Kind, Not Nice: A Playbook for Parents Dealing with Activist Teachers in a Broken System

Stop being nice to school staff; be kind to the person that matters most: YOUR KID.

There’s a horrible parent at my site. He’s abusive, grandiose, and has claimed to be a lawyer, a teacher, and a physician (among several other high-powered professions) to intimidate administration, faculty, and staff. His child, taking a leaf from his book, is comfortable telling off adults in positions of authority.

This parent puts his kid first — school officials be damned.

Look, I won’t lie. I think this dude is nuts. He’s a jerk. He goes about things the wrong way — but he gets his way. He gets his way and his kid gets tiptoed around. He has burned more of admin’s time than my state’s red tape. They hate the sight of him, but they won’t ignore him because they’re terrified of him.

There have been versions of him in every barely functional public school where I’ve taught over the last 20 years. As a parent, I want more parents just like him.

All you nice parents, parents who want to work with the system, parents who schedule meetings at the teacher’s convenience, parents who say your piece in the principal’s office and then leave, who write emails to which the response is slow, vague, patronizing or, worse, nonexistent: I need you to take a leaf out of this guy’s book, yesterday. I need you to think of your kin first — to be kind, and forget about being nice. Nice is just avoidance of conflict with people who don’t really matter to us and who we’ll never see again once our kid is up and out. Kind embraces conflict, because kindness is about true, deep love — the love of those we’ve embraced in kinship.

I get it. You don’t need the additional stress in your life. Things are very, very tough. I promise not to rant about the Federal Reserve, but with so many feeling stuck in the two-income family trap with all its stressors, parenting is unbelievably hard now. We live in an environment with a million vectors for attack on anything resembling family values, so trying to teach your child to be a decent — let alone virtuous — human being is exhausting, but this is your kid we’re talking about.

If you’re reading this, you’re concerned about the direction of schools and society and, presumably, you’d like to have a relationship long into the future with all of your children. That means you have to protect them from the disastrous unmoored ideology pervading public schools now.

I’ll say this first: there’s no way to fully protect them if you continue to send them in to public schools daily. Even if you take one of the tacks I suggest in my next few essays, your kid is going to be exposed to all kinds of trash. Good on you if you’ve built such strong family relationships over the years that your children embrace your beliefs and reject the rubbish takes society is pushing on them. But as a teacher, I must tell you that even if your family’s values are deeply engrained on your kids’ hearts and minds, you’re sending them to a place where 7-8 hours a day, those beliefs will be challenged, where the first lesson is that everything’s much, much easier for those who play along, and where they will be powerfully incentivized to keep you in the dark about all of it. I’m not just talking about challenges to your family’s religious convictions, values, or ethics: I’m talking about the systematic undermining of hard-won character traits integral to human success: discipline, perseverance, risk-taking, curiosity and creativity, and integrity. School isn’t just a waste of time, it actively creates habits in your kids that work against their long-term happiness.

The first, best option in my mind is to homeschool. The reason is simple: NO teacher cares more about your kid than you do. Most importantly, the difficulty and cost of homeschooling has come way down. With top-notch homeschool programs like the Well-Trained Mind Academy, free curriculum produced by E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation, free support in every subject via Khan Academy, and the lectures, interviews and even entire college courses available for free on YouTube, the explicit cost to access a better education than the one your kid would get at her local public school nears zero. For you, the costs in time are higher, but for her, the costs are lower. And isn’t that what parenting is all about?

With a library card and the internet, you can out-educate the school — at least for your kids. And for any of you who feel like this is beyond your ability, my DMs are open. I, and people like me, want to help you.

If you can’t homeschool (yet), let’s talk about ways you can push back and increase the costs of people who think they can indoctrinate your kid with impunity, but first: The Talk.

The Talk

You need to have “The Talk” with your kid. Pronto.

In the rough schools where I taught for 13 years, there was a very common attitude among teachers when it came to students. At some point in the year they would say, “Respect isn’t automatic; it’s earned.” Sit your kid down and tell her that rule applies to her teachers too.

At some point in the last two weeks, I listened to two Rogan podcasts: Steven Wright, who’s hilarious, and Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who’s controversial. At some point in one of those two podcasts (I’m not going back and listening to six hours to double-check which it was or I’ll NEVER publish this), Rogan said something darkly brilliant. The gist of it was this: the only reason left to send your kid to school is to teach them that the people in charge are idiots.

I’m calling this the Rogan Rationale.

While I think his statement was more global, referring to the entire government apparat, your 11-18 year olds need to know that while they should behave for the sake of the learning environment (i.e., the other kids in the class), teachers should not be seen as an authority on anything until they establish their expertise. Many kids confuse power for authority, largely because they’re trained from early on that the easiest way to get a reward (i.e., a good grade) is to uncritically repeat whatever the teacher says.

Teachers have to control the classroom, but they don’t have to be subject matter experts. They’re given curriculum to teach, but that doesn’t mean they have deep knowledge of it. They assign reading to students, but that doesn’t mean they’ve read it themselves. Remember: Teachers too have been conditioned that if they do as they’re told, they’ll get their reward: a paycheck, perqs, and pension. Many teachers have deep insecurities around their professional competence, but they also fear that with a soft major, their odds of securing an equally lucrative, 185-day-a-year job in the private sector are near zero. Your typical mid-career teacher has kids and a mortgage, so even if they see and hate the corruption in the system, they’re chained to it.

It’s crucial that you explain that while some teachers strive to provide a real education to their students, the incentives built into the system mean that most people employed in public education don’t have to be great instructors or deeply knowledgeable — they just have to show up and prevent headaches from moving up the chain of command to administration. Once public school teachers qualify for tenure they’re nearly impossible to fire. Thus, they have little incentive to continue to improve in skill or knowledge. In the districts where I’ve worked, I was granted tenure on the first day of my third year of teaching. Coincidentally, within two years, most single-subject (middle school and high school, usually) teachers have lesson plans worked out for all 180 days of instruction. They can just put it all on loop for the next 28 years and, as long as they reliably show up every day and keep the kids from hurting each other, none of their supervisors will bother them.

Most people know a teacher. You’ve heard us complain. Please listen, for the sake of your child. Regardless of what you think of that teacher, keep in mind that she has been shaped by years and years of operant conditioning and steadily declining standards for students. Many of us talk like we’re crusaders, but American literacy levels and content area test scores tell a different story. Please teach your child to have sympathy and maintain decorum, even if a teacher never earns her respect.

Teachers are victims of the system too. Nearly all go into teaching thinking they’re going to really help kids, only to be stymied by a system that doesn’t measure learning, that demands (and can manufacture) high graduation rates. The system doesn’t offer any effective support to teachers struggling to manage student behavior. The incentives handed down from federal and state Departments of Education have made it nearly impossible to remove disruptive or dangerous students from class. Districts are increasingly putting electronic devices in every kid’s hands then telling teachers they can try to control what sites 30+ kids visit or they can just let the kids freely roam the internet and lean into grading for equity policies (work accepted at any time, no zeroes, minimized reading, unlimited test retakes, passing a student if any skill is shown regardless of how/when they show it, etc.) to make sure every kid passes. The electronic babysitter makes the day-to-day much easier for a teacher and, importantly, for administrators.

The Talk is really just two simple words: incentives matter. Make sure you explain how this works in schools so your child understands why mom and dad are going to take a much more active role in her education, regardless of how you decide to go about it.

The Playbook

Now that you’ve had The Talk and explained The Rogan Rationale to your child, it’s time to choose a strategy. In the following posts, I’ll line out options you can use to prevent some of the harms your local public school can inflict on your kid.

All of these plays won’t work. It depends on the teacher, the site, and your intestinal fortitude. But I know the ins and outs of this system. I know the pressure points for most administrators and most teachers.

Over the next four posts, I’ll offer four strategies you can use to exploit the weaknesses in the system and, hopefully, immunize your kid against the mind viruses infecting millions of schoolchildren. The more parents take action, the more painful it will be for the useful idiots in charge to continue these inane, harmful policies. The people working for the system are the chinks in the armor. Many of them don’t even believe in this foolishness; they just want the paycheck. As advocates of nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King and Gandhi understood that change happens at the margin, so they pushed where the system was weakest, and the people running it are every system’s Achilles heel.

Get after ‘em, but make it an adventure. As Mary Poppins taught us, “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and - SNAP - the job’s a game.” Let’s have some fun, shall we?

1. Honest Abe

2. The Sisyphus Gambit

3. Mockingbird

4. Branson

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If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the like button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse things have become since they were in school. The system is actively robbing American children of their full potential to serve mediocre adults and maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.