Tag: public education

The death of public schools

The New York Times has a powerful opinion video up this morning, about the mounting toll on teachers of the on-going demagoguing about public education in America. If you have ten minutes today, you should give it a watch. It is worth the time, and as a public school teacher, I can tell you, it is right on in its description of the state of our schools and the teaching profession today, not to mention to things kids are facing.

Being a teacher this election cycle has been particularly hard, harder than it is usually is (and it is almost never easy.) Across the country, a fear has risen that schools and teachers are indoctrinating or grooming children, with critical race theory or gender ideology or drag queens or…. pick your politicized bugaboo of choice. We’ve been accused of it all. Politicians, especially on the right, have made teachers and public schools Public Enemy #1 this election cycle. Look at the rhetoric from folks like Ron DeSantis, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, or any other mainstream Republican politician. Teachers are a political punching bag, one that largely cannot fight back. Here in Oklahoma, it is particularly bad. After the passage of a state law earlier this year restricting what things a teacher can or cannot say to students, Governor Kevin Stitt and his handpicked candidate for state superintendent, Ryan Walters, both won re-election running on platforms against public schools and teachers. Despite the heartening news from many elections in this country, Oklahoma was a dark spot for those who care about sanity and the future of public schools. Lies and false stories about pornography in libraries, about the grooming of children by teachers, of the need to censor books and teachers, and to fire or even prosecute teachers who are supposedly hurting children: it’s been infuriating and terrifying and disheartening, all at once.

This comes on top of the on-going after effects of the pandemic and Covid shutdowns, which were hugely damaging to student learning and social-emotional development. The gaps kids are facing in their knowledge, personal skills, and emotional bandwidth are borne by teachers, and we often are getting the blame as well when kids fail to succeed. Teaching, it hardly needs to be said, is a thankless profession almost like no other.

And it is starting to have an effect. As that NYT piece says, a recent survey of National Association of Education member teachers1 found that half of all teachers in America are looking for a way out of the profession. Take difficult, increasingly disrespectful kids; add in overbearing, unreasonable parents; layer on inane amounts of paperwork and documentation and monitoring, along with rapid cuts to school budgets and stagnating teacher wages and a shortage of materials and crumbling school infrastructure; and top it all off with the active animosity of half of our nations leaders and the voters who support them, and the question becomes not why are so many teachers quitting, but instead, what the hell is wrong with those of us who are still here? It is a fair question.

Lets be clear about something: the rapid decline of public schools and loss of teachers is not an accidental outcome of rational policy making. It is the deliberate strategy of an entire political movement in this nation over the last 30 years, to discredit, defund, and destroy public education, in favor of private religious instruction and for-profit education benefitting not the students, but the shareholders and elites behind those systems. Public education has been under attack for decades; the rise of charter schools and school vouchers has long been touted as a system of “parent choice” or “school accountability” or some kind of rightful reclaiming of tax dollars by those who feel entitled to not taking part in our shared commitment to educating children. What these things actually are, though, are ways for tax dollars to be siphoned out of public schools and into the pockets of those who still, despite their ever increasing wealth, feel like they don’t have enough wealth and control.

I am always reminded of this wonderful scene from It’s a Wonderful Life when I think about the greed and rapaciousness of wealth. In this watching, imagine as if George Bailey is defending the local school instead of the Building and Loan, and Mr. Potter as a greedy financial entity who sees a profit opportunity in the funds that should be used for educating our children, I think you’ll get my point:

The powers behind wealth and accumulation in this country see the meager public budgets of schools in every community, and they itch because they see dollars and cents that don’t belong to them. And so, they have found arguments and lies and scary stories that rile up community members, and discredit schools, and lay the groundwork for them to extract those dollars and cents. Its disgusting, and infuriating, and a microcosm of the American public sphere over the last 30 years.

The moral panics about schools and books and curriculums that have swept the nation over the last year are not some grassroots movement of concerned parents. Again, it is a deliberate strategy aimed at discrediting schools and laying the ground work to pull funding. And the ones who end up suffering the most? Teachers, and students. But it works because everyday people, regular parents and tax payers and community members, instead of getting positively involved in public schools and talking to teachers and becoming part of the PTA and other community groups, spend their time online listening to the lies and then spreading those lies and stoking fear and anger and doing the dirty work for those who are using their fear against them. That’s the most depressing part, for me: logging into social media, and seeing people who I know and love and who I thought cared about my family and children and schools, spreading rumors and lies and absolute bullshit about what us teachers are supposedly doing in our classrooms. Even though many of these people have never stepped a foot in a school or attended a PTA or Board meeting, or tried to take a positive role in really helping schools succeed.

Here’s the important thing to remember: teachers are not some scary “Other” existing out there somewhere. We are your neighbors, your friends, your family. When you share that scare-mongering video or meme about CRT in classrooms, or Drag Queen story hour, or groomers in classrooms, you are talking about people you know and who your purport to love and respect and care about. Teachers are normal, everyday human beings, doing our best every day to do a demanding, thankless job, and to do it well. When politicians and parents and community members work so hard to tear down schools for some abstract, ideological fear stoked in the fever swamps of the most extreme right, they all forget that what they are really tearing down is human beings, adults and children, who live our lives day in and day out in these school buildings together. Schools are more than just brick buildings down the street, or faceless bureaucracies and school boards: like any institution, schools are the sum of the human beings who live and work and cry and laugh and learn in those buildings. And when you try to tear a school down, what you end up doing is tearing down people.

1 Full transparency: I myself am a member of NEA, and its Oklahoma branch, the OEA, as well as the Tulsa Classroom Teacher Association.

Nobody Knows Anything About CRT: Some Thoughts on CRT, Teachers, and Cameras in Classrooms

Here is the thing about the debate over Critical Race Theory in our schools: almost nobody on either side of the debate has any idea what they are actually talking about.

Critical Race Theory is not, as many conservatives would have you believe, any and all talk about race as a social construct or systematic oppression. Critical Race Theory is also not, as many liberals would have you believe, simply the teaching of the “real” history of race relations in America. These people bloviating on tv and social media about CRT and how it does this or that: they just simply don’t know what they are talking about. So my first piece of advice when thinking about this is, ignore almost everyone who makes declarative statements about what CRT does or is.

I don’t say this as the CRT expert you should be listening to. I also don’t have a lot of clarity on what it is. And I actually studied the subject! In my Masters studies, I took an entire course on Race in America that drew heavily on CRT; I also took a course on critical theory more broadly, which pulled on aspects of CRT while also focusing on the roots of critical theory in the Frankfurt School and especially the liberatory pedagogies of Paulo Friere. So, sitting here writing this, while I am certainly no expert – far from it, in fact – I can say confidently that I do know more about the subject than 99% of those who are spending all their time on your television or social media feed insisting they know what’s happening.

Here’s a hint: they don’t. This especially goes for those on cable news and those holding elected office. Their goal is not to inform or protect you. It’s to draw your attention, and they do that best by trying to scare you.

So, here are a few things that I believe are and are not true about CRT in American schools.

First, when most people on both sides of this debate say “Critical Race Theory”, they almost certainly don’t mean the school of legal and social theory that aims to critique the American legal system, as developed by folks such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado. So, right off the bat, the term CRT is simply a convenient shorthand for whatever other political hobbyhorse the person has.

Second, liberals are wrong to dismiss the concerns of parents about what their kids are and aren’t being taught about race relations. It is right that we are beginning to explore a fuller, more honest history of race in America (more on this in a moment.) But, bringing narratives and practices around declaring and critiquing privilege, or forcing students to declare racial guilt, or encouraging race essentialism: none of these things has a role in K-12 classrooms. This is what many parents are concerned about, even if that concern may be baseless. We should be doing our best to reassure parents, by being open and honest about our curriculums, instead of being dismissive and sarcastic. As a public school teacher, I want buy in from parents, not anger and suspicion. Thus, I have no problem answering questions about curriculum and sharing information, and I don’t know many teachers who feel differently. So, liberals, let’s be a little less dismissive about the concerns of real parents.

Third, contrary to the narrative of conservative nationalists, we have actually done a really bad job for a long time of teaching the real, sordid history of American racial relations, and history and civics curriculums need to by and large be rethought. Many schools gloss over Reconstruction, over Jim Crow, over the role slavery and its legacy played in our nations founding and the lives of those we often hold up for unqualified praise. We have ignored the role of racism in the New Deal, the racial backlash of the 70s and 80s; we have glorified many historical figures who should be understood more critically. These are important conversations to be having in classrooms, and the only way to do that is to develop honest and rigorous curriculums, and by supporting and protecting teachers who are the ones bringing this knowledge to our kids. The idea that American history is nothing but glory and patriots and freedom is propaganda, and it does nothing but hurts the cause of healthy patriotism many conservatives claim to value. Teaching honest history is the only way to build a better future together.

Finally, and most importantly in my eyes: teachers and schools are not the enemy. CRT has become a weapon that anti-public school voices have found in their long running attempt to kill public schools in favor of private ones. Teachers are not evil state actors out to indoctrinate your children. Teachers are your neighbors, your friends, and your family. Teachers want your children to succeed, and they want to teach them the truth while helping them grow.

Here in Oklahoma, and elsewhere, there is a new line of attack from anti-public school conservatives: the idea that we must now put cameras either in classrooms or on teachers, in order to “monitor” what they are teaching our kids. In short, this is a really, really terrible idea. (Not to mention, probably illegal, unconstitutional, and unworkable.) The idea comes with the rhetoric that teachers are merely “government employees” who “work for me” and that “I have the right to supervise my employees.” Often, this language comes from the same people who spend a lot of time exercised about government overreach and privacy invasions.

Cameras in classrooms is not only a gross invasion of privacy for teachers and for students. It also won’t work to make schools better. Oh, it may work to scare teachers away from difficult (but necessary) discussions. And that is probably the goal of many of the advocates of cameras in classrooms. But it will make schools worse, and damage the education students receive.

Here are some hard truths to know about schools:

Sometimes, your kid will succeed. Sometimes, they will fail. They will experience both.

Sometimes, your kid’s teacher will succeed. Sometimes, they too will fail. Teachers, like you, are human and fallible. And teaching, for those who have never done  it and thus don’t know, is really, really hard.

Your kid will learn about lots of things you like and agree with. Your kid will also learn about lots of things you don’t like or agree with. Such is life.

You do not have to market cornered on what is true or good. If you are trying to stamp out every piece of contrary or conflicting information out of your kid’s life or classroom, you are going to be both grossly unsuccessfull, and also damaging to your kid’s future well-being. By removing the presence of hard debates and alternate ideas, you are setting them up for failure in life, as they become unable to critically and honestly grapple with hard things.

Finally, again, teachers are not your enemy. In addition, teachers aren’t unaccountable in the classroom. Teachers are constantly observed; we have other adults in and out of our classrooms all day. We must turn in lesson plans. We cannot just ignore the curriculum. We cannot push politics or religion or personal opinions on our students. Putting cameras in our room won’t stop your kid from learning things you don’t like or agree with. But it will prevent us from having that one-on-one conversation with the kid being abused by their mom at home. It will prevent us from having that five minute conversation about last night’s game to connect with that one kid we are struggling to connect with. It will prevent us from being everything we need to be for our students.

Teachers are not indoctrinating your kids. But teachers are also not shielding them. Trust our schools to do their job, and if you don’t, then get involved in a constructive, useful way to make them better. And, for God’s sake, please stop listening to all those out there who want to scare you with stories of indoctrination in the service of their political power games. They don’t know what they are talking about. Perhaps they should spend a little more time in school.

I strongly, strongly recommend this article at FIRE for more information on what is actually happening in schools regarding CRT.