Confessions of a "Bad Teacher:" I Loved Teaching like a Crack Addict Loves Crack.

I thought I was a good teacher. 
(I also thought the Bengals would win.)

MY NAME is John, and I have a problem. For thirty-three years I was a bad teacher. And I thought I was good.

Denial. That’s all it was.

 

Then, Sunday, I stumbled across an excellent article by Dr. Michael Flanagan and his words gave me strength. You see he’s a bad teacher too.

 

Dr. Flanagan had to battle through the same agonizing process I must now endure, although he does admit there were sometimes “free bagels and donuts involved.” And I am a complete sucker for donuts.

 

(I’m sorry. When I salivate, I digress.)

 

 

FOR NINETEEN YEARS he taught, successfully, or so he thought. Oh, sure, he heard school reformers say that the big problems in education boiled down to bad teachers at the front of too many rooms. Still, he refused to face the truth. Like me, he kept pretending he was good. He’d get awards for excellence…and he’d believe those awards meant something too. 

As for me, I’d be grading papers at 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I’d tell myself, “John, you’re doing a good job.” I had an addiction you see. 

Grading papers was a crutch, like a bottle of booze to a drunk. 

I’d go to work on Monday, and students would tell me they loved my class, and I’d delude myself and think they were telling the truth. I would arrive at school early and let kids come in for extra work and I’d skip lunch to help and stay late too. I was hooked.  

I thought I was good. 

Sure. There were times I wondered. I’d pick up the New York Times and read what the latest school reformers had to say. These reformers didn’t have the same problem I did because they always avoided trying to teach. But I wouldn’t listen, not even when Brent Staples said schools did a terrible job of screening and evaluating teachers, so that they hired “any warm body that comes along.” I heard what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told an audience at M.I.T., that the big problem in schools was too many teachers were plain dumb and still I refused to face the demons. 

I’d go right back to my phone. I’d call Vicki’s parents and say, “I love having your daughter in class.” Too late now, I see that call was a cry for help. I loved teaching like a crack addict loves crack.

 

REFORMERS constantly tried to show me I was wrong. Michelle Rhee bashed teachers every time she opened her mouth. Campbell Brown hinted that teachers were sexual deviants, protected by powerful unions. Arne Duncan, Steven Brill and Joel I. Klein all agreed that tenure and unions must go. Yet, I kept going back into my classroom day after day. I had to have that fix. I had to keep helping kids. 

I know one step toward recovery is admitting a problem and trying to make amends to anyone you hurt. So let me say I’m sorry. I apologize for spending most of my adult life working with 5,000 kids. 

I’m sorry, Steven Brill, that I called your book, Class Warfare: The Fight to Save America’s Schools, a steaming pile of donkey dung. I should have known you were fighting harder than I did, just not in an actual classroom, or with actual kids. I should have known that you and Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America but never taught, were going to fix the lives of children with bold words. 

I’m sorry for so much.  

I’m sorry for doubting politicians when they passed No Child Left Behind more than a decade ago. Now I see that lawmakers in Washington knew exactly what they were doing all along. I’m sorry I said that law was flawed from the start.  

I’m also sorry that No Child Left Behind is totally dead.  

I’m sorry I don’t believe Common Core will work. I’m an addict, as I’ve said. I’m sorriest of all because I doubted politicians in 2010 when they said they supported Common Core and doubted them again in 2014 when they said, never mind, we’re not for Common Core after all.  

In fact, Governor Bobby Jindal I apologize particularly to you.

 

I’m sorry I didn’t face my problem when it might have meant something to all the wonderful young people I taught. I’m sorry for saying the standardized tests I saw during my long career were weak. I’m sorry I thought the social studies portion of the Ohio Achievement Test (OAT), implemented in 2004, and the last standardized test I saw before retiring in 2008, was a farce. I was wrong to think you couldn’t prove anything with a single fifty-question test if it covered three years of material (grades 6, 7 and 8).

 

I’M NOT JUST SORRY. I’m sad. I’m sad the State of Ohio spent millions designing that social studies subject test as part of the OAT – and then dumped it in 2009 – and will soon dump the whole sorry OAT and start from scratch again. Common Core is coming you know, or maybe it’s not. I’m sorry I said when I heard this kind of news that lawmakers in Columbus had absolutely no clue. 

I’m sorry I once brought in fourteen veterans (from five wars) to talk to 700 Loveland Middle School kids. I realize now, too late, that nothing they said could help any of those teens when it came to a standardized test. 

Especially now, since all those old tests are kaput.  

Today I understand. It wasn’t just me. I hung out with other junkies who thought they were good. We had an outstanding band director at Loveland Middle School who thought it mattered if he turned teens into musicians. We had great art teachers who imagined that if they taught kids to sketch beautifully, they were passing on value. We had a great drama teacher, who for some reason felt drama was worthwhile, and a French teacher who expected kids to speak French with skill, and we had fine coaches, who were all in denial too. Those coaches thought that teaching young men and women to work hard, to strive to improve, to win with character, might help them in life. 

Poor souls – trying to help kids who were bullied – counseling pregnant teens about choices they’d have to make – wondering how to help a boy who lived with an abusive father at home. Who were my colleagues trying to kid? 

Now I know we were all addicts, blind to our own flaws, and I look back on my career and theirs and think, “How sad!” 

But I do feel better today. I’m getting this off my chest and see I’m not alone. I can finally admit I was a “bad teacher” all along.  

I imagined that learning could be enhanced in ten thousand ways. And I was wrong. If it can’t be tested, if it can’t be reduced to A, B, C or D, it’s not learning at all. I have looked in a mirror at long last and have seen reflected an image I cannot like. Still, I can hope my colleagues and millions of public-school teachers will get the help they need. As Dr. Flanagan has shown, it’s never too late. We can all be “good teachers” if we choose. 

The politicians with all the bold plans, those zealous reformers with their millions of words, they’ll show us the way. 

They’ll show us all how to teach.

 

* 

IF YOU LIKED this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon. 

My book is meant to be a defense of all good teachers and a clear explanation of what good teachers can do, and what they cannot. 

Two Legs Suffice is also about what students, parents and others involved in education must do if we want to truly enhance learning.

The back cover provides a sense of what my book is about.

What a Difference a Century Makes

My father and mother, both age 27.

My father, James R. Viall, would have turned 100 years old today. So, what was different when he was born a century ago? 

One of the first differences we would notice would be that in 1915 there were simply not as many people. 

U. S. population stood at just over 100 million, less than a third of what it is today.

The world population would not hit two billion until 1927, when my father and mother were entering seventh grade. It would top three billion about the time my older brother, Tim, was in junior high. Population growth accelerated from there: four billion in 1974, when Jenny Viall, my father’s second granddaughter was born, five billion in 1987, when Sarah Viall, his fifth grandchild joined the fray, six billion by the time she entered junior high, seven billion by the time she graduated from Yale in 2012.

(Ellora Viall, born in 2013, is likely to see the world’s population reach nine billion before she turns 40.)

Medical care was far less advanced a hundred years ago. The first heart transplant was half a century down the road. Insulin had not been discovered. Any boy or girl who developed type-1 diabetes was doomed. (Glad that’s no longer true, Emily Viall.) Smallpox was still a killer and a sister of my father’s succumbed in 1912. An outbreak of influenza would sweep the globe in 1918. The death toll was at least twenty millions, perhaps as high as fifty million. 

Life expectancy was 52.5 years for men, almost 57 for women.

A little more than 1 in 4 American workers (27%) were employed on 6.4 million farms at the time of my father’s birth. 

(The figures today are 2.2 million and 2%).

Speaking of workers, Henry Ford dominated the fledgling auto industry and his company would roll a millionth car off the assembly lines before the year ended.

Ford also had problems. He had perfected the assembly line but was having trouble keeping workers. He decided to raise wages. In 1914, the average Ford factory worker earned $2.50 per day for nine hours. Ford cut the workday to eight hours and raised the daily rate to $5.00, including bonuses. The president of Pittsburgh Plate Glass predicted ruin for Ford Motors, or for American industry, or both, as a result. The Wall Street Journal hinted that Ford was infected with Bolshevik tendencies.

Over half of all workers in mines and factories were foreign-born in 1915. Conditions were far from ideal. Almost 2300 coal miners would die on the job during the year, roughly average between 1903-1930. A steel worker could report working 68 hours per week. And no Saturday off for most workers! A Polish immigrant reported making $41 in two weeks at his factory job. He then had to pay the company $9 rent for living in a company-owned house, owed $24 for purchases at the company-owned store, and had to pay a fee of 50¢ for a visit to the company-owned hospital and 30¢ for the privilege of having his tools sharpened at the company-owned shop. “Company towns” were common in those days—with workers sometimes paid in “scrip,” or bills and coins only good at the company store. Only 1 in 10 American workers then belonged to a union.

April 5: In a heavyweight fight held in Havana, Cuba, Jess Willard defeated Jack Johnson, a match ripe with racial undertones. Johnson, a black fighter, had made all kinds of enemies over the years, mainly by pummeling white fighters, and seeming to enjoy it, as well as marrying and/or living with various white women. (Interracial marriage was then illegal in most states, which did complicate matters.) 

April 26: Francis Marion Harbit, the mother of my wife, Anne Viall, was born. (The middle name is for the Revolutionary War hero.)

The world she entered in 1915 was a place where women were still denied voting rights. Legally, in most states, a wife’s services also belonged to her spouse—so a husband could control her paycheck. In one famous case a St. Louis woman, long separated from her husband, lost her leg in an industrial accident. She sued the company for $10,000, only to have her long-lost man reappear, agree to settle with her employer for $300, and disappear with the cash. In some states it was still legal for the husband to grant custody of the children in his will to whomever he chose.

At the time only 1 in 5 workers was female. 

Only 1 in 25 medical school graduates was a woman, a figure that would remain virtually unchanged from 1905 until 1965. 

There were still almost no female lawyers, judges or elected officials.

One man who was enjoying himself was Babe Ruth. In the spring he signed a contract with the Boston Red Sox for $3500. The investment paid off, as Ruth, a lefthander, compiled a record of 18-6. As a bonus he led the Red Sox in homeruns with four. No other player on the team hit more than two for the season. The Boston squad would go on to win the World Series, 4 games to 1, vs. the Philadelphia Phillies. Ruth never had a chance to pitch and went 0 for 1 as a pinch hitter.

Charlie Chaplin was also having a fine year, having inked a deal to earn $1250 per week, mostly on the strength of a popular new character, “The Tramp,” who first appeared as a full-blown figure in a movie of that name in April.

Billy Sunday, the fiery preacher, was also in the news. In one blistering sermon after another he railed against dresses which showed too much cleavage, with “collars down around the waist.” He also warned against playing bridge, about listening to jazz, and said it was impossible to “see God through the bottom of a beer-mug.”

World War I had raged for six months by the time my father arrived as a squalling infant. In August 1914, news of war had been met with singing and cheering in Moscow, London and Paris. In Berlin one observer reported that the people were “mad for war.” Military experts predicted it would all be over within three to five months. Now enthusiasm was waning. On a single day in 1915, newspapers could report that 20,000 soldiers had been killed in just the last twenty-four hours.

On May 7, 1915 a German submarine put a single torpedo into the side of the great ocean liner Lusitania. The “floating hotel,” as the ship was then called, would sink in eighteen minutes, carrying almost 1200 passengers and crew with her to the bottom, including thirty-one infants aboard.

From that moment, pressure would grow on President Woodrow Wilson to enter the war on the side of France and England. He would refuse, and in 1916, run for re-election on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” (Wilson would go to bed on election night believing he had been defeated; but final results, three days later, would show he had won a narrow electoral victory, 277-254, over Republican challenger Charles Evans Hughes. Ohio had 24 electoral votes—California 13—Florida 6, in those days. Today the figures are 18—55—and 29—reflecting huge population shifts.)

July 26: My mother, Eleanor Cecile Winter, was welcomed into the world.

There was great concern at this time about the flood of immigrants. The term hyphenated American came into use. Teddy Roosevelt popularized the idea of the “one hundred percent American.” Would German Americans be loyal during the war? Were Italian Americans all criminals? What about the radical ideas of many foreign workers? Could these people even assimilate? After visiting one Italian immigrant family a social worker grumbled: “Not Americanized. Still eating spaghetti.”

From 1900 to 1915, three million Italian immigrants landed on our shores. The flow had been changing. More and more Jews, fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia, joined them. There were many others from Greece, Romania, Hungary and Armenia. On the eve of World War I, 1 of ever 4 Greek males at work was working in this country.

Edward Ross, a professor of sociology, watched the flood and saw only “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality,” people who clearly belonged in “wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.”

These weren’t the kind of people who built America—who made it great! (Doesn’t that sound familiar?)

The Ku Klux Klan was also having a good year, as membership blossomed, and the Klan message—anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant—resonated. Sometime during the 20s, I believe, my mother’s Catholic family looked out one night to see a cross burning on their lawn in Akron, Ohio.

A number of books during this era warned of the growing immigrant menace. Madison Grant, in The Passing of a Great Race (1916) talked of “a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish ghettos. Our jails insane asylums and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them.”

Almost 1.2 million immigrants landed on American shores in 1914. Then war in Europe cut the flow to just over 350,000 in 1915.

Spoon River was published in 1915. 

Lillian Gish starred in the film, The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of Southern women and Anglo-Saxon culture and civilization.

Anti-Semitism was also in vogue. Leo Frank was lynched in Marietta, Georgia after his death sentence was commuted in the murder of Mary Phagan, a young woman employed in Frank’s factory. (Many legal experts believed Frank was innocent all along.) A mob of outraged citizens dragged him from his cell and left him dangling from a tree. The Marietta paper approved of the mob action, referring to participants as “law-abiding citizens” who only wanted to see a just sentence carried out. For the year there were thirteen lynchings of white prisoners and fifty-six of blacks. Harvard and other elite institutions implemented quotas on Jewish admissions and Henry Ford, himself, published a newspaper which regularly attacked Jewish bankers and ordinary Jews in language that, after the Great War ended, warmed the heart of a young veteran named Adolf Hitler.  

Speaking of prejudice, African Americans, referred to in those days as “negroes” (if they were lucky), were denied access to the vote across the South. Literacy tests and poll taxes were employed to keep them off the rolls. In some counties, with majority black populations, a black man had a better chance of being lynched than he did of casting a ballot. In many places not a single non-white voter would be listed on the rolls until after 1960.

Finally, Americans were far less educated a century ago than they are today. Only 6 in 10 white children, ages 5-19, were enrolled in school in 1915. 

The figure for blacks was roughly 4 in 10 and the average number of years of schooling completed was 8.6. 

As late as 1940, my father would still be the exception—my mother and Anne’s mother even more so. The year they all turned twenty-five only 5% of adults had college degrees. (A year before the United States joined the fighting in World War II the average high school graduate was earning $1,661. The average college graduate was doing much better, earning almost a thousand dollars more: $2,607.)

Who knows what the next hundred years will bring?
Ellora Viall, b. 9-2-2013, great granddaughter of James R. Viall.

Teachers: Accountable for What?

The true task of the teacher is to convince students to explore.

Monday morning, 7:31 a. m.; January 26: You are a public school teacher, already ensconced at your desk. Typically, you arrive early for work; but today you feel rejuvenated after a relaxing weekend with your family. You have your coffee and danish and soon you’ll be charged up and ready to go.

Unfortunately, you can’t shake a nagging doubt. 

You have heard the school reformers insist that if we expect to improve U. S. education we must “hold teachers accountable.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is an avid supporter of Common Core, with a tidal wave of standardized tests to follow. Test scores will be critical, he claims, when it comes to measuring accountability.

This past weekend you saw another report indicating that politicians in several states hope to revoke their decision to sign up for Common Core. At a meeting in Iowa Saturday, potential Republican presidential candidates for 2016 came out vehemently against what they now call “Obamacore.”

Sitting at your desk, you take a gulp of strong coffee and shake your head. You might be a Republican. You might be a Democrat. You might be a Whig. 

When it comes to understanding what teachers do, you feel school reformers, politicians and Secretary Duncan have no clue.

“Accountability for what?” you mutter.

If you’re approaching the end your career you have even greater cause for doubt. You remember how politicians promised to fix schools in the early 90s by implementing state proficiency tests. That plan didn’t work. 

In 2002 Congress stepped forward to pass No Child Left Behind, promising to fix everything by 2014. That didn’t work. 

Now Common Core is coming—or maybe not coming—and you wonder if politicians have revolving doors in their heads.

If you teach second grade, you think back to Friday. You know what Duncan never knows. You know no member of Congress ever sees, or even cares to see. You still feel sad about what happened, when you had to deal with an eight-year-old boy who wanted to wear his stocking cap all day in class. When you asked why, he started crying. So you led him gently to the hall to see what you might do. He wiped his tears and felt better because you cared. He said his mother got drunk Thursday night. (He told you two months ago that his father disappeared soon after he was born.)

Anyway, mom decided to give him a haircut, but ended up clipping only part of his head, leaving odd patches of hair sticking up in every direction. When you asked if you could see, he slowly removed his cap and you knew you had to do something to help him get through the day. You contacted the counselor and worked out a plan to have the school nurse trim off the last strands of hair.

(You were accountable to help. You were not accountable for what happened to the young man Thursday night.)

If you teach eighth grade American history, a fourteen-year-old will come to your room at the end of fourth bell today, just before lunch. “I’m pregnant,” she will tell you and together you will talk about choices she is going to have to make. 

A bell will ring again, thirty minutes later, signaling the end of your lunch and hers. Neither of you will have eaten, but you will tell the young lady you are more than happy to talk any time she feels the need.

You are accountable to give counsel to the teen. You are accountable for teaching about the Bill of Rights, the topic for the day.

(The girl, the young man who impregnated her, perhaps their parents, too, are accountable for everything else.)

If you teach Language Arts at the twelfth grade level your plan on this cold January day is to pass back a set of essays on Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other nineteenth century authors, students were assigned to write. These essays took fifteen hours to grade over the weekend. You earned nothing for your extra work. But you don’t begrudge the time.

You will discover, as the day goes by, that ten students have failed to complete the assignment. One boy is a pot smoker. (You don’t know that; but, he is.) Another will admit he stayed up till 4 a. m. twice last week—not to work on his essay—but to play video games. Three who will fail to turn in work have chronic absenteeism issues. After a recent stretch of two weeks’ absence you will learn today that one girl has dropped out. You will think back to a discussion you had in November—when you told her you could see she had college potential. She explained then that her father had lost his job, and her family was losing their home, and she had to look for full-time work to help out.

(You are not accountable for that.)

You don’t have time to worry about arrogant school reformers and idiot politicians. If you teach kindergarten, you will be putting out fires all day, trying to direct two dozen five- and six-year-olds toward a better future. You will be busy helping one boy who recognized neither letters nor numbers when you met him last August.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you are a high school football coach, you spent the fall trying to teach boys what it means to be men. Your season is over and your team went 6-6. This was better than expected, given the broken leg suffered by your first-string quarterback. You are proud to know that you plucked one young man out of gym class, because you saw he was a hard-nosed kid, and convinced him to try out for the squad. All season, he starred on defense and you think he might eventually be able to play at the college level. You know you change lives for the better, just as your colleague teaching kindergarten does.

In cavalier fashion you once heard a school reformer tell reporters, “We now know it is possible to teach every child, even the poorest kids, even from the toughest backgrounds.” 

You know what the reformer said was true. Yet, you understand that “possible” doesn’t mean “easy.” You know the kid with the drunken barber for a mother—or six million kids suffering through abusive situations every year—is going to be harder to reach than the child seated behind him who comes from a loving home.

Seated at your desk this morning, you shake your head. Then the bell rings and a wave of young people floods the room. You smile and another day begins. You are accountable only for doing the very best you can.

An art teacher is accountable for helping students find their own talents.

A Language Arts teacher fosters the love of books. 

A history teacher brings in a World War II veteran to talk about fighting at Okinawa and Leyte Gulf.

2014: The Year Teachers became Public Enemy #1

MOST TEACHERS WERE probably too busy working with kids to notice. But in 2014 we were declared “Public Enemy #1.”

Who so declared? A group of arrogant fools with no idea what it is like to spend a life in the classroom.

Luckily, as the chart below indicates, the general public still has faith in teachers. When it comes to ethics and honesty, elementary teachers rated higher in a 2013 Gallup survey than almost any other profession. (We were not included in a more recent survey in December 2014.) True, we lost to nurses. But we nosed out doctors and military officers.

Members of Congress, state officeholders and lobbyists (who have a stranglehold on education policy) ranked at rock bottom.

The only profession they beat out was witches.

(In 2014 nurses finished first again at 80%. Members of Congress dropped a point and came in dead last.)

WELL, THEN, WHO DECIDED teachers were the Great Satan? Glenn Beck was one. Campbell Brown was another. Frank Bruni, education writer for the New York Times, was a third.

There were plenty of others.

Beck weighed in with his book: Conform: Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education. It wasn’t just Common Core that left Beck fuming. He also railed against extending the school day in hopes of raising test scores. What really made teachers wince, however, was his reasoning:

There’s also the issue of what our kids would learn with even more hours at school. Many of these educators would relish the opportunity to spend more time feeding students a steady stream of radical, anti-American political ideas, encouraging teen sexual activity, and deemphasizing the importance of traditional values and religion.

Former CNN anchor Brown also had a bee-filled bonnet. Leading the charge against teacher tenure, she left listeners with the impression that this was the gravest problem our nation faced, with the possible exception of Ebola.

Again, her “reasoning” was what shocked: 

In New York City, home to the largest public school system in America, the four-year graduation rate hovers at a dismal 60.4 percent. More distressing: Less than 22 percent of the city’s students graduate college and emerge career ready, and the number drops to 12.2 percent for Hispanics and 11.1 percent for African-Americans.

Despite those statistics, a new teachers’ contract celebrated by political and union leaders offers more frustration. The deal will weaken evaluations of teachers, reduce instructional time, send teachers with disciplinary records back to the classroom, and make it harder to fire a teacher who engages in sexual misconduct with kids.

In August the California Supreme Court rendered a decision which may end tenure in the state. First, the judge in Vergara vs. California ruled that students from low income families often had less-qualified teachers and attended schools which were less safe than schools attended by students from high income families. Therefore, the judge added, a more equitable method of assigning good teachers and a quicker way to fire bad ones was essential.

SECRETARY OF EDUCATION Arne Duncan was thrilled. After all, Duncan likes to tell anyone who will listen: “equal opportunities for education must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher.”

Real teachers, struggling to help real kids attending low income schools, might have pointed out that children from low income families also deserved great neighborhoods to live in....

Great pediatricians to keep them healthy....

That the parents deserved great job opportunities....

And that teachers deserved a great Secretary of Education, one not so utterly and consistently clueless....

Who else decided in the last twelve months that teachers were the root of all evil? Thomas J. Kane, a Harvard economist whose research helped decide the Vergara case, “proved” it with numbers. According to Kane, a poor teacher cost the average child something like sixteen bazillion dollars in lifetime earnings.

So, for god sakes, we had to have excellent teachers in every classroom.

Time piled on, too, with an egregious cover story about bad teachers (“Rotten Apples”). If a reader followed the logic of the article, they came away convinced that millions of feloniously-inclined educators were hiding behind tenure protection. Naturally, Time decided to ask former Washington, D. C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee to comment. Just as naturally, Rhee agreed the Vergara decision would fix a “broken status quo.”

Rhee, for those who don’t recognize her by name, appeared on the cover of Time in 2009. There she stood—looking menacing, broom in hand—indicating she had her own plan to fix a broken status quo. She was going to use that broom to clean up the mess in the schools by sweeping out...of course...all the bad teachers!

During her three years as chancellor, Rhee did indeed fire hundreds of educators when they “failed” to raise test scores. Rhee did reward hundreds who raised scores. She then grabbed her broom and skipped town before news of a huge cheating scandal involving “raised” test scores hit the educational fan.

WHO ELSE WAS LEADING the fight to fix education?

Bill Gates, for one, was hard at work behind the scenes. Unlike Beck, Gates was all for Common Core, even though politicians seemed unable to decide if they were for it—or against it—or for it and then against.

Common Core, as you may recall, was adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia four years ago. But in 2014 lawmakers in Alabama and Ohio were hard at work trying to withdraw from the program. In Mississippi the issue turned out to be “politically radioactive” and the governor called it a “failed program,” even though he once touted it. Georgia dropped out, citing the high costs of all the standardized testing. In Louisiana the governor wanted to rescind approval. The legislature wouldn’t let him. Indiana and Oklahoma pulled out entirely, with lawmakers who voted for it four years before leading the repeal effort.

(Teachers could only shake their heads and wonder if these people had any idea what they were doing.)

The New York Times also kicked teachers in the shins on several occasions. Frank Bruni delivered some of the best blows, agreeing that problems in U. S. education pretty much began and ended with poor teachers. After talking with Mike Johnston, former Teach for America star/turned Colorado lawmaker, Bruni had no doubt the Centennial State had acted wisely in eliminating tenure. Because, with tenure, Johnston told Bruni, there was “no incentive for someone to improve their practice.”

Who else agreed that teachers were the problem? Naturally, Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America (who never taught for America or for the Fiji Islands, either), joined in the kicking with gusto. We needed smart people in every classroom, Kopp clamored. We needed people like Rhee and Johnston and everyone else who signed up with Teach for America!

Of course, one problem with this model boiled down to math. Those who signed on agreed to try to save children for two years. (After that: not so much.) Kopp had to admit that of 47,000 men and women enrolled in the last twenty-five years in the program only 11,000 remained in the classroom last September.

AMANDA RIPLEY also weighed in on the subject, delivering a number of speeches in 2014 to august bodies of non-teachers. Ripley specializes in reporting on education, although she has no personal experience in the classroom, except as an avid student. In The Smartest Kids in the World, And How They Got that Way, she first pinpointed the problem in U.S. education in 2013. Finland, she wrote, had smarter teachers. For that reason, Finnish students scored near the very top in international testing assessments.

(See: PISA scores.)

What could we learn by studying the Finnish model? We could learn that American teachers were numbskulls. That’s why American students scored somewhere in the middle on PISA assessments.

Bruni was at it again in the fall, penning a review of another new book on education, this one by Joel I. Klein, former New York City school chancellor. What factor mattered most in “the education equation?” Surprise, surprise: “Teacher quality.” Insisted Klein: “a great teacher can rescue a child from a life of struggle.” 

This is true, of course. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy—and Klein might find that out if he tried teaching.

(Needless to say, he never will.)

Bruni reminded readers that Klein “oversaw the largest public school system in the country and did so for longer than any other New York schools chief in half a century.” “That gives him a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore,” Bruni insisted. Or to put it plainly, anyone interested in education should jump in a car and drive at breakneck speed to the book store and pick up a copy of Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools.

THEN AGAIN: maybe the potential reader should tap the brakes once or twice. Klein devoted eight years to fixing the New York schools and then he decided he’d was finished. (Most of his life he has been a corporate lawyer.) Plus, Campbell Brown said the New York City Schools still sucked, despite all his efforts! So, if you’ve taught nine years, or fifteen, or thirty-one, you can offer valuable insights because you have “a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore.”

Of course, Bruni never bothered to ask veteran teachers what they thought about pretty much anything.

In 2014, that was all too typical.

With the year drawing to a close, Campbell Brown journeyed to Washington to speak at the convention for the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Without noticing the irony, the Foundation later reported: “At the nation’s premier annual education forum, lawmakers and policymakers were immersed in two days of in-depth discussions on proven policies and innovative strategies to improve student achievement.”

Two measly days. Two measly days—and they knew everything.

So it was, last year, that teachers were labeled “Public Enemy #1” by those who knew nothing about what it meant to work in a classroom.

THESE FOOLS TALKED and talked and talked about what had to be done to save every child. Meanwhile, they left all the saving to real teachers.

***

If you liked this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon.

Corporate Public Schools! It's Going to be Great!

Last week I visited the first completely corporate public school system in the country. For years, corporate crusaders have been claiming that breaking the “public school monopoly” and bringing business efficiency to education will only improve results.

So it was that I found myself seated in the office of the superintendent of the Enron City Schools in Enron, Texas.

Glancing out a window, I couldn’t help but notice three oil wells pumping on the front lawn of the administration building.

The superintendent, Henry Clay Frick, explained. “Here in Enron, we believe business principles applied to education will always bring good. So we have a lucrative deal with British Petroleum to pump oil from under the schools.

“Yeah, what could go wrong with that,” I replied, faking a smile.

Frick wondered if I might like a tour and led the way out to the parking lot and we jumped in his Lamborghini. I asked how an administrator could afford such a beautiful automobile. He admitted corporate education was different. First, there were no pesky unions demanding raises or fringe benefits for teachers. “In Enron, we pay for talent,” he explained. “Our top executives earn more because, frankly, they work harder.”

When I asked how much more, Frick said his district copied the K-12 Inc. model, a successful for-profit charter school chain. “Our eight top executives earn a combined $21.37 million,”

I do some quick calculating. If the average Texas teacher earns $50,179, then administrators made as much as 426 classroom teachers.

“It’s not easy running an efficient corporate school system,” Frick claimed as we pulled up in front of the high school. “We need money to lobby politicians, so sometimes we have to cut costs in other ways. Luckily, almost all our money comes from state coffers, so when we pay lobbyists, taxpayers foot the bill.”

“How much do you budget for lobbying?”

“We’re not quite where we need to be,” Frick replied. “We’re competing with for-profit charter operators like David Brennan, who runs White Hat Schools in Ohio, and who hopes to expand into every state. In the last eight years he’s donated $3.8 million to fifty-one politicians.”

Moments later, we enter the building. Admittedly, Enron High is neat and clean. The janitor sweeping the hall is obviously a “special needs” individual.

“We in Enron are committed to helping those who require a hand up, not a handout,” Frick says, following my gaze. “All our janitors are severely handicapped—supplied to us by Henry’s Turkey Service.”

“Aren’t they the guys that shipped disabled workers to Iowa for thirty years to work in meat packing plants?”

“Exactly,” Frick agreed. “And we use their system. We house our janitors in a bunkhouse behind the school. We charge rent, charge for meals….”

“How much do they earn when you subtract for food and lodging?”

“Oh, I would estimate about the same as the Iowa workers,” Frick says. “Around forty cents an hour.”

We head down the hall. Stopping a moment, I listen as an American history class goes over material that is expected to be on the next round of standardized tests. There are probably a hundred students crammed into the room. Frick is happy to explain. “Pack ‘em in, we say here in Enron. It’s the same as the airlines. “We even charge a $50 fee if students want to bring book bags to class.”

I offer a wan smile.

I notice a plaque over the door of the history room. It turns out the school copies the business model of the San Francisco 49ers. That means selling naming rights to everything you might imagine. This class meets in the Axe Body Wash Room. There’s also the Reynolds Tobacco Media Center and the Flo-Max Faculty Men’s Restroom. (Frick says later the school is thinking about requiring students to wear uniforms, and he is working hard on an exclusive contract with the Abercrombie and Fitch people.)

Frick soon asks if I would like to tour any of his other schools, and fifteen minutes later we pull up in front of Lehman Brothers Elementary School, I notice a maintenance worker resting a moment beside a lawn tractor. I stop to ask what he most enjoys about working for Enron Schools. He stares at me blankly.

“Oh, that’s Juan,” Frick nudges me. “We need to make a profit, you know. Don’t say I told you, but we hire all kinds of undocumented workers. Man, if you pay them under the table, those guys work cheap!”

“We’re just like the Gulen chain of charter schools,” Frick adds with a laugh. This time, I don’t even try to fake a smile.

As you tour the Enron Schools, you have to be impressed. A stop in the cafeteria at lunch reveals another truth. Junk food = big money. Students may no longer bring food from home. It’s like going to a movie theater. You can order a large Coke for $4.50. (It looks like they’re handing you a bucket.) Or maybe you’d like the special: hamburgers—only $3.50. Frick winks as we go through the line and advises me to skip the burgers.

(He admits later that the meat came from a company that was perhaps bending a few regulations and selling meat from diseased cows.)

Our last stop for the day takes us to Michael Milken Middle School. Frick is proud of the new system and outlines a few of the ways a profit can be squeezed when it comes to students. Each school has an office set aside for a representative of Pearson, the successful maker of standardized tests. Huge piles of cash are there to be grabbed—so one business scratches the back of another—and Pearson sends state education commissioners and Enron leaders to cool education conferences in places like Rio de Janeiro. And what do you know! Pearson now holds the contract to supply more and more tests to Texas schools.

“There’s some huge money right there,” Frick grins. “The Pearson contract is worth $468 million per year.”

Time is growing short, so we hurry along. I see barrels of toxic chemicals stacked in a corner of the art room. Safety costs money. So Enron cuts corners when it must. To cover their tracks they copy the Massey Energy model, meaning there are two sets of safety books, one for company use and the other to dupe inspectors. True: occasionally a few people get blown to bits, but what’s a corporate school supposed to do? Not make gigantic profits?

“We’ve pretty much monetized everything,” Frick says as we finally head back to his office. “If parents can’t pay fees or afford school supplies, we encourage them to take out payday loans. I’m proud to say we’ve copied First Premier Bank of South Dakota when it comes to lunch charges. We allow families to open accounts but cap charge limits at $300. They pay $95 to create the account and a $75 annual service fee.”

“So...you’d be looking at an APR of…67%?”

“We’ve also adopted the discipline system of the Noble Charter Schools up in Chicago,” Frick says, changing the subject. “We charge students who get into trouble for ‘discipline packets.’ What a corporate business model! Noble pulled down $188,000 in discipline fines and fees in just one school year.

“You probably noticed how few discipline problems we have, too,” Frick continued. “We’ve been following the Jansen Pharmaceutical Model. If our nurse thinks a child has behavioral issues she makes sure that child is given a prescription for anti-psychotic drugs. 

“Man, sales are up!”

“Isn’t there evidence some of these drugs have dangerous side effects and that children may die as a result?”

I think Frick suddenly realizes I may be some sort of commie agitator. “Jansen keeps only the finest doctors (and our school nurse) on its payroll and those doctors issue reports to show that these drugs are completely safe,” he says defensively. “And, naturally, our well-compensated school nurse agrees. Just because some Arkansas court fined Jansen $1.2 billion dollars for lying….”

Frick’s voice trails off. I glance at my watch and see it’s really time to go. I thank him for his time and ask one final question.

“Is there any way you think you can still improve profit margins in the Enron City Schools?”

He puzzles over the matter a moment. “If only we could copy the cost-cutting methods of Apple Inc., which operates a number of factories in China.”

“You mean,” I grimace, “violating overtime rules, child labor, workers penned in behind barbed wire….”

“Child labor...if only,” Frick says wistfully. This time he doesn’t smile. “You want cheaper iPads—or cheaper education—you have to make tough decisions.” He gets a faraway look and I hear him mutter, “There must be a way to outsource jobs in American education….”

I bid a goodbye and soon find myself driving north on Interstate-35, back toward Cincinnati, Ohio. “I have seen the future of corporate education,” I tell myself, paraphrasing Lincoln Steffens. “And it works.”

Really, this is going to be great.

Logo for the Enron Public Schools: Endless possibilities...for profiting!