In other words, where are our school leaders leading us?
Please listen to the last 30 minutes of the Radion Free California podcast and capture Will Swaim’s (of the California Public Policy Center) interview of Dr. Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. Click on Dr. Izumi’s picture for the interesting conversation. You’ll find it compelling if you’re worried about the condition of your child’s school.
To be clear, let’s not tar everyone with the same brush. Not every Trump voter cheered the January 6 riot, not every Democrat is, figuratively speaking, in bed with the socialistas of The Squad, and not by a long shot is every teacher responsible for the mediocrity of the schools. During my near 30 years as a public high school teacher, I have seen the great variability in teacher quality but few, very few, fit the bill as truly incompetent and uncaring. Some, like me, failed at their first bite of the apple, but learned the lesson that effectiveness is a dynamic process, experience being the best stylist of good teaching.
Yet, undeniably, something is amiss in our schools, and most emphatically in our public schools. Pre-pandemic, the failings spared no socioeconomic group. Certainly, the pandemic panic exacerbated the situation. Using the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as the benchmark, schools with overwhelming middle-class enrollment produced dismal results with over half performing at below grade level. It only gets worse when we look at schools with the entire student body on the school lunch program. So, moving to a “better” neighborhood for the “better” schools is a fool’s errand. You’re only getting a student body in nicer clothes and cars, not a better education.
If I was to choose one overriding factor for the dreary situation, it would come down to rotten leadership. And I don’t mean to make administrators as a group the brunt. Poor captaincy stretches from many school board members to professors to superintendents through an administrative descent to the individual school, and, lest I forget, their directors and abettors in state and federal government. Most of this leadership crowd is pickled in a brine of progressive ideology emanating from the political arena and the gatekeepers of credentialing, the collegiate schools of education.
Teachers must also traverse the same gauntlet.
If you’re shocked by racial shaming sessions in your child’s Zoomed Social Studies lesson, well, what did you expect? Today’s progressivism is synonymous with the militant wokeness of neo-Marxist critical theory and it percolates through ed courses and the teams of “educators” who produce the curricula. It’s everywhere and everywhere destructive.
If you want better schools, clean house of the poison and install leaders with their heads screwed on straight. Start with the state leadership and move like Sherman’s March through the collegiate schools of education and the people who run the local districts. The rot begins at the top, so start there. In the end, the teachers will be better for it.
Oh, before I leave the topic, an important cog in this Borg is the teacher unions. They need to stop being a conduit for this ideological mania. If they are to continue to exist, they must stop seeing themselves in the vanguard of a revolution and more as shapers of patriotic and productive citizens. Got it?
RogerG