School Presents a Clear and Present Danger to Your Child's Physical and Emotional Well-Being
It's not a question of if your child will be harmed at school but when. The question is why American parents are putting up with it.
This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American government schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something American public schools no longer provide, if they every did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in government-run schools in California.
The typical American parent sees public school as a resource. Parents are a child’s primary educator; it is our right, privilege, and obligation to inscribe values, morals, and character on the hearts of our children. The primacy of feeding, clothing, and sheltering them notwithstanding, these three responsibilities form the bulk of the mental and emotional labor of parenting. We send our children off to school so that professional teachers of content can play a supporting role in helping our children develop the academic skills, cultural literacy, and scientific knowledge that will help them succeed — a necessary part of educating the whole child.
But just a part.
Over the last ten years of my teaching career, I’ve watched three school districts, incentivized by the state, increasingly encroach on parents’ territory. This encroachment comes from people who have no stake in the long-term success and happiness of your child.
This tendency is now policy. It is pronounced and aggressive. There are hundreds of examples across our country of teachers using their classroom authority and the hours they spend with our children to instruct them in matters of sexuality, self-perception, and personal beliefs.
Grooming as Policy
When I became a teacher, I wasn’t qualified to also act as counselor, psychologist, or parent. Education school was laughably inadequate preparation for the typical rigors of an American classroom, let alone vocations where the training takes YEARS and you’re not really good at the job until you’ve had a raft of experience, not to mention significant training in ethics pertaining to the treatment of the human mind.
Yet, increasingly, I am asked to gauge students’ emotional health. I am asked to try to ferret out their feelings about race and ethnicity, their own and others’. I am asked to help kids determine their sexuality and/or affirm their gender. I am asked to discover moral attitudes and challenge them until they match the narrative du jour.
Given the discipline of my bachelor’s and master’s degrees and adding in the hoop-jumping year of teacher education, I have not qualified as a counselor or a psychologist. While I am a parent, I lack adequate personal knowledge to address your child’s emotional health. If I touch on it, I become a barrier between a child and his family. It is profoundly unethical for a person trusted by a family to perform skilled work in one area to interject herself in a familial relationship.
Let me put this very plainly.
If what I tell a kid goes against what he’s taught at home, and I use my authority as a teacher and/or the coercive nature of grading to get the kid to toe the line, that’s grooming. Whether we’re talking about moral beliefs, ethical positions, political stances or a child’s emotional and physical health, I have no business interjecting my ideas. The state has given itself that power through legislation, and forced the actual commission of the act on school employees.
Laws made by the state legislature of California require keeping parents in the dark.
There are currently laws on the books which enable a student to miss class(es) to go to medical appointments without his parents’ knowledge. The law requires the school to hide the absence from parents under the auspices of confidentiality.
Another law prohibits insurance companies from sending Explanation of Benefits notices to parents of children who use their parents’ insurance for medical care without parental knowledge or consent.
This interposition of the state in family business is frightening. Wouldn’t you want to know if your daughter was seeking psychological treatment? Wouldn’t you want to know if your son was considering hormone blockers? Wouldn’t you want to be part of any medical intervention decision when a minor — who we’ve historically recognized are not capable of informed consent — is making possibly life-altering medical decisions?
Beyond wanting to know, aren’t you responsible for the well-being of your child? Isn’t this your moral obligation? Not just for one year, but for 18 and, in so many cases now given the state of our culture and economy, longer?
Why are school administrators, teachers, and staff who barely know your boy, who don’t know his medical history, don’t know his psychological history, don’t know family dynamics, and certainly aren’t going to be part of his life forever, attempting to influence a decision-making process that could have lasting physical, emotional, and psychological effects?
How grandiose of education bureaucrats and legislators to force teachers and counselors to empower a minor to make a life-altering decision without any input from the people who will carry any fallout from such a decision. This is an act stunning in its hubris and contempt.
Then there are those adults within the system who are happy to hide interventions from parents so that they can satisfy a social or personal agenda. That is a criminal act. It’s called child endangerment.
Parents call that grooming too.
But let me take a step back here. Although I had three children inform me this year that they had chosen names and a gender other than what appeared on the class roster, students taking actions permitted by the laws mentioned above are rare, @LibsofTikTok notwithstanding.
Sadly, what’s common is actual sexual abuse of children at school. A comprehensive 2004 report produced for the federal Department of Education published the startling finding that “9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 to 11 report contact and/or non-contact educator sexual misconduct that was unwanted, 8.7 percent report only non-contact sexual misconduct and 6.7 percent experienced only contact misconduct. (These total to more than 9.6 percent because some students reported both types of misconduct.) Of students who experienced any kind of sexual misconduct in schools, 21 percent were targets of educators, while the remaining 79 percent were targets of other students.”
I can hear you now, thinking, well, most abuse is coming from other kids, not the teachers. Fair point, but just keep in mind that a 1 in 10 chance is not a small one. The stories are everywhere if you look.
Then there’s the problem of sexual misconduct perpetrated by other students.
In high school, there’s a four-year spread and enormous differences in size (and influence) between freshmen and seniors.
Would you send your kid to intern in an office knowing there was a high likelihood someone bigger and with more status would sexually harass her? My guess is no, unless you knew she had plenty of other options and could walk out of the building scot-free at any time, and that her leaving wouldn’t cost her some excellent opportunity at the end of the internship, and that you could bring the weight of the law against anyone who laid a finger on her.
Schools have strong incentives to sweep misconduct under the rug. “The attacks AP tracked ranged from rape and sodomy to forced oral sex and fondling. Assaults occurred anywhere students were left unsupervised: buses and bathrooms, hallways and locker rooms. No type of school was immune, whether it be in a wealthy suburb, inner city or farm town. And all types of children were targeted.” (Note: the AP report cited above is not for the faint of heart.)
So if your child happens to be one of the unfortunate kids who experience sexual abuse at school, the odds that the school will do anything about it are small. Given the incentives under which school operates, there’s reason to suspect you’ll never even find out about it.
Violence, Bullying and Public Humiliation
When you see schools mounting near-universal anti-bullying programs despite the many reasons they have to hide such events, you know the problem is rampant. Your child sees them every day. She is likely to experience all three at some point in school.
Physical violence is a reality on every high school campus, regardless of how “good” your school is. Like rats in a cage, if you lock children in a room without any engaging activity to confront and add all the stressors of modern schooling, a statistically significant number of them will act out. It’s one of the few ways they can take agency.
This year, our top-ranked school site had fights on campus on a weekly basis. Some months, we saw fights weekly. Kids who committed acts of violence were known to administration and to the student body. A parent of a poor, but high-performing transfer student from a much worse school the next town over shared her concerns that our “fancy” school was just as “ghetto” as the school from which she’d pulled her daughter.
Two of my students were caught multiple times fighting. They were suspended from their normal classes as a consequence, but remained on campus. The other children knew they were present at school. What message does that send? Get in a fight and you don’t have to go to class, but we’ll give you food to eat and your parents won’t be inconvenienced with your suspension. Oh, and you get street cred for your physical toughness. I fail to see how this punishment disincentivizes anyone from fighting, which explains why physical altercations have been rampant.
Eventually, both of my students were officially transferred. However, both remained on my roster through the end of the year so the school could continue collecting the daily funding for both of them. Meanwhile, both kids enjoyed a significantly decreased workload, as requested by the teacher assigned to support them while they were “out”.
And we haven’t even begun speaking about the fights which were sparked at school but resumed later at an off-campus location where security couldn’t intervene. Those fights ended up on TikTok where classmates and thousands of other American school kids watched, some in admiration and others in fear, wondering when it would be their turn.
Bullying is more pervasive than physical violence, especially given the rise of social media. Teachers and administrators are powerless to stop it. Boys experience this, but it’s much more prevalent among girls. It can start for any reason, but once two girls decide not to get along, things can get nasty in a hurry. If your daughter has a smart phone and is glued to her social media feeds, there’s no escape for her. Often, two girls will get their friends to pile on after-hours in a verbal war of attrition that may not result in violence, but definitely makes it impossible for your daughter to come to school without intense feelings of fear or anger, both of which shut down her brain’s frontal cortex, effectively preventing her from learning anything in class.
In my experience, girls glued to their phones rarely produce good work; they’re too distracted. Unless their parents limit phone access at night, they’re also too exhausted to focus in class. When students are visibly tired in my class, I usually ask about what time they went to sleep. It’s not uncommon to hear a 14-year-old tell me she was up until 3 a.m. scrolling and texting.
This year, one of the most beautiful young women in our school was in my class. Toward the end of the school year, I was just inside the door, greeting students as they arrived at class. As this student neared the door, I caught the tail-end of her conversation, delivered with a level of menace I’d never heard in any female student in my 20-year career. She said, brutally, “…that f***ing rat-faced c*nt.”
This girl is the child of two very accomplished, esteemed, highly-educated parents. Her phone might as well have been surgically attached to her, it was in her hand so often. I had a formal meeting with her mother at her mother’s request earlier in the year. The meeting went well, but didn’t seem to impact her performance. This child missed at least one class a week. Sometimes she missed weeks at a time. She was late every day, despite my class being the second of the day; she was absent for almost a third of her first-period class meetings. Every day was a constant fight to get her to put her phone away.
You would think a school would simply outlaw cell phones at school. The benefits of such a policy to minimize distractions, prevent bullying, and maintain discipline cannot be overstated. Yet the schools refuse to do it, usually falling back on the excuse that the parents don’t like it. The cell phone becomes a battleground in every classroom. The easiest way to deal with it is to ignore it and let our strongly encouraged policy of grade inflation make up for the problems created by a culture of screen-addicted kids.
Back to this physically beautiful young lady. She continued to miss a lot of class. I found out later that she was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder which was, no doubt, compounded by her late nights and social media consumption. She stopped coming to school in May; her friends told me she will attend a hybrid micro-school next year.
I’m glad for her.
Things are a little different for young men. Frustrated, fearful boys who don’t act out physically often sink into video games and the Discord chats that go with them. There they are the hero of the story, their avatars fearless and powerful. They often play into the wee hours of the morning, talking to mostly harmless strangers along the way. At school, a gamer’s unsociability makes him less of a target, but also renders him mentally absent and often socially isolated. It’s easier to hop on Discord and talk to someone who wants to play than do the work of earning and maintaining friendships. As a consequence, the schoolwork gamers turn in is often significantly worse than the average social media-addicted girl’s. That has a lot to do with the way school structures favor girls propensity to remain seated and prioritize social relationships over productive physical activity. Boys recognize and resent this ossified favoritism which, again, makes them less likely to learn.
The number of boys slavishly dedicated to gaming this year was significant. Some of them were able to earn a passing grade. Quite a few were not.
Given such habits and their effects on learning, your kid also runs the real risk of public humiliation at the hands of a teacher. I’d love to believe humiliation happens rarely. Unfortunately, I doubt it. Many of my colleagues take pride in being “tough” and publicly shaming kids who don’t have homework, supplies, or anything to contribute to a class discussion. This is supposed to serve as a lesson to other students. Teachers see it as minor when they make a dismissive comment about a less-than-stellar on-demand answer from a student. But for an already fragile kid trying to stay under the radar, teacher snark is another fear-generating and isolating event that subverts the efforts of the frontal cortex to hold on to information.
Then there are the teachers who verbally abuse kids. Some stories I’ve heard directly from colleagues would make your head spin. When it happens, these teachers are savvy enough to save their cruelty for a one-on-one conversation. Both parties know when it’s the teacher’s word against the student’s, the teacher will win. Even if your child is brave enough to tell you and you’re willing to take it to the principal, it’s doubtful the teacher will face a consequence, but your child will almost certainly experience the ramifications of relating the incident to you. On multiple occasions, students have come to me privately to ask for advice in dealing with an abusive teacher. My standard advice is to tell them to talk to their parents and ask their parent to advocate for them. This almost never happens. Students can war-game what happens when a fired-up parent shows up in the principal’s office. Regardless of what the principal says to soothe you, your kid will face the consequences, not the teacher. Too often, parents justify the abuse; they tell their children that mistreatment by someone with power is a fact of life they must learn to accept.
Color me idealistic, but I don’t think Stockholm Syndrome in our nation’s children is something we should subsidize.
Periodically, a school shooting reminds us how vulnerable children are in public schools, but we rationalize sending our children back every day because the odds of a deadly safety failure happening in any one school on any given day are infinitesimal.
However, your safety evaluation likely discounts the real, pervasive, cumulative harms inflicted on your child at school, all of which impact her learning and rob her of years of her life. They’re mostly not mortal wounds — although suicide rates are way up among children in high-pressure school cultures — but when you are injured repeatedly over time, you will be scarred.
If your child is being harmed in school and is not learning as a result, why would you force her to go back every day?
Consider the possibility that she could be as or more productive in a different setting, one that is healthy and sane and is overseen by someone who loves her: you.
If our job as parents and as a society is to protect our children to ensure the future, we must recognize the harm that’s part and parcel of the system. It’s time to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American government schooling, one family at a time.
The Dissident Teacher is an actual classroom teacher, and the stories shared by DT here are true. Ask any California kid in a PreK-12 California public school; he’ll tell you.