On Good Authority

Authority figures in American public schools have abandoned their responsibilities to evade accountability. As usual, your child pays the price.

All teachers used to be authorities. If you’ve read Anne of Green Gables or seen movies like To Sir, With Love or had an effective teacher, you know that great teachers understood the source of authority: deep knowledge and care. That care wasn’t always soft and cuddly, but if it was there, students saw and trusted it. Until very recently, it was accepted as fundamental that people in schools were authorities: teachers knew what they’re talking about and principals supported teachers in holding students accountable for listening, processing, and retaining knowledge.

Unfortunately, authority is now widely reviled. The never-ending revolutions in K12 instruction actively subvert it. Authority is seen as unnecessary if not detrimental in modern schools. Teachers are “guides on the side” as students undertake a learning journey through disconnected slide decks and worksheets.

The only people in schools with any gravitas and the will to wield it effectively are mean girls and violent bullies. Teachers are irrelevant, principals are invisible, principles nonexistent.

Rules? What rules?

If you follow any teachers on X or Instagram or are Facebook friends, you’ve heard about the total lack of discipline in schools. Troublemakers are treated to zen breaks in dedicated Peace Rooms instead of detention in the cafeteria. They’re given junk food in the counseling office rather than trash duty in the quad. The people in charge beg the worst kids to be good, placing all the power in the school in the hands of the minors inclined to abuse it. Well-behaved kids watch in horror as administrators further incentivize the worst kids in school to continue mass-scale abuse of their peers.

I’ve seen administrators evacuate classes, ceding a room and all its equipment to a tantrum-throwing adolescent while his classmates cool their heels outside, their lesson delayed, possibly forever. In too many classes, disruptive behavior forces the teacher to frequently stop and restart lessons, leaving students struggling to hold together frayed threads of a complex lesson. In the worst cases, the teacher doesn’t ever bother with whole class instruction, she just posts an assignment on the board or on Canva or Google Slides, stations herself at her desk in the back of the room, and tells the kids they can come see her if they need support. Weeks if not months of a child’s time are wasted in public schools where teachers and administrators lack authority.

In an English class, it stinks. In a history class—well, she didn’t really need to know about the mid- to late-20th century, right? In a math class? Good thing we’re grading for equity.

So what happened? Have teachers just become unbelievably soft?

Nope. They’re rational creatures responding to incentives.

The failure belongs largely to the so-called leaders in a system doing their best to salary-max while simultaneously avoiding any accountability for student outcomes.

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How did we get here? Who was the first troglodyte that forgot millions of years of human evolution and decided that authority should be the only unmet need of children?

Some public commentators blame the schools of education. They claim young, left-leaning teachers in education programs center justice over learning; that they believe emotional intelligence trumps knowledge and skill; and that a teacher’s willingness to “meet students where they are” will eliminate bad behavior.

Hogwash.

No teacher with any time on the job in a real school buys any of that Shinola. Leftie teachers may not admit it on X, but damn well everyone knows the score. No matter how much an education major loved Paolo Freire in grad school, a newly-minted teacher in the typical no-authority school will be screaming bloody murder for a return to out-of-school suspensions and expulsions by the end of the third quarter of her first year.

Anybody who isn’t an aspiring Ed.D., i.e., a wannabe “school leader”, that is.

The modern K12 principal is a contradiction in terms. Principals have few principles and show zero instructional leadership. She certainly does not take principal responsibility for student outcomes. Principals believe only in The Prince, and only the part where the ends justify the means, and the only ends she prizes are the ones where she has gets more pay and less accountability. She doesn’t want authority, she wants power with plausible deniability.

Schools now tout “student-centered” education, a neat little sleight of hand. If the students are in charge of their learning, how could anyone in leadership be held responsible when kids learn nothing? It’s the student’s journey, after all. Who are we to tell them which way to go? If they go backward, well, it’s all part of the process.

Here’s what I know. The principals I worked with who held students, parents, and teachers accountable were always and only Assistant Principals. They lived a life of quiet desperation, trapped by their scruples, unwilling to bend to the hidden incentives of the K12 system.

These few good men made too much money to drop back into the classroom (beware lifestyle creep!), but weren’t ideologically pure enough to snag the brass ring in the District Office. They were frustrated to the point of disgust. Only one I knew escaped bitterness; the faculty marveled at his stoicism in the face of the raw deal he got from the muckety-mucks higher up. I’ve known dozens of principals and assistant principals in my 20-year career and can count the good ones on one hand. One retired. A few are involuntarily transferred from school to school year after year because the District honchos lack the ammo to fire them, but want them to leave. The rest are dead.

How do the people at the very top get middle management to upend the proper functioning of a school? This one cute trick: marrying the truth, bell-to-bell “instruction” as a best practice, to a lie, student safety is priority #1.

Here’s how this scam works. Under the guise of not wasting an instructional minute, administrators heavily weight a single metric of classroom effectiveness. When they waltz in to observe a teacher, they’re primarily looking to answer only one question: are the students engaged from the very beginning to the very end of class?

The term “engagement” is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness. “Engaged’ can mean chatting with a classmate. It can mean staring at a screen. It can mean listening to a lecture. It can mean working silently. It can mean taking notes, but it can also mean doodling. The effect of engagement on student learning is near impossible to measure, but engagement itself is easy to track; you just need tally marks and eyeballs.

If engagement is step #1, a weak administrator doesn’t have to lift a finger to improve instruction until a teacher can effect it 99% of the time. He can also shift all responsibility for student behavior to the teacher. He never has to hold any substantive conversations about how best to get complicated material across to learners at vastly different levels. He couldn’t anyway; most administrators have limited teaching experience. In challenging schools, weak teachers begin looking for an out within three years. Assistant Principals are routinely elevated to oversee work in which they themselves were never effective.

The overarching administrative attitude toward teachers is this: who cares if you further beat down an already demoralized teaching staff? They’re tenured.

Let me paint the picture for you. Say you’re a teacher, doing your best to deliver information to students. Most of them are doing what they should: listening to you explain then attempting the work that will help them internalize knowledge.

There are a handful of kids not following along. They’re talking over you. They don’t even begin the assignment. In fact, they’re making it difficult for other students to hear you. As you circulate the room to help kids who need extra support, those kids get even louder. Students around them struggle to stay on task. Weaker students who were trying quickly surrender to join in the fun. Others are visibly annoyed at how loud the room is.

While you talk to one kid, you hear an inappropriate comment; you look up to ask the offending student to get back to work, in the process losing the thread of conversation with the kid who called you over. It takes you a few moments to reorient yourself to help him. Meanwhile, more and more kids stray off-task. The little work you assigned in class won’t be done in the time you allotted. Kids will have homework. The weakest won’t finish it. You were going to try to help them during class, but repeated disruptions made getting to all of them impossible.

This could go on for weeks. In an English or History class, it’s a low-down dirty shame. In a math class, it’s a disaster; there’s no way the kids will master the material they must to be successful the following year.

You’ve tried everything. Calling home. Behavior slips. Building relationships. The kids aren’t doing anything bad enough to call security; they’re just disruptive.

One day, it’s all too much. You take the once mundane but now extreme action of sending the students out of class so you can actually teach. Unfortunately, an AP happens to walk by and sees them in the hall chatting like it’s snack break or lunch.

In the olden days, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in middle school, that assistant principal would’ve taken those two kids right to his office, read them the Riot Act and kept them in the front office until their parents picked them up. Those days are gone. In the scenario I described, this would happen now:

You look up from the student you’re helping, surprised, when someone with a key opens the door and ushers the students back in. The AP motions you to come talk to her at the door. The conversation goes something like this:

AP: “I talked to those students. They should be okay from here on out. Here’s the thing: you can’t leave them outside like that. It’s a safety issue.”

You: “I’m sorry, they were just really disruptive. I’ve been struggling with these kids for weeks. I’ve gone through all the progressive discipline steps, made multiple parent contacts, and sent home behavior reports. I’ve assigned detentions, but the kids don’t serve them and there’s no Saturday school anymore. I’ve logged everything in the student information system multiple times, but no one has pulled the kids for a conference or anything that I know of.”

AP: “Well, if you’ve done all that, you’ve met the requirements to send them to my office. I’ll tell them that this is their last warning. Just call the office and let us know if they’re coming so we know where they are.”

Feeling a surge of relief, you thank the AP and he leaves.

The next day, armed with the knowledge that somebody is going to back you up, you begin your lesson confidently. The students see something is different, so their disruptions are hushed at first, but get louder. Why not risk it? You’ve done everything possible on your end and it’s cost them nothing so far.

You give them a few warnings. You finish the last one by saying, “Disrupt the class again and I’m sending you to the office.”

They disrupt the class again. True to your word, you send them up and dial the office to let them know students are on their way.

For twenty glorious minutes, your students work quietly. You have time and quiet to support the struggling. The students make good progress. You see a common misconception on multiple papers and go to the board to address it for the whole class. The class listens, then kids put their heads down and get back to work.

Until a key turns in the door. The security guard holds it open as the imps walk right back in, laughing, each holding a snack bag of Hot Cheetos and a Gatorade.

Later that day, you receive an email from the AP. In it he says something like this:

“A Restorative Conversation was held. The students apologized for disrupting class and promised to be more respectful in the future. They did mention that they don’t find your class very engaging. They also don’t feel their learning needs are being met, so in the future, please make more of an effort to differentiate the class for all learners; this should result in fewer disruptions. Now that I’ve held this Restorative Conversation, please restart interventions according to our Progressive Discipline protocols. Continue to document every infraction and any and all interventions you use in response to them. There are many Tier 1 options available to you for immediate classroom use; review the 100-page discipline handbook for ideas. Please note that if you don’t follow policy, I won’t be able to support you again the way I did today.”

Justice has been served: Restorative Justice. Students back in the classroom, their unmet needs addressed, the AP one ticked-box-of-ideological-purity closer to the cush District Office gig, and the teacher chastened: everything is exactly as the people at the top wish it to be.

Crucially, the teacher has learned exactly what the front office and the District Office want from her: handle everything in your room. Don’t bother us again. We will literally make your job harder if you do.

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There is no authority at the top. The few who might have a chance of taking the authoritative stance necessary to keep harmful students in line are neutered by policy. The rest are fully on-board with whatever it takes to move them up the chain of command away from actual students, including anti-learning discipline approaches promoted by the non-teaching, Justice-Seeking Ed.D.s running state Boards of Education. It’d be one thing if this was unique to states governed by Progressives, but Satan’s handmaidens at the federal Department of Education employ this legerdemain too, and they have the taxpayer money to spread their dirty tricks across the entire nation.

And as much as I’d like to let teachers off the hook because it would help me cope with the 20 years I spent rationalizing the fraud committed against trusting families, I can’t do that. Not fully, anyway.

Far too many teachers barely know more than what’s in the student textbook. Many of us don’t even know that. We assign work from the book or from the online course and lean on district-adopted equitable grading policies to ensure we never have to do much heavy lifting from the front of the room. Ask your kid—especially a twice-gifted kid with an autism or ADHD diagnosis—how many of his teachers have gotten something basic egregiously wrong. (Note: you will not like their answer.) Worse, wily students make hay off low academic standards by turning in garbage work at the eleventh hour, knowing it’s too much of a hassle for the teacher to do anything but give him a passing grade.

Once I sussed out the long-game admin was playing, I did what they wanted and took my game fully in-house. For a tenured teacher, I was definitely on the masochistic side. Watching my dad do impossibly hard physical labor to keep the bills paid made it impossible for me to coast on tenure. The worse my school got, the harder I worked. Extra hours of prep time translated into deeper knowledge of my subject(s). I read anything and everything, from picture books to 18th century essays, that might help me break down material for students, the vast majority of whom were well behind in skills and knowledge.

My students figured out I was working my butt off because my class was so different from the rest: fast-paced, action-packed, work-intensive. The extra work I put in to wrangle the class took us all to another level. I had anecdotes and stats and hilarious connections to random modern events that helped kids hook into explanations. They could ask me damn near anything and if it was tangentially related to my subject, I could come up with a satisfactory response. I had no ego about going to Google after class to double-check my answers. If I was wrong about something, I’d tell them next class.

My students also took a stand. They appreciated class enough to exert enough social pressure on their miscreant classmates to keep them from derailing us. I rarely had to intervene other than shooting a “teacher look” to let a kid know he was out of line. Students the rest of the faculty considered incorrigible behaved themselves. But there was more to that too. I went out of my way to let them know I didn’t judge them by their grade. I’d side-hug the ones having bad days. With kids I knew to be having bad years, I’d find the thing they loved and make a point of chatting about it. Every kid got a warm greeting if I saw them around campus. Still, I held all kids to the same standard in the classroom. I expected the same work from every kid. Students saw that as fair.

My colleagues, understandably, thought I was doing too much. From their standpoint and, importantly, from the letter of the law in our union contract, there was no reason for me to bust my butt; my unchecked mouth meant I’d never be promoted anyway, so what was the upside? They knew I could just show up, lay a lesson down and if the kids wanted to do it, great. If they didn’t, so what? Admin would pressure us to give even the least-deserving kid a passing grade, and when we refused—as I often did—counseling would just shunt them into the easy-to-cheat after-school credit recovery classes so they could graduate on-time.

As my department chair once said to us after debriefing the distribution of Fs at the third quarter, “Give them all Ds or better and be done with it. There’s no point failing them. It just creates headaches for you.”

His was the prevailing attitude at every one of my schools, I’m sorry to say. What’s more, the kids knew it, thus creating yet another incentive doom loop with enormously costly second-order effects, i.e., unintended consequences, for every student.

But my chair was also right: in the modern public school, the workload and effort required to maintain authority in the face of the learning-destructive policies coming from the head office is unsustainable for most teachers.

I’m still doing it, but I’m old and bullheaded. There’s little incentive for the average teacher to do what I do when it comes at high personal cost. There’s absolutely zero incentive for principals to back teachers like me; it makes their numbers look bad.

So remember this the next time you’re tempted to complain to a principal about something that happened at your child’s school: he has no authority.

He wouldn’t do a damn thing with it even if he did.

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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 schools have become since they graduated. The public school system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.