What One Student Rant by Jeff Bliss Doesn't Tell Us

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE NEWS REPORT AND VIDEO of Jeff Bliss going off on the teacher in his World History class, you should check out the link.

The “in-depth analysis” by Channel WFAA fills up two minutes and forty-one seconds of valuable air time. More than 3.8 million people have watched it. Thousands have felt a strange urge to comment. The actual rant lasts only ninety seconds. You can see the original on YouTube. It’s listed under the title: “Jeff Bliss Rant against Lazy Teacher.”

And here’s what’s so cool.

All you need to do is invest a snippet of time. Once you finish you know all you need to know about U.S. education. You can be a school critic! That’s what many who enjoy this brief glimpse of life in one Texas classroom decide.

On one of the videos the “top comment” was: “That teacher ought to be fired.” It had 85 “likes” and no “dislikes” at all.

I added the first.

As a former educator, I admit I watched the video and perused comments with a bit of a bias. I noticed, for example, that many newly-minted experts seemed minimally grounded in logic and reality. If anything, I felt bad because maybe schools aren’t doing a good job teaching critical thinking.

When I clicked on the “Lazy Teacher” video, for example, there were already 3,300 comments. Clearly, not all who felt compelled to start typing spent as much time cogitating as they did whacking the keyboard with abandon  (click on the picture below to enlarge):

Don’t you love the internet—a place where ignorant individuals can call other human beings “niggerdumb” and make informed judgments about all the black kids in class “there for the easy ride” and “not learning jack shit.” And you can somehow tell a teacher is a “fucking fat feminist” and not even realize who really, really, sounds dumb?

It’s bad enough you get this kind of thinking from fools who comment via YouTube. But the Bliss clip has been featured on Fox News.

(Motto: We Hate Unionized Teachers—You Should Hate Them, Too!)

Again, we are dealing with ninety seconds of video, in one classroom, an incident involving one teacher and one student. We have not heard the teacher’s explanation and if we rely on Fox News we never will.

Logically, then, we can’t draw broad conclusions. Nevertheless, many of the Fox Faithful do (although not all are sympathetic to Mr. Bliss and his predicament):

Donna Ramsey Bowen: The Unions have ruined our schools....among other things. Unions were great when they were started. Now, they hurt more than they help. Teachers are a good example of that. Teachers do not actually have to "teach" any longer and they cannot be fired because the Unions have all these regulations the school must follow first. Most Unions require someone to get in trouble at least 3 times - and it has to be for the Exact same thing - before they can be fired

Betty Shelton: Teachers have gotten lazy over the last 30 years. That is why kids can't read at grade level. And End of Grade Or End Of Course test are ignored and child is passed to the next grade or gradeuated.

Mary Long: Right ON! This is why we have nothing but Illiteracy in this country...Teachers care about their pay, not the students. Public Education needs to GO AWAY! We have a PATHETIC work force with Teachers and Unions across the board....All about the money....NO QUALITY in Education.

Debi Krupna Mielach: LOVE this kid!!! More passion in that short clip than that teacher probably showed in the entire school year. God bless you, Mr. Bliss. Don't lose your fire!


Here, I am thinking to myself. I am wondering how Debi sees through walls into other rooms and around corners, etc. I am thinking I’d like to be able to ask: “Ms. Mielach, if I have a video of you sitting on the toilet for ninety seconds does that prove you have been seated on the toilet all year?

That’s what, logically, I am thinking. Many other commentators are apparently typing as fast as they can. This is much faster than they can think:

Arlene Parson: This kid has a future as a motivational speaker at a teacher's convention. Keep it up Mr. Bliss.

Josh Stringer: I hope she gets fired. She was only doing the minimum to get a paycheck. Most places I know you would get fired unless you work at mcdonalds.

Sean Denaris: Listen to the teacher sounds so bored. Likely class taught the same way. Wish more people would stand up.

Beth McKenna Wade: Kudos to this kid... Sadly "teachers" like this are common place in alot of our schools these days!!

Jason Robertson: paid leave? for get that you don't work you don't get paid. I can not stand unions they have screwed up my childhood, rrrrrr and who pays to have a teacher that is not working

(Okay, now we know that the Fox Message has been sinking in to plenty of otherwise empty heads. Unions are terrible. Union members are bums.)

I decide if I’m going to comment, I should know more. I watch several interviews. There are plenty. All feature Mr. Bliss. None allow us to hear from the teacher. Her name is Julie Phung.

Jeff Bliss comments on an incident at Duncanville High School in Texas.

Here’s what I notice:

1. During the original rant the rest of the class appears to be working.

2. Say what you want about the young man's message, his rant eats up ninety seconds of education for every other kid in the room.

3. Bliss is far angrier than the teacher—and if her responses seem tepid we cannot know how much she cares about teaching. (If you are a teacher you don’t want to have this sort of situation escalate. You want the student to exit the room quickly and you want the rest of the kids to remain on task.)

4. Most of the Bliss interviews cut off the last part of the rant. If Bliss sounds eloquent in spots he sounds belligerent at the end. Again, we don’t know what sentiments motivate him.

5. What precipitated this incident? At some point Phung told him to “stop bitchin’.” It’s an inelegant choice of words but in a high school not something kids and teachers don’t hear every day.

6. Apparently, Bliss wanted to know why his class hadn’t had more time to prepare for the STAR test, the Texas standardized tests. These are the kinds of tests good teachers hate, the kind most feel are making education worse. Bliss is angry because his instructor keeps handing out packets. All I know is that in my final year in the classroom that’s what we were ordered to do. Keep using those packets, specially prepared by the State of Ohio (in my case), because we must raise test scores!


I HATE TO BREAK IT TO THE CRITICS, to young Bliss, or school reformers, but you don’t measure “inspiration” with standardized testing.

I still have an abiding interest in the future of American education. So I watch several more interviews. Not a peep from Ms. Phung. I only hear what Bliss thinks. I discover that he is an 18-year-old sophomore. By admission, he has failed once, during his freshman year. Based on age, I assume he has been held back twice.

He started ninth grade a second time, lasted a semester, and dropped out.

Was Bliss previously a terrible student? Did he have attendance problems? Were there substance abuse issues? Problems in the home? How is he doing now in other classes? Has he truly turned his life around? Is he working diligently? Or, is he a troublemaker and a loose cannon? From the evidence we possess we don’t know.

We do know Bliss is back in school. That speaks greatly to his credit.

I spend ten minutes watching the “Jeff Bliss’ Interview on Fox4.” I find myself liking some of what he says. His mother sounds nice and doesn’t want the teacher fired. I notice that there is no mention of a father in any story.

I come away from this excursion into the world of YouTube and Facebook commentary still not feeling like I can make any judgments.

Well, except one.

I have noticed in recent years that bashing public school teachers and making wild claims—that America’s public schools are failing—all failing—and all failing because of unions—has now become a right-wing sport.

The only definitive statement I will make is that people who make broad generalizations based on limited evidence are ignorant. It’s like convicting someone of a murder that took place in Dallas because at the time the “suspect” was, in fact, a human being living in Texas.

I’m amazed by how many unenlightened individuals feel they can judge Ms. Phung after ninety seconds. Then:  they compound their error by using one erroneous conclusion as foundation for another.

SOMEONE IN THIS COUNTRY NEEDS TO SPEAK UP for all the good teachers. For all we know, Ms. Phung may even be one.


P. S. Let us wish Mr. Bliss great success in all his future educational endeavors.

*

IF YOU LIKE THIS you might like my book: Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching, available now on Amazon. 

Fox News Goes All Warm and Fuzzy for Public School Teachers

I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED WHY any sane public school teacher watches Fox News. After all, if there is a story out there that can be used to shed a negative light on public school teachers, Rupert Murdoch’s sock-puppet commentators will find it and flog it. 

But, wait! Fox News is suddenly “standing up for teachers!” 

That's right—Gretchen Carlson and Megan Kelly and Sean Hannity will soon be boo-hoo-hooing the fate of poor public school teachers. 

According to a recent Fox News story, teachers are getting absolutely hosed. It’s tragic, they want their viewers to know. Just terrible—and unfair—and un-American too. The average teacher is making a mere $44,000 a year.

It’s tough going, says Tracie Happel, a teacher in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. And here’s where the story gets interesting. 

Whose fault is this? You’re thinking, maybe, that ass, Governor Scott Walker, who wants to take away all bargaining rights from teachers? Maybe the infamous Koch brothers, who donate tens of millions to all the big right-wing-nut causes, and who dream about crushing the last glimmer of life out of the U. S. labor movement? 

Nope. Fox News found the one teacher in America who would agree that the real problem was fat cat union bosses. Says Happel:

It’s always about the union. It’s never about the teachers or students. When you’re a teacher, you know you will not always be able to have the money for renovations on a house or go away on vacation, but it’s a tough pill to swallow when you can’t do those things when the people who are supposed to represent us get paid more and more every year.

That pill might be even tougher to swallow if you’re one of the tens of thousands of teachers who have been laid off by Tea Party- loving, tax-slashing, union-busting governors in the last couple of years.  

But no one at Fox News bothered to talk to any of those teachers. 

Not a snowball’s chance on a Fourth of July grill! What Fox really wants to see is the smashing of unions. It’s simple. No one at Fox News actually cares about teachers. The key to this “awful” story isn’t teachers’ pay. It’s those evil union leaders, and by extension their diabolical Democratic political friends. According to Fox sources, the evil leaders of the evil teachers’ unions are pulling down salaries and benefits of almost half-a-million annually. 

That’s the real takeaway from the tale. Don’t stop to remember that Wall Street types crashed damn near the entire U. S. economy in 2008, while hedge fund CEO’s raked in $100 million salaries. Don’t look at stories in newspaper about banks rigging basic interest rates—affecting what every teacher (and every poor sucker who watches Fox News) pays on mortgages and car loans. Pay no attention to the pharmaceutical companies that have paid huge fines for illegal marketing tactics. Ignore companies, including Bain Capital, that ship good American jobs overseas to India, China and Bangladesh. 

Biggest economic problem in America today?  

Overpaid union leaders. 

YOU MIGHT THINK THE DUMB CLUCKS who let themselves be gulled nightly by the Fox crew would have the tiniest clue. Then again, you’d think public school teachers wouldn’t be watching a channel that vilifies them. But if you think fans of Fox News didn’t get the real point of this recent story, all you have to do is read a few typical posted comments. 

“Well,” Warren Reichle noted, “the Average teacher is a know nothing Slug! End the unionization of our educators, end the tenures, increase quality of our educators, increase their pay with results!” 

Clearly that man felt bad for all the “know-nothing slugs” (to polish up his grammar) who make only $44,000 a year. 

Estella Bunny Howe added:  “Hey, the teachers have the right to opt out of the unions. Stupid if they don’t. And, just remember these are the same teachers who are teaching math, etc. to our kids. And, you wonder why our society is so screwed up?????” 

Yeah, don’t you hate it, Bunny, when teachers screw up the world? Starting the War in Iraq, for example, making American adults fat, causing health care costs to skyrocket. 

Yeah, damn teachers. 

Diana Lynn Friemann certainly caught the point of the story. She picked up the football and ran with it down the field and spiked the ball in the end zone. “We need to have a law outlawing these unions. They are full of thugs, liars and thieves. All they are good for anymore is raising money for the Democrat candidates. That is NOT what they are supposed to be for! They are supposed to be a voice for workers, but that ended years ago. Thugs!” 

The sympathy (cough, cough) for teachers that Fox News, in its heart, hoped to elicit was everywhere in view: 

Theresa Victorino Stevens:  “Public education system is RIDICULOUS!!” 

Joe Armato:  “This is why the children do not get an education. The teachers are so dumb that they allow this to happen.” 

“There’s probably no more overpaid profession than teacher,” Tom Van Riper grumbled. Apparently, he didn't care if Tracie Happel (or any other teacher in America) made $44,000 per year or if she had to get by on minimum wage.

John Hammack was equally sympathetic, noting, “around here they make on the average $90K. I’d love to make $44k, get three months off during the summer, and leave the job at 3:30 with no accountability.”

Marc Mathews pretty agreed with Mr. Hammack:  “44G with a pension, summers off and very good benefits and what is basically a job for life. Doesn’t excuse the 500g salaries but I'm playing the worlds smallest violin for the whiners.”

GregandAngie Jones—which could be a couple sharing a Facebook page—or maybe a posting by co-joined twins, responded:

Good teachers are the exception, not the norm. Many teachers are there to put in their 180 school days per year. Take their winter break, spring break, and summer vacations; collect their pay and retire on the taxpayer. The level and standard of public education in the US is a good indication that it is failing.

Charles Donaldson looked under his bed, couldn’t see President Obama’s birth certificate anywhere, but caught a glimpse of the Red Menace boogie man: “schools, public education, is destroying america…kids don’t have an idea what work is cause they spend their whole life in school socialism.” 

Jeff Runyan touched on a common sentiment, damning to America’s teachers in general, when he grumbled:  “The US doesn’t even rank in the Top 10 in the world for education yet we spend the most on it. Wonder why that is.” 

John Bravo backed him up, especially after a more liberal individual noted that maybe the matter was more complex than a simple list that showed the United States wasn’t in the Top 10 in terms of education. He lambasted Azhar Din, who dared to disagree, then made it crystal clear where the problems in education began:  “[We] rank low because liberals have been in charge of our schools for the past 50+ years wake up troll.” 

I did what I could. I posted a few comments of my own, including one in response to Mr. Runyan, noting that the U. S. doesn’t rank in the Top 10. True. We stood 25^th in the most recent international math comparison. Unions, right, fans of Fox News? I explained that if he cared to do a snippet of research he might discover that the U. S. was 24^th in life expectancy, using the same 30 countries in the international math survey. We’re 1^st in health care spending, too. 

It must be our terrible doctors. Are they union members, too? 

UNFORTUNATELY, LOGIC ISN’T A STRONG SUIT for fans of Fox News. So let’s leave the last word to Lowell Smith, a Tea Party philosopher. Says Mr. Smith: “For all you history majors here, on the upside, when the communist finally do get total control the first thing they do is shoot all the intellectuals and teachers.” 

Of course, Mr. Smith, won’t it be great when they shoot all the intellectuals and teachers! That’s the upside.  

Something tells me, sir, you’re going to be perfectly safe.