Miseducated

Miseducated

I spent 40 years teaching! I had a substandard public school experience, especially in mathematics, and my college experience, at the undergraduate level, was also mostly a bust. My eighth-grade math teacher stunk, and was known for her exploits in nonacademic areas. My ninth-grade algebra teacher was incompetent beyond belief. Throughout that academic year, she turned during lessons and addressed the class this way: “Is this what they’re teaching in the Catholic schools?”

I probably would have stayed in my college major, economics, but my math skills stunk, and by that time I had a block to math. I switched into the social sciences, which I loved, but it was connected to teaching, and that was a mistake. I am not, nor never was, suited to public school teaching. I peppered 30 years of public school work with work at community colleges and the college where I studied for my undergraduate degree.

I had a recent discussion with a relative who spent nearly 30 years in public schools. She believes that the role or goal of public education has changed dramatically since the 1960s. She attended schools in a mostly middle-class suburban school district and received a great education. I went to schools in a town where both the textile industry and the business district had seen its best days decades earlier, and the quality of schooling reflected that dying community. But, and this is a big qualifier, working-class kids could get an education in the 1950s and 1960s, if not the best. My friend’s parents lived a fairly comfortable working-class life and he received at least an adequate post-secondary education. His parents spent their working lives in textile mills, which was not an easy life.

I had little patience working with kids, but somehow I managed. Schools were making a transition in those days to a more authoritarian organizational pattern, but kids in middle-class districts could still receive a good, or at least passable, education. Poor kids, and minorities, long screwed over by public education, had already experienced lousy schools that received inadequate support and lesser qualified teachers. I cite Savage Inequalities below, which illustrates what the author witnessed working in schools in poor economic areas over many decades.

I worked as a substitute teacher after I graduated and had a mixed experience. As a long-term substitute, I could manage and teach the classes assigned to me. When I went in for single days, the scene was one of bedlam! I returned to the same school district decades later and worked as a substitute counselor for a single day, and I could clearly see the school to prison pipeline before me. Two boys in the front of the class set up a young girl’s schedule for sexual encounters after the school day was over. This was a middle school. No administrator answered my calls for assistance over the school’s telephone system.

Schools in the state where I spent most of my working life were mostly mediocre, or worse. Women had long-since won the right to professional job opportunities and those left in teaching were generally either incompetent or poorly educated. Men, who had open job opportunities, were sometimes slackers. Some content educated teachers were better, but some were horrific. School administrators were generally incompetent and highly authoritarian. Questioning was frowned upon and as whole industries left for foreign shores, many kids either fought for career placements, or college vocational programs, and became careerists.

My favorite source in what’s become of education has been Jonathan Kozol. His Death at an Early Age (1967) and Savage Inequalities (1991) are the best sources for what happens in public education, especially in poor schools.

Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) is the best single source for a critique of how the charter school movement has harmed public schooling in the US.

The move to charter schools and privatization of public schooling began with the Reagan administration’s A Nation At Risk (1983), and that movement has eviscerated public schools across the US. Trump’s attack and near-destruction of the Department of Education is a clear example of how public schools, kids, teachers, and teacher unions have been brought to their knees by the dictates of the far right and an economy that shed, or destroyed, the role of schools in preparing students to live within a democratic society. Prisons take up some of the human products of a failed economy and failing or failed public schools.