In their May/June 2011 issue, the Boston Review has a fantastic article by Junot Diaz. The article is called Apocalypse, and it’s about the earthquake that struck Haiti back in January 2010. Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is a great book, is probably his most famous work) presents an arresting article about Haiti and the disaster, but the article really spoke to me about poverty and education reform.

 

At the midpoint of Apocalypse, Diaz writes “we must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters.”  This makes quite a bit of sense. There’s a reason the earthquake in Haiti (a 7.0 on the movement scale) and the “World Series” earthquake in the San Francisco area (a 6.9) had wildly different outcomes, and it’s because the natural disaster is simply the end product of a series of social disasters.

 

School failures or teaching failures aren’t failures and disasters in and of themselves, for the most part. They’re the point at which we identify a long string of social failures. Schools in poor areas are more likely to struggle than schools in wealthy areas. And some are suggesting that wealthy schools simply don’t fail. When we talk about the problem with public education, we’re really talking about the problem with our society.

 

Diaz ends on a positive note. He writes that “apocalypses are not only catastrophes; they are also opportunities: chances for us to see ourselves, to change.” Reform should occur, of course. But reforming schools is like reforming and making more efficient the airdropping of food after an earthquake. It makes an intolerable situation tolerable, briefly.