Securing Equitable, Empowering Education for All: The Need for Critical and Creative Imagination and Action

• In Event: Dreaming in Greene: Reframing Contemporary Educational Policy, Practice, and Research Through Maxine Greene’s Critical Lens

Abstract

Drawing on Maxine Greene’s work, I wish to speak directly to the need for critical and creative imagination and action in regard to equitable access to integrated and empowering education. I am compelled to do so at a time when segregation and privatization jointly threaten the “common school” that was meant to be a central purpose and method of public education.
Acknowledging the realities of racism, disinvestment, and segregation in traditional public school systems over many decades, I thus will bring to bear some of the even more extraordinary deprivations that are occurring in heavily privatized settings, such as New Orleans, a U.S. city that currently has little to no public education system left intact. In contrast to such deprivation and devastation wreaked upon that public school system, for example, I would like to hold up some of the creative strategies many public schools are inventing (and sometime reinventing) to secure the dream and possibilities of an integrated and empowering public education system.

Author

• Linda Darling-Hammond, Learning Policy Institute