I see many news articles about what is happening in schools. I see social media posts from people who think what’s happening in schools is great. I see posts from people who think Satan has taken over the schools and is going to turn every students trans or gay or liberal or furry or all of the above. I see post after post from all over the political spectrum about what is happening in schools. Some use anecdotes to make generalizations.
“Ms. Smith made a comment about slaves instead of calling them unpaid workers, so she must be a CRT-promoting, indoctrinating liberal, which means that’s what all teachers are! She’s also a member of the union, so they must have brainwashed her!” “Mr. Brown made a comment about unions being bad in his history class, so that proves that schools are actually conservative bastions of the status quo!” “They’ve taken God out of the schools and that’s why we have school shootings!”
Lots and lots of people talk and write and post about schools and what happens in them, and what happens in all classrooms, making blanket statements about public education, when in fact they have not been in a public school in years. They don’t know what is happening in public schools because most of them have not been there.
But I do know some involved citizens who have been in public schools, either volunteering or substituting, who have opinions as well. They might have a better idea, but they still don’t really know what’s happening.
District people do walk-throughs a few times a year in many districts, including my own, but what they are often seeing is a show of compliance designed to give them what they want to see. “Look! I’m following the curriculum map and am adhering to the pacing guide!” The same often goes for school-level administrators. They are in a few classrooms once or twice a year, and what they are seeing may or not be what usually goes on. (I think of Miss Honey in Matilda, covering up all of her colorful lessons and wall decorations the minute Miss Trunchbull shows up.)
So am I going to tell you that I’ve actually been in the trenches, a classroom teacher for 31 years now, so I do know what’s going on in schools?
No, I am not.
I can only tell you what’s been going on in my classroom for 31 years. No one else’s. I talk with other teachers in my subject area, English, about what they are doing, but I seldom, if ever, get to observe them actually teach. As for teachers outside my subject, I hardly ever even hear about them. I may hear, or overhear, students’ accounts of other classrooms, but I pretty much take them with a grain of salt. Students are excellent unreliable narrators.
I have been in schools for 31 years: a wealthy-ish high school, a rural middle-high school, a small middle school, and now a large high school. And I really can’t make any generalizations about what goes on in schools. No one can, and now one should. Because no one – not parents, not administrators, not teachers – has a truly global, objective perspective on the teaching in a single school, much less a generalized view of public education across this great nation of ours. Education varies from classroom to classroom, school to school. In my school alone, I just need to read the bumper stickers in the faculty parking lot during a fire drill to know that we have extremely conservative teachers at my school, as well as both libertarians and liberals. And everything in between. And fans of Star Wars and Barbie. Education varies subject to subject, district to district, state to state. There are few, if any generalizations to be made with any accuracy. Yet people make them all the time.
I will make a guess, based on my limited perspective, as to what is going on. We are having massive shifts in society in attitudes about many things – some good, some bad, some neutral. All of these shifts find their way into public schools because of our incredibly diverse student body, which comes from incredibly diverse families. I see that through the lens of my own single classroom, and through what I see in the halls at school, and online. It’s less about what teachers are doing and more about what culture is doing, which then shows up at school. Students are online. Students talk to each other. Culture spreads, for better or for worse. But that’s just my guess. It is not a statement of certainty. I would need to do a lot of research to prove my theory, so I’m putting it out there as something to think about – not as a statement of Absolute Truth.
The closest we might get to an objective view of a single school, or possibly a single district, might come from students – but we seldom listen to them. As a teacher, I try to listen. I listen to students in class discussion, in one-on-one interactions, and in their writing, where I ask them to reflect on my class and on education in general.
While adults feud and fuss about CRT and LGBTQ issues and book bans and vouchers and school choice, kids tell me they are sick of being tested too much. They tell me they want education to have a point and a purpose – because too often it seems to lack both and ends up seeming meaningless. They tell me they want to be engaged. They want to learn, but they want to have some fun while they’re doing it. They want to feel safe in school, no matter who they are and no matter where they live.
Those are generalizations from my classroom over many years of teaching. I don’t know if they are generalizations of students everywhere. I suspect they might be. But I can’t be sure. Because 31 years in my classroom does not make me an expert on what’s going on in public schools. It makes me an expert on my own little corner of the public school world.
One thing I’m sure of is this: educated people don’t make generalizations from limited information. At least, not generally.
But an awful lot of people who ought to know better do it all the time. Especially when they claim to know exactly what’s going on in public education.