It Takes a Village
Your child is a solitary Indian in an institution with thousands of chiefs and you, dear Parent, aren’t one of them. How can you make the chiefs listen? Read on.
There was a teacher in the English department at my last conventional high school that spent a significant part of the school year pushing the narrative that whites are inherently racist at a school that is mostly white and upper-middle class.
The parents in the community were shocked he was kept on staff despite numerous complaints lodged against him, especially since he was a probationary teacher and could have easily been dismissed for cause.
As luck would have it, a child of one of the most vocal parents was assigned to his class at the beginning of my last year teaching there. The parent called the teacher directly before the school year began to let him know upfront that he would be keeping a close watch on all the class assignments and would be in touch with him and the principal if he felt the course was veering away from the District-prescribed curriculum.
How do I know all of this? Because this teacher told me and a handful of other teachers in an unofficial department meeting that happened in the hallway. A parent questioning the school system and attempting to oversee his child’s education directly clearly troubled this teacher. He told us he was sharing the conversation after talking to our department chair, who wanted the story told to let us know we all should keep a low profile for the year because we wanted to make sure the teacher was able to remain on staff to secure tenure and thus remain part of the English department in perpetuity.
As we stood in that busy hallway, I listened to a round-robin of narratives about “crazy” parents who dared question the judgment of classroom teachers. My personal favorite concerned a particular parent who inspired deep derision from multiple staff members. He was called “nuts”, “abusive”, “insane”, and “ignorant”.
While I don’t know this man personally, I know his name. He’s a highly successful member of the local community, is well-known throughout the state, and has a place on the national stage.
So here you have a group of bachelor’s degree holders in soft disciplines from second-tier state universities who are paid as though they are interchangeable cogs (because to the system, they are), openly mocking a man who is known for his professional success, commitment to the community and who, for reasons unknown, has enough faith in the public school system to trust his children to it.
To handle parents like this — those who foolishly think they should have some say in the education of their children — one veteran teacher offered the following advice: delay responses to any communication until the parent reaches out a second or third time. If forced to respond, do so in one- to two-sentence emails that fail to address the parent’s concern. Whenever possible, blame the child for misunderstanding the intent of your words and/or assignment.
Teachers have authority that is rarely challenged in their day-to-day lives. Students understand that grades are subjective and often arbitrary, so high-performing students are careful not to voice dissent in the classroom.
Ever.
Parents who expect their child to go to a top-tier university or who are competing for college scholarships often take the same tack, excusing flagrant bias in the classroom by telling their child, “You have to learn to work with people you don’t like.” Ths implications of this totally undermine an adolescent’s education.
When adults ignore indoctrination, we teach our kids that truth is less important than their comfort. “Easy” becomes the default position.
This is the death knell of a Republic.
Additionally, teachers have no reason to question their own beliefs or how they present them in the classroom. They don’t have to compete for clients; they automatically receive them every year. There is no accountability, at least in California, for student growth over the course of the school year. The only data that matters are pass/graduation rates, but a teacher has direct control over those. Given the push to implement Equitable Grading practices, Ds and Fs are becoming a thing of the past in public schools across the nation, even though test scores continue to reveal a sever decline in actual knowledge and skill among the nation’s children, especially those who are growing up in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. Further, Congress made it illegal to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers using growth rates from the National or State tests all students take annually, so even though the data to determine teacher effectiveness exists, it is never used to ensure the long-term academic success of American students.
In my mind this begs several questions all American parents and grandparents should consider, if not ask their local school administration in an open meeting, such as the growing “Coffee with the Principal” monthly outreach events:
How can we trust that teachers have students’ best interests at heart when they are free to dismiss input from the parents who have the most at stake in a child’s education?
Transparency of curricular and assessment materials seems like a good idea that would protect teachers from “crazy” parents, so why is the school District leadership fighting FOIA requests and the Teachers’ Union fighting laws that would publish all teaching materials for community review?
Are tenure laws serving our students by protecting unpopular speech that kids need to hear or are they serving the schools by giving leadership the cover to say, “We can have a conversation with Mr. Smith, but there’s really not much more we can do about him”?
The answers, or non-answers, you receive should inform your decision-making around the future of your child’s education.
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.
Sorry about the typo, readers. Heck, I forgot that I had scheduled to post this and thought for a moment that my Substack had been hacked. Getting old is annoying, unless you have a paranoid bent, then it's hilarious.