Teaching, especially in public education, has experienced substantial mission creep over the last decade.
“What we’ve got here is a failure to educate.” Teaching, especially public education, has experienced substantial mission creep over the last decade, some of it self-inflicted due to a brew of teachers’ compassion and vanity, and the rest owing to an expanding administrative apparatus that offers classrooms very little while attempting to shoehorn in ever more social engineering from a cohort of overpaid EdDs competing for district- and state-level roles. Recent spats about reporting student pronoun changes to parents chronicled by Haley Strack and Kayla Bartsch’s self-absorption column converge to adroitly reveal the elements most negatively affecting American education.
In the classroom, teachers think too much of themselves and their influence on their students. To be fair, the public’s view of teachers as “underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated” is somewhat true for first- and second-year teachers who begin in the sump pit of the union salary ladder and who have not yet established a lesson-plan regime that they’ll flog for the next decade or more, but the maxim fails to apply to the majority. It’s little more than labor agitprop that many teachers nonetheless accept as gospel. Who doesn’t like appreciation? The problem is that too many teachers are making their interactions with the students about the teacher by assuming that they are the only responsible adults in a student’s life, and that what students need is a confidant rather than a mentor.
Secreted pronouns result from this folly.
PDE has uncovered more than one thousand school districts that have . . . policies that allow schools to conceal a child’s gender transition from his parents.
With over 13,000 school districts in the U.S., these sorts of official pronoun non-report policies are still in the minority, but many teachers outside of these districts maintain similar standards. The best case that can be made for not reporting is humoring a kid’s flight of fancy and preventing him from getting grief from his parents. But entertaining delusion, especially without evidence that a child would be in any danger beyond having his parents tell him he’s a boy, says more about the educator than it does the kid. For one, teachers are excessively compassionate and want to empathize with a kid’s anxieties while also feeling like they’re taking part in something subversive — a progressive sense of sticking it to the establishment, be it economic, religious, or cultural. The teacher is extending herself beyond her prescribed role to satisfy her urge to cosset and gratify her political interests; in doing so, she betrays the student by indulging in fantasy and robs the class of her attention in the process.
What the teacher ought to do is treat social illness like any other: Direct the student to the school nurse or counselor to discuss the matter with the child’s parents. The Left, especially the maternalistic aspect, talks a lot about “emotional labor,” especially in relation to women’s work. What teachers need to know is that it isn’t their job to do the emotional labor — just to teach. Watching a loved one go through her time as a first-year teacher, I was amazed by her drive, and that of her peers, to take projects home that weren’t school-mandated. Rather, the teachers generated self-imposed deadlines and lessons. Some would be up until midnight fretting over an activity. Why? Because caring is a status currency in education.
Caring about student safety, belonging, and development all have cachet in education settings — especially in schools most staffed with women. “Protecting” the gender identities of students is a high-status proposition in schools; it’s less about the kids and more about the teachers. This makes lawsuits against the school districts the easiest counter, as administrators will be forced to implement guidelines for reporting. The weird art teacher will surely still have her cohort of gender-nonconforming students following her around, but the rest of the faculty should fall in line.
The administration, however, is just as much a problem as the teachers because the DEI track is the easiest way to move up the ranks of the education bureaucracy. In Wisconsin, we’ve seen a superintendent fired after making racist remarks about his “lily-white” district (one paying him $220,000 per year) and a district diversity coordinator who’d sent racist texts during his time in Milwaukee is now positioned in Oshkosh (making $120,000). In both cases, the men had unimpressive records except for their DEI work . . . education degrees receiving six figures is really something. “Choose your rate, choose your fate,” as they say.
Instead of refocusing teachers on their purpose — for which the public pays dearly — administrators such as these men further incentivize the faculty to focus on tertiary concerns that will only increase as kids see preferential treatment and attention offered to those kids who claim non-traditional attributes. Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a program along these lines. In the program, teachers take a period and teach the children how to be aware of themselves and practice mindfulness, meditation, and other self-fixated tactics. Though it sounds New Age-y (because it is), what I gather from teachers is that SEL instruction is a wasted period where the teachers give up on the program almost immediately and let the kids dink around on the Chromebooks in a quasi-study hall. The admin gets to claim the adoption of the latest and greatest program, and the kids are left with even more downtime rather than instruction in reading, writing, and mathematics — all of which they are grossly unqualified to practice at grade level.
School boards fail by hiring charlatans, who then fail their charges and faculty by establishing non-educational programs that consume class time and introduce fractious ideologies and enticements. At each of these levels, the need to elevate one’s position, “my truth,” as Kayla puts it, is all-consuming. The public must reassert its right to know what occurs in schools, and elevate administrators and teachers who understand the fulfilling limitations of being no more or less than the instructors of the next generation.