On Friday, February 26th US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will be speaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). The talk is scheduled from 2:30-4:00 and is sure to attract a capacity crowd as well as others gathered around various TV monitors that will be simulcasting his talk. It remains to be seen if there will be any critical push back from the HGSE community regarding Duncan’s federal education policy, known popularly as “Race to the Top.” HGSE’s self-proclaimed mission is “To prepare leaders in education and to generate knowledge to improve student opportunity, achievement, and success.” The institution also claims that its “faculty, students, and alumni are studying and solving the most critical challenges facing education: student assessment, the achievement gap, urban education, and teacher shortages, to name just a few.” But the HGSE community, which also says it is “pushing the frontiers of education,” has been curiously silent in the face of the most recent round of threats to public education being meted out through federal education policy. As NCLB wreaked havoc on public education systems throughout the United States, the HGSE community didn’t push back. As Duncan and President Obama have been pushing policies that exacerbate some of the worst forms of attack against public education (the increased privatization and commodification of educational management, services, and practice; the propping up of a multi-billion dollar testing industry; the driving toward a standardization of the educational experiences of the least advantaged students; the deskilling of the teaching profession; the increased presence of non-educators in educational leadership positions; and the promotion of profit-oriented market-driven models of school reform, to name a few) the HGSE community has remained silent.
There is a stark contrast visible to those who care to look between the words in HGSE’s mission and overview, and the HGSE community’s (in)action. This hypocrisy was outlined nicely in an open letter written to the HGSE administration and faculty by three retired Boston area teachers, who together represent more than a century of celebrated teaching experience. Take a look at the letter for yourself: OpenLetterHarvardGSE. They’ve yet to receive any substantive response, a tactic that the HGSE administration is known for employing when faced with harsh criticism. Harvard’s been around longer than all of us and even the institutions we represent, and it relies on this staying power to wait out its critics, ignoring them until they go away, graduate (yes, not all HGSE students are enthralled by the graduate school to which they pay thousands of dollars in tuition fees), or give up. The authors of the letter along with some local allies plan to leaflet outside of the Duncan talk on 2/26. Will HGSE offer any substantive response?
