| Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Curriculum & Instruction and 2007 YWCA Woman of Distinction honoree, is a dedicated and committed woman: dedicated to family, community, church and career. She's the kind of intellectual who is in touch with the community and with the heights of academia. While she clearly cherishes her time as the president of the American Educational Research Foundation, the largest in the world with 25,000 members and presiding over its national convention in San Francisco that attracted 15,000 attendees and nationally-renown speakers like former UW Chancellor Donna Shalala and former California Governor Jerry Brown, Ladson-Billings cited the one-on-one work she has done with women around the issues of breast cancer -- Ladson-Billings herself is a breast cancer survivor -- as one of her crowning achievements. And she clearly meant it. Ladson-Billings' professional work centers on helping teachers become better educators. Increasingly, she is also concerned with the state of our nation's public schools and the direction they are headed in. While Ladson-Billings doesn't feel that Madison's schools will deteriorate to the state that some Milwaukee schools have, she is concerned with the public's commitment to public education. "I would say we are becoming like districts such as the Athens, Georgia school district," Ladson-Billings said during an interview with The Capital City Hues. "The University of Georgia is in Athens. But almost none of the middle and upper class people who live in Athens are using that school system. They're using private schools. They're using more suburban-like schools. There is the danger of kind of ghettoizing Madison. I think Madison will always have a pretty decent base of middle income people because of the university and the state legislature and some other things. But for me, the bigger danger is not what is happening to Madison; it is what is happening to public schools. There is this retreat from public schooling and retreat from the public in general: from public transportation, from public housing, from public health, from anything that focuses on our relation to one another and our obligation to one another." Listening to Ladson-Billings talk about the state of public education harkens back to the economic debate between Adam Smith and John Locke in how the public interest is achieved. While the present state of affairs clearly weighs in on the Adam Smith side of the debate, Ladson-Billings takes a more Lockean approach to public education. "What you hear now is this discourse of private interests," Ladson-Billings observed. "And somehow, we are being made to believe that the public interest is simply the aggregation of all of our private interests. And that's just not so. There are certainly things that I would like just for me. But that's not in the public interest. On some level, John Locke says we are in a social contract, which means that I have to give up some things in order for us to have even greater things." And even if one were to look at things in a Adam Smith point of view, Ladson-Billings feels that people are being short-sighted in terms of what they think squeezing the funding for public education will ultimately accomplish. "The question becomes 'Where are all of these kids going to go if they aren't going to school and being successful?'"Ladson-Billings asked. "It's not like they vaporize. They still hang around communities. And so if you don't pay for them on the front end, you pay for them on the back end. You pay for them through social welfare. You pay for them through prison systems. You pay for them through mental health services. You still end up paying. It's much cheaper to pay for them in grades k-12." As the state revenue caps begin to force the Madison public schools to sacrifice extra-curricular programming and its ideal core educational model, the common denominator of what is offered to all students continues to be less and less while families with the means continue their children's educational and social development utilizing private means. A system of separate and unequal is beginning to reemerge. "We lived in California under Proposition 13, which was the beginning of the 'taxpayers'revolt,'" Ladson-Billings said. "Our kids weren't really impacted because they went to Palo Alto schools. So the minute the district started cutting things back, the community formed one of the earliest foundations and just put the money back in. I was in California for the 2003-2004 school year at Stanford. I remember driving by one of my kid's high schools. And here was this big, beautiful library going up. And I knew funds were tight in California schools. There was a sign up front that said 'This library is being constructed by funds from the Palo Alto Education Foundation.' So this was the parents who were able to get it built." Next issue: More public education annd the race-income co-variables. |
| 2007 Woman of Distinction Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings Talking about public education Part 1 of 2 By Jonathan Gramling |
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