Why doesn't Education matter?

Ripping the Department apart makes no sense

My friend, fellow author and Substacker Ron Gruner offered a most interesting post the other day, tracking the troubled history of the Department of Education which, thanks to Hacksaw Elon and Keep-em-dumb Donnie is now going to BE history. Which may be in keeping with their priorities but shame on us that enough Americans are so numb on the topic of education that we let this happen.

Why ISN’T Education with a capital “E” important to us? Who are we turning our country over to? If education isn’t important to us, why should it be to them? I suppose as long as there’s enough cannabis dispensaries around, maybe it won’t matter to this next generation.

As someone who invested a good portion of his life - 15 years - to the educational process, teaching at Florida State, Tallahassee Community College, Bainbridge State College, Godby High School and East Gadsden High School, it’s appalling that apparently so many of us are OK with our own government saying, in essence, education is not now and won’t be a national priority.

The fall of the Department of Education - Keep 'em dumb

As I wrote in a rather lengthy response to my friend’s post, it’s not as if we can point to what the Department of Education has achieved (or not achieved) and be proud. Americans spend more money per student than just about every other country but our test scores continue to drop like healthy pitchers in the just-concluded MLB Spring Training. Teacher’s Unions, as well-intended as some of them may be, are pretty much useless. (And I say that from bitter personal experience.)

Whjle there is no question that the system isn’t working like it should and there is plenty of waste and stupidity (as if the Trump Administration hasn’t demonstrated they already have plenty of that) to completely dismantle the Department, thinking somehow that is going to improve the future education of our young people is idiotic, reckless (what a surprise) and short-sighted.

Trump might be fine with us collectively not being all that bright (“I love the uneducated”), but are we? Now, the National Department of Education as well as the Florida Department of Education did me, a classroom teacher, no favors. They did nothing to help teachers that I could see, setting up these theoretical standards for all schools, some of which, particularly for a school like mine, were nearly impossible to meet.

Comparing area high schools, according to what I read on the Internet this morning, about 26% of Gadsden High students or a quarter of the school, read at grade level or above. At Chiles High School, it’s at least double that number. Yet each crop of students are expected to meet the state of Florida standards for graduation. In other words, Gadsden teachers are expected to pull off a Tom Brady-second half of the Super Bowl vs. Atlanta, winning the game after trailing 28-3 in the third quarter, every single year. No wonder, compared to the rest of the state of Florida, which typically ranks in the 40’s compared with other 49 states, Gadsden is always dead-ass last, generally by a considerable margin, too. They don’t have a chance, do they?

When you are a classroom teacher and feel as if you are not only fighting the Administration of your school (I plead guilty) but the national Department of Education as well, the job is challenging enough. I understood no Department of Education anywhere was going to applaud my lesson plans, which included, boxing matches, Laurel & Hardy, U2, Bob Dylan, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry David Thoreau, Seinfeld, Mark Twain, The Ray Bradbury Theater, James Joyce, Huck Finn, The Marx Brothers and Ernest Hemingway was OK. That it met the “standards.” That my kids showed growth in all four quarters. Blah, blah, blah.

I had to teach like a renegade because, in my view, the materials that were approved were so Godawful boring and so out-of-touch there was no way you were going to get them where they needed to be using them. That was the truth.

The bottom line was, did I? In most cases, I’d say yes. Didn’t get ‘em all, you never do, but an increasing number of my former students went on to college and rocked the joint, including a brilliant one who stopped by my book signing (on baseball!) last night, finishing up her Masters Degree at FSU. How cool is that? Some are even becoming English teachers, even after witnessing my out-of-the-box ways.

I’m not sure how you could fix the Department of Education since typically, when you get Administrators involved, they insist on telling the teachers WHAT to teach and often, HOW, even if the last time they were in a daily classroom was 20 years ago. In a dozen years of faculty meetings, more of them than I dare to count, how many times do you think an administrator looked at a group of us classroom teachers and asked, “Well, you guys are in the trenches every day. What do you think?”

NEVER. Not a single time.

Shouldn’t the goal of the Department of Education be to HELP KIDS LEARN. Period. And the only way that’s going to happen is the HELP THE TEACHERS, not “Marzano” them, giving them this checklist that an Administrator will “objectively” complete when they haven’t been in your classroom maybe once or twice. That’d be like a NFL team signing a guy to a million-dollar contract off of what they saw in his highlights on the 6’oclock news.

Are there “bad” teachers? Sure. But there are way more good ones than you can possibly imagine. And they could improve, with help and guidance. Being a classroom teacher for a dozen years definitely made me a better person. Shouldn’t that matter to our government? Don’t we want more selfless people coming out of our colleges, aiming to help kids learn, grow, mature? Why wouldn’t we encourage that?

Note to the Department of Education everywhere. Teachers each have their own way of working, of finding ways into a kid’s brain and maybe their heart. You can’t standardize it. Don’t try. Try this - TRUST them.

The vast majority of my former colleagues truly wanted to help their classes learn. Whether you’re at a “B” school, which I helped Godby achieve after they’d received an “F” and hired me as somebody to fix it and we did or an “F” school, which Gadsden was for most years the place was open. It comes down to this: I just don’t think we’re asking the right questions. Banning the Department of Education isn’t going to solve anything. We need to ask better questions. And listen to the answers.

In my last year of teaching, I had one student, a back-of-the-room underachiever who would often fall asleep in class. As soon as I saw the head go down, I would be up at her desk, waking her up. Not enough, however, she failed first semester. After moving her seat to the front, I thought I’d try a somewhat advanced technique with her, annotation. That is, breaking down a short story, line-by-line.

The story we were reading was Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story about a sleazy guy trying to get his girlfriend to get an abortion, though that word never appears in the story. I had her reading it aloud. The couple is already bickering, there’s something not being said out loud which we can sense.

So the guy says “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.”

“Ok,” I asked her. “Why is she looking at the ground?”

“I don’t know.”

" “Guess?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. Take a chance, Columbus did. Why did she look at the ground?”

Disgusted or frustrated, she made a face and looked away, across the classroom.

“There!” I said. “Why did you just look away?”

She made a face.

:”Why?” I persisted. “Tell me.”

“Because I wanted to change the subject”

Then, suddenly her look changed. She raised her hand.

“She uh, didn’t want to talk about it?”

“YES!”

“He’s trying to talk her into an abortion and she doesn’t want to deal with it and is looking at the ground.”

“YES!”

She got an A second semester. If I can give myself a wee bit of credit here, I think, this time at least, I asked the right question.

Why can’t we find way more educated people than an old sportswriter to do the same. The future of our country could be riding on it.