Photo by Yves Alarie on Unsplash

It’s so normal to put education on the back burner, it’s hardly news. You hear this from most teachers in many parts of the world. Governments always have bigger fish to fry – fighting nation states through proxy wars, purchasing fighter jets, for instance.

Many years ago –nearly 14 years in fact– I wrote about a new blog begun by the US State Department in its attempt to be more transparent.  Field officers wrote about their work in countries like the Sudan and Afghanistan. Dipnote, as it was called was a breath of fresh air. But that hope was quickly dashed. Subsequent administrations lost the plot. What’s all this got to do with education?

Consider the story of ‘ghost schools’ by Buzzfeed News reporter Azmat Khan. Building schools in a country torn apart gave the US nice little project to look like it was doing some nation building in Afghanistan. Until it was discovered that this was money spent in vain. Ghost schools is a powerful metaphor of smoke and mirrors. And while the US was doing this, teachers in the US were working in poorly funded schools, many in trailers known as ‘portables.’ Students, likewise were struggling to juggle two jobs and school during the pandemic. It’s as if we raided our own country to use the funds to destroy another, and then rebuild what we broke. Here’s a disturbing comparison: Upgrading US public school facilities needs almost $200 billion according to the US department of education. An F-35 fighter plane costs $36,000 per hour. Per hour! All this while there’s a lot of hand-wringing when it comes to paying a teacher more than, say, $45,000 a year.

Put those two numbers on a slide and show it at your next community meeting.

So what’s my point? Since they can’t get foreign policy right, it’s time channeling some of those funds to domestic policy.