Teacher_and_student

It's ironic that I've worked in schools for the majority of my adult life. Except for a year here and there, I didn't enjoy the 12 years I spent in public education. It could have something to do with attending 13 schools during that time. The years I liked happened because of special teachers, the kind who know how to engage kids and who treat them like the little humans they are.

It's been popular in the press and in political circles for many years to claim that public education is failing. Standardized test scores are treated like the holy grail in this data-driven age. State legislatures pass laws to do things like mandate that students be taught their multiplication tables, implying that they are not learning that already, when of course they are. In a nod to tradition, people who don't know how to send an email pass laws that force instruction in things like cursive writing while eliminating jobs for people who teach art, music or who work in the library.

Conservatives aren't the only ones who denigrate education, but they're the people who want to take money from the school budget and give to shady for-profit and poorly supervised charter schools. They also favor giving to religious schools teaching that man and dinosaurs walked the earth together. In many southern states, segregation academies get public money for their mostly white student body, while the public schools in the same area are underfunded. Take a look at the study from Pro Publica that I've linked to.

Somehow the right-wingers have convinced people that there are teacher's unions everywhere that care nothing about children and that exist only to extort money from the government. In my home state of North Carolina, a law exists that forbids any public employee from joining a union. There are no negotiated contracts. There is no right to strike. Teachers and every other school employee takes what the state decides they should have, or they go work somewhere else. Many teachers already have a second job. I've seen them waiting tables, behind cash registers and at the plasma center. Our legislators even abolished higher pay grades for advanced degrees, while simultaneously complaining about teacher quality.

Of course, there is a bell curve when it comes to the competence of teachers, just like there is a bell curve in every other profession. Most teachers care a great deal about what their students are learning. I've listened to many, many excited explanations of new ways to teach first-graders addition or high schoolers chemistry. You can see the real passion in so many teachers and the work they put into their lessons. I've seen plenty of them stay at school long after they could have left for the day, just so they could provide extra help to kids who are behind.

The US as a whole is doing pretty damn well for a country that supposedly has a failing educational system. These days I work in higher ed at a private university and I don't hear our professors complaining about unprepared students in their classes. As someone who works in IT, I can also tell you that these young people are learning tech skills somewhere because keeping them on the straight and narrow path and out of places where they shouldn't go is a full-time job.

Next time you hear someone start the old "our schools are failing" routine, stop them and probe a little deeper. The chances are that they've bought into the big lie.

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