Looking Back
I’ve mentioned before that I usually start my day by reading Diane Ravitch’s blog, one of the few that I follow regularly. In today’ posting Ravitch comments that when she started her blog in 2013, it had a specific focus and goal – to speak out in support of public education and in opposition to the forces that threaten to undermine it. That core mission is still present, but more and more of her entries are about Trump and his efforts to displace democracy, which she sees as the threat that transcends all others.
Ravitch’s comment struck a chord with me because this blog has also changed course since I began it in 2019. I also thought its primary focus was going to be on education, but it was born in the age of Trump, so the turn to politics was inevitable. But it went off into many other unpredictable directions, most of them personal, some hybrid. For example, I did a series of pieces about my own schooling – elementary, secondary and college – which added an interesting dimension to my reflections on schooling today. You’re your own boss in the blogging business, which has definite advantages, but in my case it’s resulted in a diffuse product. A friend and fan of MarvHoffman.com thought I should look into the possibility of compiling the weekly entries into book form and connected me with a publisher he knew. I didn’t have a good feeling about following that path and my reservations were confirmed when the publisher responded with some pointed questions about just what the whole thing was about. I couldn’t produce a convincing elevator speech in response, so I quietly tiptoed back to my lair.
Recently, I had a rare opportunity to look back at what I’ve produced, something I don’t do often – too busy just pushing forward. A friend asked if I could send her the pieces I’ve written about aging. Her mother was coming to live with her and my friend thought those entries would interest her. I broadened the search to include posts about retirement and death and discovered I could identify 15 items on those topics, dating back to 2019, about 6% of the total postings. This was a relief, since some of my readers have accused me of being morbid, which I don’t think is even true of the entries under that heading.
If I had time or the AI capacity to classify the contents of the rest of the blog, I think education would still be a front runner, with healthy representations of political rantings. (I would have to have the sensibility of a stone for that not to be the case in this era of Trump.) I’m guessing that the other front runners would be personal, memoiristic pieces and cultural entries – books, movies, TV shows. If an archivist should discover my blog in the future, I think he/she would find it representative of the times in which it was written – lots of reflection of the political turmoil of the time, but also a recognition that the business of living and dying proceeded nonetheless.
Apologies if this feels like an abrupt shift of focus, but since the blog’s roots lie in education, I have to speak here about the general blitzkrieg affecting all departments of government which has also all but erased the Department of Education. It’s true that there are a number of pending lawsuits arguing that the dismantling of DOE is illegal, but even if they are successful Humpty Dumpty will not be put together again. The resulting damage is considerable in certain areas. The civil rights division, whose primary focus has been protecting the rights of children with disabilities (with waning attention to complaints relating to segregation) is not easily transferable to another cabinet department.
The cancelation of research work, particularly that focused on tracking student success is particularly ironic, since Trump’s fake excuse for gutting the department was the country’s poor test scores, which will now be difficult to track. It’s part of the general effort to erase data – on the economy, the environment and many other areas, part of the assault on those cursed facts.
Probably, the area that the department’s demise that will have the most immediate impact on American’s lives is the student loan program. Trump, in his wisdom, has handed that role off to the Small Business Administration which has neither the expertise nor the manpower to oversee it effectively. The loan program was already a mess under DOE. That piece is going to radiate a whole lot of pain throughout the land.
It’s important to remind ourselves that education will continue to be mainly in state and local hands. Washington pays for only 10% of the cost of education nationally and, despite all the culture war noise, has no role in what is taught in our classrooms. The greatest damage Trump and Congress could inflict on the local level would be to pass some form of national voucher law and funding for it. That would be another death blow to the cause of public education. Even rural state Republicans may take a stand against that, as they have in Texas. Apart from that, things will continue to hum along in your neighborhood classrooms where the real business of teaching and learning is happening, though the morale of the dedicated educators who are struggling to remain hopeful will absorb yet another blow to their morale.
