Public Schools’ New, Uneven Landscape
My piece that ran in the print issue of The Progressive is now available on line. In it, I tried to draft an overview of what the education landscape looks like as we head back to it. There are many factors I discuss; here’s just one in an excerpt from the article.
rouble recruiting and retaining teachers has been a much-discussed topic for more than a decade. During the pandemic, there was a fear that the exodus from the profession would accelerate, but it didn’t. In fact, in 2020, teacher turnover actually slowed down. But by this summer, the negative indicators were piling up.
While a variety of factors are at play, the short version of the story is pretty simple: Teaching used to be an empowering, stable, well-paying, and well-respected profession; now, it is not.
Pre-pandemic, teachers were already feeling the loss of autonomy and the emphasis on preparing students to score well on the annual test. The pandemic dramatically increased teacher workloads. Teachers were hailed as heroes, but that soon ended and was replaced with attacks. Culture warriors raised the specter of critical race theory, followed by panic over anything mentioning gender identity or sexual orientation, and teachers who tried to speak up were branded as pedophiles or groomers.
If much of what’s driving the toxic atmosphere around schools seems deliberate, well, it probably is. Speaking at Hillsdale College, Rufo, who spearheaded the critical race theory panic, said, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” Destroying trust in public schools is a calculated strategy, and teachers are bearing the brunt of that.
Meanwhile, teachers across the nation are reporting a rise in student misbehavior, from simple disrespect to acts of violence. It seems that during the pandemic, many students simply forgot how to “do school.”
n some districts, the atmosphere has become deeply toxic. As one teacher who is leaving the profession after her district was commandeered by repressive Christian nationalist board members told me, “I can’t live and work where I’m not safe.”
Many teachers are dealing with the smoke and ash of the post-COVID culture wars by getting out. Many others are continuing, but without their previous joy and optimism.
When the Vesuvius of COVID-19 shook the foundations of public education, many people sensed an opportunity to rebuild a new structure. Folks on all sides of education debates thought that this would be an opportunity to create something new, to “reimagine education,” a slogan used at various points by folks on both the left and the right. But it appears they underestimated just how badly people wanted to get back to the normal and familiar.
Some pandemic experiments were largely failures. Very few parents, teachers, or students loved virtual school enough to want to keep using it. And we are still sorting out the mental health effects of school in isolation for students.