School House Burning

In this episode of Wine, Women, and Revolution, Heather is joined by Derek Black author of “School House Burning”. They talk about the concept that public education has been an integral part of American democracy through the earliest days of the founding of the country. As much as racism has attacked these ideals, the idea of a public education for all is so ingrained in America that is has even survived racism. Public education is under attack from both sides of the aisle these days from Betsy Devos and Chris Christie to Cory Booker and Obama’s appointees. The push for charter schools is a new form of racist attack but Derek shows us how much we can learn from studying the history, so we can move forward with an even deeper commitment to protect our education system. Education is the true path to citizenship and without it, we have nothing resembling a democracy. Transcript Auto Generated Derek Black 0:00So we had three things Common Core, teacher evaluation systems, and charter schools being pushed out on public schools during the Obama administration. Heather Warburton 0:15This is Wine Women and Revolution with your host, Heather Warburton. Hi and welcome to Wine Women and Revolution. I’m your host Heather Warburton coming at you here on Create Your Future Productions. Create Your Future Productions is the only place you can find new episodes of Wine, Women and Revolution. And you can find us online at YourFutureCreator.com follow us on all the social medias and get us wherever you get your podcasts from. Today I am going to be talking about education, which you know, is a topic I’ve covered a few times here. But I’ve got with me today the author of “School House Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy”. Derrick Black, welcome to the show. Derek Black 1:01Yeah, thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure. Heather Warburton 1:03So I guess you know, the most important thing to talk about is when we’re recording this, Betsy DeVos is kind of going to be on her way out soon. By the time people listen to this. She may be in our last few weeks of torturing American education. So that’s kind of exciting. Derek Black 1:20Yeah, it is. I had a post I put up the other day and said after watching the, you know, the the results come in. People were enormously excited for the end of the Trump presidency and the end of him as President, but running a close second, I think was the end of Betsy Devos as Secretary of Education. I mean, if you were, if you were looking at things, they were immediately articles going up, and I actually got one of the biggest responses I’ve had and Twitter, in the last few weeks at least, and it was just mentioning that Betsy was on her way out. And certainly folks are looking forward to that. Heather Warburton 1:56Absolutely. But we can’t just pretend that all the attacks, the recent attacks on public education just started under the Trump presidency. It’s been a while now that the public education has been under attack. And whart you sort of laid out in your book is that you talk about the current political climate a little bit and dove in to the history, which that’s kind of what we’re going to do here today is a little bit of talk about how it kind of where we are and how we got to right now. And you said, you know, under Obama when he appointed Duncan, that was a pretty bad sign for how they were going to be dealing with public education. Right. Derek Black 2:35Yeah, I mean, already, Duncan had been superintendent in Chicago public schools, and had been part of a pretty massive expansion of charter schools there. And there was also clearly a divide at that moment, a lot of folks were talking about Linda Darling Hammond as being the Secretary of Education. Her name