Okay. I started my teaching career in September of 1990. I left a job I loved, working for people I loved (proofreader for McCoy's Business Services, Marlene & Greg McCoy) for one primary reason: I was idealistic and naive enough to think that teaching mattered. I am now twenty-five (or so) working days away from the end of my 23rd year as a teacher, and I've decided to retire from teaching. The three primary reasons are (1) my daughter needs me, (2) I am sick of the newest bullshit reforms which threaten the very concept of public education, and (3) I am no longer so naive and idealistic. With respect to (3): -a- I know that there are administrators who know that the latest (and most dangerous yet) reforms are bullshit, yet they stand behind them because they are afraid they will lose their jobs. There are no Spartans for this Thermopylae. If there ever was an age of ideals, it has given way to the age of self-interested pragmatism. (No wonder a fourth-rate novelist like Ayn Rand who preaches The Virtue of Selfishness is still remembered 56 years after her last shitty novel was published.) Why would any administrator risk his/her six figure salary to stand up for what's right--or to stand up against what's wrong? -b- After the latest insulting email "from higher" arrived in my Inbox, I talked to a half-dozen of the best teachers at my school. Every one of them told me that s/he felt really insulted by the email and that they would retire at the end of the year if they could do it. I have second-hand (and very reliable) knowledge of a graph that was presented to the Upper Management of JCPS depicting the current state of affairs in my high school:
wherein the left hump represents low performing students (black and low-income students, primarily, but we don't call them that) and the right hump represents high performing students (also known as white and high-income students, but we don't call them that) and the sparse middle zone represents the rare "high achieving" left humpers and the rare "low achieving" right humpers. Now that's definitely a problem. Something must be done about that. A pretty simple solution presents itself to me: when a kid sleeps in class or acts disrespectfully to a teacher or refuses to do his/her work, s/he should be taken out of the class and told that s/he has one chance to straighten up. If s/he is pulled out of the class a second time, they are exited from the school. After six months they can apply to re-enter the school system. If s/he is pulled out of class after that, they have just chosen to exit the educational system. I've taught many lower classes in my 23 years. I've also peered into many classrooms as I walk down the hall. I see kids sleeping and being obnoxious. I hear stories about kids saying "Fuck you" to their teachers. Would you like to guess what happens to these kids? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't look good if a school suspends or fails too many students. [Sidenote: The husband of a middle school teacher told me that his wife and her colleagues in a middle school were told by their principal that NO ONE FAILS this year. So no one failed. The school then received an award because no one failed.] But it gets worse. The High Muckity Muck Plan differed substantially from my proposal. It can be summed up with one image:
The red line represents the target. Pretty simple, eh? Just like mountaintop removal. Lots of benefits to this scheme. The ACHIEVEMENT GAP (which means the difference between black and white scores) pretty much disappears. It's also a lot easier to make progress toward ever rising goals if your starting point isn't too high. And the white families who can afford it pull their kids out of public schools which can no longer meet the needs of higher achieving students. And the school looks GREAT. Everybody wins. If Truth is a casualty . . . well, you've got to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelet.
Hey, there's another benefit. Once you pulverize the mountain tops, they are going to need some new approach to education (since clearly the Old Ways don't work/are no longer applicable to our Brave New World/Etc. So in the interests of the Public Good, various companies will create new educational programs and sell them to the schools. What could be more American?
