the schools are falling apart
notes on the teacher shortage
So I recently published an essay in Compact about the teacher shortage, basically pinning it on how bureaucratic schools have become, and how this has dehumanized the experience for everyone involved—especially the teachers. I cited Christopher Lasch’s critique of Horace Mann’s Common Schools Movement (taken from both The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites) and aspiration to offer universal public education.
Here are a few extra thoughts and some “deleted scenes” from the original draft.
More bureaucracy!
[deleted scene] DeSimone’s father, who worked in public schools for 30 years, managed to support his family of five on his income alone—living a “joyous, fulfilling, satisfying and sustainable life.” Thus, she had no qualms about investing the time, money, and energy to pursue the credentials to become a teacher. Needless to say, the demanding expectations placed on her—which intensified during the pandemic—without adequate support, on top of the low compensation she received and having to pay for classroom supplies out of pocket, chipped away at her morale.
She cites the education systems in Japan and Nordic countries where not only are the schools stronger, but where “respect for adults is ingrained in the culture…It’s a lot easier to teach math when your students just know to be quiet and listen to you.” Having to teach students content is demanding enough—having to assume the position of a parent who teaches “emotional skills,” as well as having to take on extra jobs to cover the cost of supplies and to pay off student loans, doesn’t exactly lighten teachers’ loads.
Despite having well-meaning administrators, DeSimone says “their hands were often tied because they’re not the big shots making the calls…Parents’ needs were prioritized.” She saw too many teachers who were “absolutely left hanging out to dry…It’s really difficult to manage a classroom or teach children right from wrong when you have absolutely no backup or support. You feel like you’re constantly in a defensive squad because you never know when a child is going to accuse you of something and you’re going to have to face the repercussions despite the fact that you’re the adult and there was no one else to backup your story—all of a sudden, your job’s on the line.”
Other teachers complained of a “corporate” mentality overtaking schools, which has given way to the emergence of new bureaucratic tasks that distract from the actual work of educating—namely excessive paperwork and documentation of academic and behavioral issues. DeSimone complained about how much the piling on of paperwork started breaking her down and suffocating her passion for the act of teaching itself.
Similarly, Aimee Rodenroth, who had taught elementary and middle-school language arts for over 30 years in Texas, found that the extra tasks that amounted over the years began interfering with her personal life. “I was unable to fully unplug from school, even during vacation times. Despite my seniority, I still wasn’t being paid adequately…When my kids were small and would get sick, I had no daycare and would have to stay home with them. I ran out of sick days and would start to get docked from my pay because I had to stay home with sick children.”
The ideological vibe shift
Teachers’ concerns about the state of schools reflect a certain ideological “vibe shift” that crosses partisan fault lines—not unlike Lasch’s own oeuvre. “Left-coded” positions in favor of workers’, women’s, and minorities’ rights and “self-care” are comingling with “right-coded” ones in favor of stricter discipline and against “soft-parenting” and bureaucratic bloat.
Adding to the diagnosis
This was obviously too long to include in the final version, but this excerpt from Paglia’s take on the Columbine massacre echoes much of Lasch’s beef with the bureaucratic nature of public schools:
For me, the lesson of Columbine is that primary and secondary education, as it gradually expanded over the past century, has massive systemic problems. We are warehousing students from childhood to early adulthood, channeling them toward middle-class professional jobs that they may or may not want. Young, male, hormonally driven energy is trapped and stultified by school, with its sterile regimentation into cubical classrooms and cramped rows of seats.
I found naggingly unsettling the aggressively upbeat, we're-all-family public discourse of the Columbine faculty and staff, particularly when juxtaposed with the bland, sometimes indistinguishably WASPy faces of the students themselves. The conflict between individualism and the norm can be brutal: bourgeois "niceness" is its own imperialism.
Today's busy, busy, busy high school education seems to prepare young people for nothing. There are too many posh cars in the parking lot and too much stress on extracurricular activities. Just as I have argued for lowering the age of sexual consent to 14, so do I now propose that young people be allowed to leave school at 14 -- as they did during the immigrant era, when families needed every wage to survive. Unfortunately, in our service-sector economy, entry-level manual labor is no longer widely available.
At home, American teenagers are being simultaneously babied and neglected, while at school they have become, in effect, prisoners of the state. Primary school should be stripped down to the bare bones of grammar, art, history, math and science. We need to offer optional vocational and technical schools geared to concrete training in a craft or trade. Practical, skills-based knowledge gives students a sense of mastery, even if they don't stay in that profession. A wide range of careers might be pedagogically developed, such as horticulture and landscape design; house construction and outfitting; automotive and aviation mechanics; restaurant culinary arts; banking, accounting, investment and small business management.1
Maybe millennial teachers just suck?
I shared some of these “Why I Quit Teaching” videos with my friend who is a public school principal, who posited that perhaps part of the problem is that many millennial teachers are unprofessional and immature…narcissists who love playing victim and getting attention for it, adults who haven’t grown up enough to lead and be authoritative with children. Of course this is a factor…and surely Lasch would agree were he still alive to watch these viral videos.
There’s a a bit of a mimetic quality to some of these posts, exacerbated by some of their creators’ desperation to forge an online career after having left their previous jobs. It’s hard to deny a certain narcissistic quality to the applause they receive for their commitment to “self-care.” Yet pinning the blame on the immaturity of young teachers—as much as this may indeed play a role—is too easy.
Remember, Lasch was cautious of “conservative” critiques that would chock narcissistic tendencies up to a matter of individual moral failure, rather than understanding it to be the inevitable result of social order that inhibits the full realization of one’s agency and personal responsibility. By that logic, pinning the blame on administrators and parents is also too easy, as it fails to consider the greater structural realities that allow for such treatment of teachers and students to happen in the first place.
The Paterson School District—New Jersey’s third largest—advertised for over 124 job openings this past August (with 2087 teachers employed at the time and a student:teacher ratio of 10:1). This is an improvement since the previous academic year’s 186 vacancies.2 Superintendent Dr. Laurie Newell thinks the state could do more to attract and retain younger teachers, like removing roadblocks like the Praxis exam requirement and allowing non-New Jersey residents to obtain waivers to teach in the state. Even still, Dr. Newell recognizes that since the pandemic, recent college graduates are more drawn to jobs that allow them to “be their own boss” and to work remotely. “Folks who would consider the profession are now seeing they have a lot of great options,” thus making it harder to attract and keep new teachers.
Taking a stab at solutions
So I pin most of the problems in schools to the bureaucratic structures and mentality that has overtaken them…and on the fact that it is impossible for teachers to teacher, as well as to serve as a parent, social worker, and psychologist—while making barely any money and having to buy their own supplies. The only solutions I hinted at in the piece is to up the pay/benefits of teachers as well as parents (so they have more time and energy to actually parent their students.)
Nick Ferroni said unions don’t do much but they’re better than nothing. Michaela and Jerred said they were useless. My aunt who was a principal said unions make it impossible to incentivize teachers to dedicate themselves fully to students and to be willing to grow and improve as teachers. As much as I acknowledge that many unions make things harder for admins and students by overprotecting teachers—while in effect doing barely anything to actually protect and empower teachers—I kinda feel it’s better to have them…on a matter of principle.
So I once worked at a school that was very not-bureaucratic, and because of this, there was a genuine sense of community. Everyone treated each other like human beings, the admins respected teachers’ freedoms, they and the parents respected the teachers, students trusted teachers. There was barely any bullying because (1) the students saw each other as brothers and (2) when kids did act up, the teachers acted like real authority figures, telling the kids to knock it off—rather than relying on bureaucratic programs like sensitivity training or restorative justice (which end up doing nothing, and sometimes making the bully even more insensitive). I wrote about this here and here.
But I should also mention the flipside of not having a bureaucracy—sometimes people act too human, which bureaucracy (attempts to) act as a buffer against. The reality is, you can’t avoid the excesses of authority (authoritarianism). So the question is really one of whether we want impersonal authoritarians (bureaucracy) or a real, fleshy one (old school model of leadership). But there’s no escape from authoritarianism…as bureaucratic models would have us believe.
On that note, as much as hateful actions and behavior should be discouraged and—when necessary—punished, to attempt to ban politically correct humor tends to exacerbate hatred and prejudice. Politically incorrect humor—within certain boundaries—can be a healthy way to air our prejudices and then overcome them, building bonds of fraternity and unity. Humorlessness never did much to unite people, anyway.
Should we start sending kids to private schools? Start a homeschooling co-op? A lot of progressive activists will argue that these options are only for the privileged, and that we should be investing more in improving public schools. Maybe we should let them drop out younger and pick up a trade…or better yet, establish more vocational/tech schools (which this article makes an excellent case for)? Either way…we need to accept the fact that teachers are not miracle workers. Some kids are not cut out for school. And rather than pressuring teachers to perform miracles with them, we need to consider letting kids opt for alternative programs that are more fitting for them. A number of students I used to teach dropped out of college (which they only went to because they thought it’s what they were “supposed” to do) and start construction jobs…lamenting having wasted so much time and money on college, when they could’ve started a trade (and maybe their own business) years ago.
Ultimately, what I’d like to see happen is (1) to downscale and decentralize schools—institutions, as Dorothy Day reminds us—that are this big cannot get stuff done (2) to foster a spirit of collaboration among admins, teachers, and parents—rather than an antagonistic one (3) for parents to discipline their kids out of love for their growth…this soft parenting is ridiculous. If you don’t discipline them, you don’t love them! (4) to recognize that a kid’s family and community are their main teachers—and that school teachers are only there to teach the specialized stuff…and NOT to raise children.
In this TedTalk,
makes a convincing case for teaching kids to work with their hands, and normalizing going to a trade school rather than college. And if you haven’t read all his books already, then what exactly are you waiting for?
She continues:
Guns are not the problem in America, where nature is still so near. These shocking incidents of school violence are ultimately rooted in the massive social breakdown of the Industrial Revolution, which disrupted the ancient patterns of clan and community. Our middle-class culture is affluent but spiritually empty. The attractive houses of the Columbine killers are mere shells, seething with the poisons of the isolated nuclear family and its Byzantine denials.
Alas, the Columbine bloodbath already seems to be the rationale for increased surveillance of young people, who are now exhorted to snitch on each other to the authorities. The brooding apartness of Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Byron or Emily Bronte; the shrinking shyness of John Keats; the passive-aggressive reclusiveness of Emily Dickinson; the erratic moodiness of Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Baudelaire -- all will now be defined as antisocial, potentially dangerous behavior not to be tolerated by the omnipotent group, which will dispatch counselors of every stripe to coerce conformity. The totalitarian brave new world is upon us.
In addition to hosting job fairs, putting up billboards, instituting internship and apprenticeship programs, and offering professional development programming, Newell cited the end of the state’s nearly 30-year take over of the district’s Board of Education—thus restoring local control over decision-making processes—as one of the key factors shifting the numbers in a better direction.