Your Kids Aren't Learning: Teachers Aren't Subject Matter Experts

Deep content knowledge is now superfluous for the average teacher.

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something public schools no longer provide, if they ever 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 state-run schools in California.

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School isn’t what it used to be. Districts spend billions of bond-measure-raised taxpayer dollars on 21st Century Learner initiatives under the rationale that giving students and teachers access to technology will create a workforce with the technical skills required by modern industry.

On the teaching side, the biggest difference is a change in medium, not practice. Virtually every middle and high school teacher I know relies on a Google Slides deck that displays each day’s work, homework (if any), and Expected Student Learning Results (i.e., learning goals) to students. This used to be handwritten in a teacher’s plan book and transcribed to the whiteboard for students. Once developed, these slides are rarely meaningfully revised, despite changing student needs, site demographics, school goals, and advances in scholarship in the teacher’s content area.

When You Don’t Know That You Don’t Know

Slides go along with a lecture in more didactic classrooms, like science and history. Students quickly learn that if note-taking is required in the course (less often now because notes are ableist) they are to copy what’s on the slides which makes attending to lecture difficult. Whatever the teacher says goes in one ear and out the other; kids are focused intently on copying bulleted text.

The teacher has also learned this, but instead of writing brief notes on the board as she talks in order to increase memory by getting information to kids through their ears and their eyes, she reads the bullets on the slide deck, waiting until every child has copied them before moving on. Any human interest tidbits shared but not displayed are missed by kids who know the test only covers what’s on the slides.

Those moments of humanity become more rare every year as slide-dependent instruction further dominates classrooms.

Why? Because for a very low price on Teachers Pay Teachers, a teacher no longer has to do any prep work for the entire school year. A new teacher may never have to prep anything, never even needing to crack open the Teacher’s Manual, never worrying that she needs more story, more beauty, to keep students engaged.

Nope. She’s got this:

I’m not commenting on the quality of this seller’s work. It’s probably okay. Then again, only four exams in an entire year of US history from colonial America to modern times is suspect. The four Escape Rooms will make up for it, I’m sure.

What does concern me and should concern all parents is that Teachers Pay Teachers and presentation technology remove the teacher’s responsibility to make curricular decisions particular to that year’s students, which makes content knowledge irrelevant — for the teacher. Notice the underlined phrase in the description above: “I detail all the days for the entire year... You won’t have to lift a finger.”

Plug and play, baby.

The typical teacher may realize that buying something like this not only weakens her practice, it reinforces the argument for online learning. There’s no reason a parent couldn’t just buy this same product to free up time and prevent school-based psychological and/or physical harm to their child. But at the end of the day, the seller is right: she won’t have to lift a finger, and that matters more.

Experienced teachers have curriculum they developed in the early ‘00s and tests they wrote at the same time. Such curriculum will be Teacher’s Manual-based, if not written by the publisher and included on an ancient CD-ROM and voluminous kit of teacher support materials (read: worksheets).

The rare teacher who reads frequently in his discipline has interesting anecdotes to share and a clear understanding of how concepts in his field developed over time. If he’s developed a structure for his class and is able to maintain an effective learning environment (a fraught proposition these days), his classes will be a joy. Sadly, landing in a class like this is akin to winning the lottery for the few students lucky enough to be assigned to him.

Still, some students who get him will resent his high expectations for them mightily.

A majority of the rest of the teachers will be tired, bored-out-of-their-minds clock-watchers who structure class to be easy to pass which will minimize interaction with students.

The Rise of Google Suite for Education

Enter the 1:1 device policy. Touted as a way to engage students and teach 21st-century skills, I’d judge it wildly successful. Students are quite engaged in online gaming, YouTube shorts, and, once they figure out how to get a VPN on their device, whatever else they want, from movies to sports to… other things.

They also are quick learners of the keyboard shortcuts which allow them to hide what they’re actually doing from their supervisor, the teacher.

Teachers who can’t control student device use are ironically incentivized to make Google Suite the gateway to every lesson. In case you think that’s actual technological skill, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. All most teachers have done is take advantage of Google Slides, Forms, and Docs to make worksheets accessible digitally so they don’t have to wrestle the always-broken copier in the teachers’ lounge and they can give students credit for turning work in via their smartphone.

Google Forms is labor-saving. It’s easy to transcribe old worksheets to it. A teacher can upload pictures of old handouts to Drive and Google Docs will helpfully turn them into editable text for you, which you can then post to Google Classroom for student use. If you use the fill in the blank or multiple-choice features, Forms will grade everything for you. Some Student Information Systems allow for seamless upload of grades in Classroom to the online gradebook.

You can embed YouTube videos in every Doc, Form, or Slide deck so that students don’t need you to lecture; they can just watch the video and answer the attached questions. All classwork can be done at whatever pace a student chooses and turned in via Google Classroom anytime. Teachers still give due dates, but because of the push for equitable grading practices, late work is accepted and minimally penalized, if at all.

Teachers’ new responsibility to control for cultural and racial inequities in the classroom offers a seductive rationale to give students whatever time they “need”. This practice comes with powerful reinforcement for overwhelmed faculty. Accepting work at any time means teachers don’t have to interact with parents, don’t have to butt heads with counselors, and never hear from administration. If everybody passes, the adults employed in schools experience much less stress.

Of course, this creates a logistical nightmare in a class where one concept builds to the next, like math, science, composition, or history. It also hurts in a class where students study longer works and discuss a story arc as they would in literature or film. The performing arts might be exempt if students attend class regularly and choose to participate, but equitable grading makes allowances for non-participation too. Fine arts classes might be able to function around this, but certain skills must be learned before others can be taught.

The effect of this can’t be overstated. What I’ve seen over the last ten years of 1:1 device adoption is that teachers have backed way off whole class lessons, despite principals talking a big game about “first, best instruction.”

The end of whole class instruction is a predictable consequence of government policies that incentivize administrators to abandon any pretense of student discipline. Equitable grading and 1:1 devices have destroyed standards for classroom behavior. Only the very best teachers are able to keep kids engaged in a lecture or demonstration if students also have Chromebooks open or phones no one dares confiscate.

When you can project a to-do list at the beginning of class, give students a short video to learn from and a worksheet as formative assessment (kids know the File > Make a Copy > change name trick and use it. liberally to minimize their workload, by the way), then spend the class period attending to the million piddling administrative tasks dumped on you, why in the world would you fight with 30+ students who will just tell you they need more time to finish any assignment and can reasonably expect you’ll provide it?

If they fail the upcoming test — and they will — who cares? You’re supposed to let them retake it until they demonstrate mastery.

This approach also puts a band-aid on poor classroom management. Behavior is “managed” because kids have devices and know what to do with them. This may or may not mean students complete assignments, but the devices do keep them locked in and out of their classmates’ hair. While this is far from ideal, it could allow the teacher to coach students who want support. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens in a mixed-ability classroom. What happens is that kids who need help don’t ask for it and fall behind. They do so knowing in most cases the teacher will save them at the eleventh hour by letting them turn in just enough sloppy, poorly-done work to pass the class.

“Essential” Standards and Equitable Grading

All the while, a teacher watches red missing assignment marks fill her online gradebook. She talks to her students, urging them to turn things in, but feels helpless to nag beyond occasional check-ins. She believes — because she’s been repeatedly told to believe — that pushing kids to work hard perpetuates systemic inequities.

Yet those missing assignments in the gradebook glow red. Assigning more work at more challenging levels would help some kids grow, but will create even more red boxes in her gradebook for others. What’s a teacher to do?

Don’t worry, admin has an answer: lean back on the “essential standards”; only assign work that corresponds to them. Everything else is reserved for “enrichment” and should not affect the grades of students who haven’t yet mastered the basics.

That’s right, parents: in department meetings across our great land teachers debate which of the standards for core classes must be taught and which can be skimmed over or ignored entirely. That long-list of state-adopted content standards? Negotiable. What you think your kid is learning — even if you think the state standards are suboptimal — is not what your kid is actually learning. Your child is learning far, far less than what the state prescribes.

It should be no surprise that the most difficult concepts requiring extensive knowledge and deep practical skill of the teacher are likely to fall by the wayside.

Remember that year-long TPT unit I posted above? A teacher can make it really easy on herself and tell herself she’s making her content accessible to all by simply posting all the teacher lecture decks complete with presenter’s notes to Google Classroom for students to access whenever they’re up for it, if they ever are.

While 1:1 devices and Google Suite for Education relegate whole class instruction and mean the teacher doesn’t need to know much, equitable grading policies make small group and one-on-one coaching subject to the whims of the student, who has exactly zero motivation to push himself when he knows he can fall back on submitting a fraction of the required work at the last minute to pass. Arguably, this hurts competent students the most; the social stigma of asking for teacher attention is so high only kids with parents who are on them like a duck on a June bug ever do it.

On the teacher’s end, grading for equity (late work accepted without question, pacing based on student emotional state, mastery whenever, etc.) means there’s no incentive to monitor student progress or productivity. Students can work whenever they want. Anything else — like drop-dead due dates and end-of-unit tests — wouldn’t be equitable.

And here’s the rub: this is a downward spiral for both the students and the teacher. If a teacher can rely on TPT and has no incentive to pace the class to pull up the lower-performers while exhorting the ones at the leading edge to push on, the teacher has little reason to learn anything new. The stories and quandaries of her content that pique human interest are rendered irrelevant in her practice.

Over the course of my career, I’ve read widely across history, literature and economics. My students thrive because, yes, I care deeply and have high standards for all of my students, but more because I provide an avalanche of challenging content and expect them to work with it. I’ve studied the great writing of the major figures in all the disciplines I’ve taught and never hesitate to share their genius with my students, parsing and chunking to make it accessible to students of widely varying ability. I know the minutia that keeps kids riveted, the fascinating anecdotes of human brilliance. I have a bank of stories to illustrate principles of economics and poetry and history. I’ve got multiple methods to teach difficult skills because I use them myself. I regularly write anchor papers so students see, clearly, what good writing in the discipline looks like at differing levels of achievement.

Most importantly, I know enough to be able to ask pointed questions which force kids to step beyond their initial reactions toward deeper, nuanced understanding.

In 20 years of teaching at schools with faculties of 100+ teachers, I met three others who made a habit of engaging with the work of the greatest minds in their disciplines.

The rest? Well, tenure and test scores tell the tale. Many English teachers never actually read the canon of Western civilization, but sure knew why it shouldn’t be taught. They read the novels they teach once or twice, letting the teacher’s guide do the heavy lifting. Now that many English departments are making the switch to literature circle models and adopting a raft of Young Adult novels written around contemporary issues, the teachers don’t need to be an expert in any of them. They just have to let the students teach each other using a set of generic prompts and questions for discussion that apply to all the novels.

Most of my colleagues in social science departments never read a text in economics, government, or history from cover to cover. The best of them had set lectures, especially in AP US History and European history, but most of the rest adopted the very hands-off slide deck/Google Suite approach by 2015 or were heavy assigners of Inquiry-Based learning projects, where a kid does “research” on a topic of her choice, creates her own slide deck based of what she learned, and presents it to class. These types of projects take weeks to prepare and present. The work is usually done in-class to support equity; some kids are unable to do such work at home. My colleagues loved inquiry projects because, in practice, they remove the responsibility of actually teaching the class and freed up their contracted working hours.

Imposter syndrome is real and often deserved. Older teachers know what’s in the teacher’s manual. Newer teachers know what they “learned” in college, but often don’t bother with the textbook. They’re much more likely to lean on Google Suite and lessons they find online or are provided by colleagues. Once they have a year’s worth of material, they relax and throw the whole thing on loop.

It’s understandable. Why wouldn’t you follow the path of least resistance when your job is more or less guaranteed?

Students are on their phones or their devices; it’s impossible to monitor all of them all the time. Administration looks best when everyone passes — they remind teachers of this fact often. Parents don’t call or email as long as their child has a C or better. No one is checking whether student performance matches student grades; there are no content-specific end-of-year tests in most states. If there are, the results can’t be tied to teacher evaluations by federal law. On top of that, thousands of teachers sell a year’s worth of work on TeachersPayTeachers for around $200, and that low price can be amortized over a 30-year career.

The time it would take outside work to develop content expertise seems like a high-cost, low-benefit proposition given the systemic conditions detailed above. I can attest to the fact that all the extra work felt masochistic when I saw how few other teachers did it. I would’ve resented it, but my students were exceptional people. I couldn’t have looked them in the eyes if I was phoning it in.

All that outside work mattered; kids love my classes because what I bring to them is human and relatable. Crucially, they see my respect for them. By presenting them with challenging work, they understand that I believe they could grok it, talk about it, and write intelligently after they internalize it. That is my payoff, and it’s priceless.

Every time I post something like this on Twitter, a chorus of teachers tell me I’m wrong.Teachers are doing the work.Kids are thriving. It’s not like that at THEIR site. How can I be so sure what I did in my room wasn’t happening elsewhere on campus?

Because teachers like to talk. They love to talk about how great they are (like I did above) and how disappointing students are.

It was the lack of stories of teacher interaction that made me start asking my colleagues what their classes looked like and if they wouldn’t mind sharing lessons with me through Google Drive. What I learned in conversation and from their lesson plans and the work they assigned to students and, most importantly, from helping my own students do the work other teachers assigned, is that teachers didn’t know that much about their subjects. One of my English colleagues taught her students that Animal Farm was about Hitler and the holocaust. Yes, you read that right: Hitler. Government teachers had never read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Economics? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Books that tell us to stand tall and teach like a Champion or a Pirate (or whatever the latest “Teach Like a _____” book written by a good-hearted teacher-savior watching his profession swirl the drain is titled) hint at an awful truth: teachers need a white knight costume because they aren’t experts. Our education nomenklatura have seen to it that the system focuses its foot soldiers on equity and justice rather than developing a foundation of deep knowledge and the guiding principle that all students deserve to travel in realms of gold.

As a result, teacher-student alienation is now the norm in 1:1 device schools. It was the norm in my sons’ elementary school. In middle and high schools, it’s just too easy to project the assignment on the whiteboard, let students decide when to work, and say, “I’ll be up here if you need help.” Curiously, students rarely do.

Your children know their teachers don’t know much. Your son has heard them make egregious content errors. Your daughter wants to ask deeper questions, but has seen it’s pointless and is trained to go to Google’s algorithm instead (a whole other can of worms). Your child may have even gone so far as to correct a teacher when she was wrong and was almost certainly punished for it. It’s not personal; when a teacher doesn’t know her content, her already tenuous authority becomes shaky at best. Thus, anything resembling dissent must be curbed, even if it has instructional value.

Now, teachers can and do avoid such situations by employing digital bulwarks to remain the guide on the side — way, way on the side — rather than the sage on the stage. If a teacher doesn’t feel like guiding or lacks the skill to way-find, she can outsource that work to Teachers Pay Teachers and Google and make it all look pretty with a pop of Pinterest.

Incentives matter. Nearly every single one in place in public middle and high schools is anti-learning: for the kids and the adults.