B.A., M.A., and doctoral degree. Evers now serves as deputy superintendent with the Wisconsin DPI. Evers is a decades-long member of the public school establishment, with the good, and bad, that tenure confers. In the Northwestern Q&A, Evers observes that
I’ve been in public education 34 years. Some of the most important and telling things relate to public libraries are the foundation of our democracy. I believe it’s all about freedom. People need to be educated to be free, even for this country.
It’s impossible to agree, even for someone who likes libraries, as I do. Evers is patently wrong to conclude that freedom requires education, however important and education surely is. It’s an argument about when liberty is effective, suggesting that certain social conditions must exist for freedom to persist. Perhaps, but education (at least as understood here as literacy) is not one of them. India, where Congress party voters often relied on pictures for identifying the party they favored, is proof that effective liberty did not require even literacy.
I favor literacy programs, surely, but arguments from effective liberty often assume requirements for freedom that are not requirements at all. Often, they’re a first-world assumption about how important our own living standards are, for even the most fundamental freedoms. They’re not. The very poor can have functioning free societies also. Freedom is not conditional on per capita GDP.
You can have a public school system, but it’s perfectly possible to have freedom without public schools, and even possible to have freedom with literacy. Existence alone justifies the right to be free, and no further conditions are necessary, or need appertain.
I am sure that Evers will advance to the general election, and I hope he does, because it will give me the chance to examine his views more fully for weeks more. If he advances, I will write to him, and challenge him to a written debate on this website. This is just a small blog, written by a common man, and it would be a great opportunity for someone so educated, credentialed, and clever like Evers to show me up. He could laugh about it with his friends afterward.
I’ll post my invitation to him tomorrow on this blog, should he advance tonight.
Rose Fernandez Fernadez lives in Mukwonago, and is a critic of the existing public school system, having until recently served as president of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families. (‘Virtual schools’ as far away from Evers’s positions as one can get and still live in the same state.) She was graduated from Northern Illinois University and has a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Fernandez calls for a local decision-making, changes to inflexible No Child Left Behind provisions, the elimination of “needless paperwork and documentation burdens,” and supports “get[ting] back to basics.”
Laudable, if I thought back-to-basics meant something more than rote teaching to a test. I have no idea what Fernandez means when she says this.
The success of a campaign against the public school bureaucracy depends on revealing how that system falls short comprehensively, including students with disabilities, and those who are academically gifted. Back-to-basics, however appealing it may seem, highlights only a slice of the problem. The real challenge to the existing system doesn’t involve merely shoring up the average, but also confidently refuting the proud claims of credentialed teachers that they serve the advantaged or disadvantaged particularly well.
Fernandez offers a bland critique.
Because these aspects of education – for those doing well or those struggling – seem complex, and are easily shrouded in the jargon of credentialed professionals, lay critics are easily intimidated. A thorough general schooling offers ample tools to reason compellingly against defenders of a state-supported administrators’ and teachers’ guild.
If professional credentials mean so much, then the debate will not last long, and end convincingly in favor of the present bureaucracy. A few critics will be bruised in public debate – no harm done, for the stout of heart.
But if not, and if there is no compelling defense of the existing public system despite
so much training, then what are we to say, except that the system falls short not only in its accomplishments, but in its proud insistence that only a few have the insight to understand these issues?