Jan Resseger looks at some of the baloney about education being served up by politicians trying to paint public education as a threat. Reposted with permission.
In the current polarized political season, the press is filled with articles spawned by desperate politicians looking to frighten voters with stories about the collapse of our society. In this narrative of collapse, attacks on the public schools loom large.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Matt Barnum and Melissa Korn quote Donald Trump: “Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs… We will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory.” “The former president has said he would deploy federal powers to pressure schools and universities that he considers to be too liberal. One strategy that he has described would launch civil-rights investigations of schools that have supported transgender rights and racial diversity programs.”
It doesn’t seem to matter in today’s political environment that the extremist political rhetoric about what’s happening in public schools has been shown to be inaccurate. Here is Education Week‘s Sarah Schwartz reporting the response of the American Historical Association: “The longstanding battle over how to teach America’s past has been particularly contentious over the past few years. Conservative commentators have accused history teachers of rampant left-wing bias, ‘indoctrinating’ students into hating their country and rejecting its founding ideals… But this portrait of American classrooms as ideological incubators is largely a fiction… Instead, the research, from the American Historical Association, finds that teachers overwhelmingly say they aim to develop students’ historical thinking skills—teaching them how to think, not what to think—and value presenting multiple sides of every story… The finding echoes history teachers’ responses to attacks on their work…. (I)n interviews with AHA researchers, teachers explained that it was important for them to remain neutral and nonpartisan. ‘I am going to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to tell it like it is and how it happened.’ one teacher from Texas told the researchers. Another, from Illinois, said they didn’t want ‘students knowing my views.’”
As I watch today’s outbursts from members of far-right-funded parents’ rights groups like Moms for Liberty and listen to politicians, I hear people who don’t seem able to imagine what teachers do every day as they work with children and adolescents. I also notice that cynical politicians are satisfied to manipulate widespread public ignorance about the work of teachers. After all, most of us spend very little time visiting our schools and observing teachers in their classrooms. We have also been victimized for over two decades by a school evaluation scheme based solely on students’ standardized test scores without any consideration of what teachers are expected to do, their preparation, or their daily challenges. Conversations denouncing teachers don’t seem to consider what it is like for elementary school teachers to work with with and learn to know 25 or 30 young children. For high school teachers, the numbers are even more staggering: more than a hundred adolescents every day.
It is worthwhile to consult an expert who spent a career preparing teachers for their work and who wrote several books describing the skills and strategies teachers must develop in order to be able manage and nurture groups of children and adolescents day after day and to help them grow academically. Educating children is not a mere matter of packing their brains with basic facts.
The late UCLA education professor, Mike Rose, prepared teachers to serve their students well in the complex environment of the classroom. He also devoted much of his career to observing excellent teaching and writing about it. Rose was already worried about our failure to grasp what teachers do when he published Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us in 2009 and an updated edition in 2014. Rose anticipated today’s political discussion—Donald Trump deriding teachers for massive failure and Moms for Liberty and other right-wing-funded parents’ rights organizations berating teachers for “woke” pedagogy:
“Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here. Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination.” (Why School?, p 203)
Mike Rose began trying to remedy our widespread ignorance about teachers’ work in 1995, when he published Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, a book exploring what he observed during three years of personal visits he made to watch teachers managing their classrooms in schools across the United States: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost. It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)
As he traveled and visited schools, Rose considered the factors that make teaching school such complex work and he described the practices by which good teachers were supporting young people: “As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kinds of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints—though not without times of confusion and defeat—and they had determined ways of organizing their classrooms that enabled them to honor their beliefs about teaching and learning… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.” (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423
In a 2014 summary article based on years of observing teachers in their classrooms, Rose published the best definition I know of excellent teaching: “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”
Now decades later in 2024, there are other symptoms of widespread lack of respect for teachers. It isn’t just that politicians rail against teachers, but across the states, legislators continue to enact budgets too meager to support adequate salaries for teachers. Public school districts across the United States continue to pay teachers less than other comparably educated professionals. This month the Economic Policy Institute published its annual report compiled by Sylvia Allegretto: Teacher Pay Rises in 2024—but Not Enough to Shrink Pay Gap with Other College Graduates. Allegretto, who conducts this annual research, is a labor economist and former co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. The trend is not new; for years Allegretto has been tracking the failure of teachers’ salaries to keep up with the pace of salaries in other professions.
Allegretto reports: “The pay penalty for teachers—the regression-adjusted gap between the weekly wages of teachers and college graduates working in other professions—grew to a record 26.6% in 2023, a significant increase from 6.1% in 1996. On average. teachers earned 73.4 cents for every dollar relative to the earnings of similar other professionals in 2023. Although teachers typically receive better benefits packages than other professionals do, this ‘benefits advantage’ is not sufficiently large to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers. The relative teacher weekly wage penalty exceeded 20% in 36 states….”
You can consult Allegretto’s bar graph to discover how salaries for teachers in your state compare to salaries in other professions. The results are discouraging and sometimes surprising.
