Wolverines (and Knights and Panthers and Gladiators and Eagles...)

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

I feel like I can’t stop writing about standardization, testing, 2000s era school reform politics, and the downstream effects of public opinion shifts caused by those three things. It’s important stuff and, I think, the general narrative being told about the recent past in education misses some key nuances that help us arrive at a more accurate understanding of our present moment. Still, I am often focusing on failures. Policy failure. Political failure. Schools failing kids and kids failing school. Negativity abounds and given the level of negativity in all other aspects of online discourse right now, I thought it would be nice to try and write something about what I want from schools. It’s a bit of a wish-list situation and one post probably can’t go into the deep weeds of school funding or various state and local level policies. People write whole books on pedagogy and I’d like to avoid that mistake. My goal today is to respond in kind of a big-picture way to the complaints I’ve outlined recently and lay out a vision of school that I think would accomplish one big goal: rebuild public trust and parental buy-in for public schools. To do that, I think we need to make schools occupy the social position that Hollywood always pretended they did. We should embrace the classic American schooling experience as a core component of Americans’ civic identity.

Embrace Cringy Americana

The 1984 film Red Dawn is about a Soviet/Latin American invasion of the United States. It’s not an amazing movie by any definition and took on kind of a cult status in libertarian and anti-communist circles for obvious reasons. I’m not mentioning it because I endorse the movie’s politics which are, I think, actually kind of a muddled mess and not as straightforward as you might think. No, I am mentioning Red Dawn because the organizing principle of that movie is the traditional American high school. From the opening scenes of the attack to the main characters being high school students to the hierarchies they establish amongst themselves, the movie is deeply connected to schooling, especially high school as one of the major factors giving order to American lives.

We joke today about people who played high school sports and “peaked in high school.” We think of high school as simply a steppingstone to college or to a career so who cares if your random suburban high school nearly won the state championship in baseball? Unless you’re one of the few athletes recruited for college sports or directly into the pros, there’s not much social capital attached to being an athlete. Indeed, we’ve been cutting sports, and physical education more generally, for the last two decades or so, in part to make space for more academics. The nerds are the stars of the modern high schools, not the jocks. And yet, not too long ago, when we imagined what an American resistance to military invasion would look like, it revolved around athletes organizing against the evil invasion. The Wolverines — the resistance is named after the school’s sports mascot — leadership is premised on the leadership of the team, with former football star, Jed, taking command of his younger brother and football player Matt and an assortment of surviving friends, all but one of whom is wearing a letter jacket. When the paratroopers land and begin their attack, they land on the football field and attack the history teacher who goes to greet them and see what’s going on.

Later in the movie, the bad guys explain that they targeted two things when invading, the local government and the local schools because those are crucial to controlling the local populace, in part because they have records that are useful and in part because they recognize those are important components of the civic fabric of a community. It seems almost unimaginable today that schools would be seen as important civic institutions — civic in the sense that they allow for democratic engagement of the citizenry in the sustaining community. Schools are, instead, technocratic institutions that are meant to inculcate skills for the workplace or, more conservatively, transmit the appropriate values to the young. In taking schools out of the civic picture, we have made them feel irrelevant and distant from the concerns of communities.

My first big idea, then, is for a bit of a return to kitschy, cringe Americana to our schooling. We should want schools to be important local institutions that communities oversee and want to see succeed. If all that we can think of is that schools should be closed or that parents should send their kids elsewhere if schools’ academics are not strong enough, then we have lost some of schools’ classic functionality in the United States. It should be good for kids to identify with their schools and feel pride in where they went even years later.

It’s not just in TV

I really want to harp on the Americanness of this way of thinking about schools because I think that helps explain some of the revolt of the public against public schools. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, historians of education, coined a term back in the 90s that I find absolutely essential to understanding American schools. In their book, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A century of public school reform, they argue that there are some aspects of schooling that are highly resistant to change. To explain these aspects, they invoked the term, grammar of schooling. Just as someone using poor grammar in speech or writing sounds wrong, schools that violate the grammar of schooling feel wrong. Writing for The Kappan, David Larabee puts it this way:

Our schools need to feel like schools to parents and to the general public. When they don’t there’s historically been a kind of thermostatic reaction that seeks to re-establish this feeling. Coming on the end of a two-decade series of reforms, it’s no surprise to me that parents embraced a right-wing backlash to the perception that schools were no longer under local control. I expect that the new series of reforms will leave a similarly bad taste in peoples’ mouths as their real nature becomes apparent. Those of us who care about public schools should take the lessons of the grammar of schooling to heart. When the backlash to the backlash happens, we should remember that schools can be important local civic institutions and, perhaps, should be once again.

If we are, as Governor Spencer Cox suggests, best suited toward unity through local civic participation, then schools need to be an important component. Cox says we should be focusing our politics more locally “by running for City Council and voting for someone in your local City Council or your school board.” I’d argue that’s all fine but real involvement means making those local institutions matter to who we are. Cox is right that people are too wrapped up in the “team sport” of Democrats and Republicans or conservatives vs liberals. What I’d like to find a way back to is people being wrapped up in their schools. We should be proud to be Wolverines or Eagles or Tigers or any number of other high school mascots out there. Our teams should be just that, teams. If that feels like kitsch and nostalgia, yeah, it is. That’s part of what Americana is all about. Schools are, both in our media and in real life, part of that Americana. If we forget it, we forget what our schools have always been about.

Thanks for reading!