Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Little Red School Houses For You And Me

"School choice" is a stalking horse for white flight, allowing the people who can't afford private schools to get into one anyway as long as it works diligently to keep non-white students at a minimum. If that doesn't work, just gut the schools like a fish by driving out teachers. If you think that's not a plan: You just haven't been paying attention:
At least 471 contract abandonment reports have been sent to the state, according to recent data. That’s a 60% increase from the 2021 fiscal year. 

“We’re leaving because it’s not worth it anymore,” Crosswell said.

....

Paul Tapp, an attorney for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, provides legal counsel for teachers looking to understand the consequences of contract abandonment. In the past two years, Tapp said, he’s seen a surge of teacher certification suspensions.

“I’ve been working with teachers just a little over 25 years at this point, and I have never seen a period like we have gone through, particularly this year, but last year as well,” Tapp said. “The thing we’re seeing now that we didn’t see before was the teacher saying, ‘OK, I understand I’ll be sanctioned, and I don’t care.’”

Tapp said he thinks the marked increase isn’t necessarily because districts are issuing complaints to the state more than before, but that teachers are quitting at unprecedented rates.

“On top of having such a difficult job, being kicked around in the public discourse has just gotten to be too much for a lot of teachers,” Tapp said, referring to the push to ban anti-racism instruction, labeled by some state lawmakers as critical race theory, and the move by some districts to restrict acknowledgement of LGBTQ identities in the classroom.

...

Crosswell’s story is a common one heard from hundreds of Texas teachers who have become disillusioned with the profession. There’s the low average salary that has remained stagnant for nearly a decade. Then the frequent switches to virtual learning and back to the classroom caused by the coronavirus pandemic. And the newer requirement to complete a 60- to 120-hour course on reading, known as Reading Academies, if teachers for kindergarten through third grade want to keep their jobs in 2023. And there’s the recouping of learning progress lost during the pandemic.

....

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, said school districts that are losing more teachers this school year are finding it increasingly difficult to replace them in the middle of the year.

“Every single one of those individuals have made a conscious decision to say they no longer give a damn about their teacher certification because conditions have gotten that bad,” Capo said.

When talking about Texas’ teacher shortage, experts usually point to teachers being overworked and underpaid. But Capo believes these teachers aren’t leaving in the middle of the year and potentially risking their certification over more pay. He believes it’s become an issue of health, safety and respect.

Texas saw two COVID-19 surges this school year, which pushed school districts to the limit. Teachers were out, substitutes weren’t available and instead districts were asking parents to come in and watch the children.

When Crosswell was making her decision to leave, she said it boiled down to putting her interest first. Teachers, for the most part, are asked to be selfless and put others ahead of themselves and their families.

“My mental health is greater than the need,” she said.

A great deal of what's said in those final quoted paragraphs resonates with my experience in ministry.  Pastors are also asked to be selfless and put others ahead of themselves and their family; but that's the job, isn't it?  Yes; it's also why Catholic priests don't have families, and there's an undeniable logic there.  But the expectation of seflessness in this society is the expectation of servanthood and non-being.  You exist only to serve the whims of the loudest voices.  That's toxic in a church as it is in a school.  I am not making a marty of myself (my reasons for leaving ministry were in part because I wasn't suited for it), but that toxin is running through the culture, not just in the "declining churches." In the article on Cruz it's noted that rural Texans aren't in favor of school choice, because they don't have any alternative but their public schools (and Texas dallied with the idea once, giving money but no oversight to private schools.  A lot of corruption sprang up in that situation, as you can imagine, and it was reversed entirely by the next Legislative session, a sign of what a truly bad idea it was.)  Either you expand school administration to private schools taking public funds (and who pays for that duplication of effort?), or you give away money to grifters.  The push for public money in private hands has everything to do with white flight and nothing to do with public education.

But these days, neither does public education have anything to do with public education.

Yes, we've been down this road once or twice before.  When I was in school nothing was taught about race in America (the Civil War was about "freedom," not slavery), or about the slaughter of the natives (I doubt our school library had a copy of Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.  We all had copies anyway.  Some days I wish I'd held onto mine.), or about anything to do with economics except "Marxism = bad if not satanic," and it was strongly implied capitalism was God's gift to America.  I know high school students in the district I live in now who were reading Howard Zinn's history of America a few years ago. If that was around when I was in high school, I never even heard of it.

Time really is a flat circle.

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