Today I began my 36th year as a teacher. If you include my 13 years in K-12 as a student and 6 years as a college student for a bachelor’s and master’s degree (I lump my Phd work in with teaching as I had an assistantship,) this begins my 55th year going to school. Wow, things have changed since the 1970’s. Some good, some not… Education has been considered an honorable profession. Students, Parents, Teachers, Administrators, and School Board members used to be united as a community to educate and help create a responsible young adult that we could all be proud of… That was the goal in my home town all those years ago…

Where did that go????

This is not a dissent in the traditional sense. It is a reflection. The older I get, the more I look back and ask, “How did we get here?” I know the answer to this question when it comes to education. I have been studying political policy and its effect on education for twenty years. I’m not going to hold back on my criticisms of the policies, knowledge of the cultural changes, or the sociological damage Republican neoliberal economic policy has done to the United States of America. I fear it might be long… …but I need to write it down or it will envelope me in darkness and despair. I owe it to myself… a healthy alternative… expel the garbage… try to heal for another day…

My K-12 schooling was in a small manufacturing town of around ten thousand or so people in Illinois. I began kindergarten at the age of four, turning five within the first months of the school year. I could read when I entered kindergarten. I owe this to family members who read to me, and I picked up the sounds of the letters by watching and listening. Reading has always been a passionate pursuit. I would rather learn on my own through reading and studying than listen to a lecture. I know there are many like me. Experiencing has always been a better teacher for me…

My academic career in school was lackluster. It comes with being a poor blue collar kid, as the expectations were low. Despite the expectations, the early standardized test scores of the Carter and Reagan administrative policies said I showed promise. Sports and music kept me motivated. Music took over entirely my late sophomore year of high school. I graduated in the top 25% of my class just shy of a 3.0 gpa. I showed great interest in history, government, and some aspects of English (Language Arts.) I despised most everything else. I never failed anything outright, but I also never pushed myself to get A’s. I was your typical Gen X Latchkey kid working jobs, studying enough to get by, and just trying to survive…

College really didn’t enter my equation until late in high school. I had a couple of great high school teachers in the social studies department that suggested I give it a try. I thought about the service fields of emergency medicine, or nursing. I never gave teaching an interest until later in college. My next door neighbor in high school was the band director in the neighboring town. He heard me practicing the all-state audition outside one day after my job. It was mid-September. He came over with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other and he said, “You have a gift! You need to play in my municipal band next summer. You should major in music!!!!” It wasn’t until March of that year, due to a school tragedy, that I made my decision to go to school as a music major.

What I remember from all those years ago, was the path of freedom to achieve an education. I had ample opportunities all around me. No dual credit, long term educational plans from counselors, vocational opportunities, ample electives to spark interest, and I only needed three credits of math, four of English, and two of science. My music participation was as good as a foreign language. My extra-curricular participation and work experience was appreciated by the college admissions folks. We also had to take some pre-business courses like keyboarding, consumer math, family planning, etc… You see, test scores at this time were not steering all things education. The Nation at Risk document had yet to grasp the public collective within education. What had grasped the public, were words like: indoctrination, liberalism, and appropriateness…

President Reagan and the hard right caucus were at war with the way my generation was digesting and abusing the freedoms of our working baby boomer parents allowed us to have. As teenagers we abhorred being placed into cliques… Indoctrination was something that had been done to Reagan, not us. Many of us embraced the liberalisms of George Carlin, Saturday Night Live, etc. Our music was labeled for content by the establishment, because artists wrote suggestive metaphorical lyrics. Their political response to our education brought hundreds of changes over the next 40 years, and very few of them are positive for developing a freedom of thought, knowledge, or love of learning new things…

During my undergraduate years I remember the Music Educators National Conference was responding to policies that required a set of standards for teaching every subject. It hit the core curriculum first. I remember my alma mater high school cutting numerous courses off the books due to a lack of education standards between 1988-1996. I didn’t quite understand why. What was wrong with offering a reading class on the Supernatural, where one read Frankenstein, Dracula, The Raven, etc???? Not appropriate…

Once I became a teacher in 1991 the standards started to go through their vetting and eventual adoption in 1994. There were nine standards. During the Clinton Administration the standards were put into practice. There was still a lot of freedom, as Technology initiatives became the norm through 2000. When the Bush II era began and No Child Left Behind was instituted, freedom in education was drastically cut. The test score became the be all end all of curriculum development.

The Common Core & ESSA legislation like the NCLB legislation before held schools hostage financially for not meeting standards. The lack of funds punished the students who needed them the most. Lack of support staff, large class sizes, elimination of fine arts in some schools, and of course the mandatory test prepping classes that punished the students who scored low…. This type of legislation is what damaged education even more. The defunding of public education to fuel the voucher philosophy or school choice philosophy which is based in economic and racial discrimination.

*Special Note: My grief has never been with my colleagues or the school districts I have worked in. They have always been with the politicians of both parties that ignore research to place their biases into educational legislation.

Would you like to know why school hasn’t been fun for kids these last 20 years? It is the eternal punishment the kids see on their data tracking and test scores. Where is the child, in this mess of testing? Data, data, data, data, data….

Post Pandemic and the healing from trauma has introduced social well being education into our already busy day. Teaching also requires numerous meetings where each grade level teacher is using the same instruction, vocabulary, process, pointing to specific segments of the standards while using the data as an indicator of what was successful and what was failure. The freedom to plan a lesson during one’s planning period at the core curriculum level is limited. I’m lucky as a fine arts teacher, as I get more autonomy on my instruction.

Sociologically the students today are at greater risk than the students 35 years ago. Children are spending more time alone in their homes due to technology and parents/guardians needing to work multiple jobs to keep that roof over their head. Food scarcity is at an all time high. The food that is affordable is not nearly as nutritious to help grow a mind. Wealth disparity is also at an all time high. Children’s needs are not being met at the basic biological and emotional levels. If the needs for life are not being made at home (economically, developmentally) how are children supposed to succeed at school? (No, I’m not blaming parents. The issue is sociologically constructed by governance.) We teachers only get those children about 25% of their yearly life.

Herein lies my biggest grief with the situation. Since Reagan’s neoliberal economic policies took hold in the 1980’s our society has turned education into a transactional relationship with the ideals of capitalism. Every relationship in the school feels transactional from our behavior strategies to our relationships with colleagues. We all dance on egg shells trying to meet the expectations of our bosses, their bosses, and their bosses. Education is not a transactional relationship. Education is not based in capitalism. Education is a social responsibility where the people relate to one another by building communal social relationships that foster the development of curiosity and learning through freedom and guidance.

As I reflect on my life as a student and as an educator, I am just astonished at how politicians working within biased religious, moral, or capitalist mindsets have managed to dismantle and discredit the American Institute of Education in such a short period of time (four decades.) It makes me sad to see my noble profession always being kicked around by the elected that haven’t read a novel in the past decade.

I miss the early days of my teaching career and the student career I had before all of this political bias. Have there been good developments in education? Yes, but that is a different blog. The weight of these negative policy changes cause me great worry for the immediate future. Hopefully we can swing some of this back a ways after the mid-terms.

…so it goes…