Teachers! 

Education Support Professionals! Superintendents, Directors, Principals, Counselors, Assorted Officers (I'm sure I'm leaving somebody out)! School Board Members! 

(and other interested parties)

Abuse and intimidation at school board meetings. Harassment from parents. Book banning and burning. Newspeak and rhetorical legerdemain deployed by the enemies of public education. Makes your head explode, doesn't it? Does mine, and I'm retired. If you are still out there grinding and facing the debasement first-hand and head-on, let's talk about you are going through and what in the name of John Dewey we can do about it.

Of course, the truth is it's never been that great for us. Except in some chimerical past or Another Country where teachers are revered, I tell you! it has been the plight of teachers to face constant disparagement from critics **who know nothing of our work** but who are eager to stand back and throw stones big and small. Lately the stones feel more real than figurative.

And I'm not even talking--yet--about the student-teacher violence spawned by witless TikTok challenges or abetted by the failure of weak administrations to respond to threats, harassment, and genuine assault. That will be the subject of a (near-) future post.

And frankly, the regular attacks from consultants, district commissars, and administrators who may have spent just enough time carrying a roster to learn how to make a seating chart are now routine. Even the actions of legislators in Florida and elsewhere feel like an unsurprising extension of the ongoing assault. Sadly, we've come to expect it and, speaking for myself, I almost missed it when it didn't come. If I wasn't the target of some establishment flunky or another, it made me uncomfortable. It meant I was doing something wrong.

These days the assault is ubiquitous. Beyond the usual suspects, the condemnation seems to come from anyone who has ever stepped foot inside a classroom, and from many who seem to have wasted their time there. More than that, from COVID-19 protections to critical race theory, ideology trumps reason and the outrage is palpable and dangerous. Media coverage is hapless or worse as "news" outlets love their villains and fit teachers for the part. Again. Teachers are under attack, schools are battlegrounds, and the whole notion of public education as a shared enterprise and public good is in jeopardy. 

The "parents" I see on the teevee--grievance performance art forever stuck in the "outrage" default setting--look nothing like the parents I met when I was on the job. All that shouting, all those threats. Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe there was a shift as schools began to open, parents were exhausted from supervising remote schooling, and teachers--gasp!--were cautious about going back to in-person schooling under guidelines that would be predictably incomplete and inevitably disregarded. 

Thus the fifteen seconds during which teachers got credit for recreating an entire system in a weekend was just a blip, and we have returned to our regularly scheduled programming. 

Well, not exactly. It's actually worse. From Texas and Texas to California with Arizona in between, and let's just say many, many, other places around the country, educators are the focus of ideological aggression. 

Political is the operative word. For as long as I can remember--and I started school in the wake of school prayer and spent high school surrounded and confounded by the fight over busing--schools and schooling have been conscripted for ideological service. In more recent years, the pattern generally has looked like this: 

Incumbent: "Look what we've done for your kids! And no new taxes!"
Challenger: "The schools suck! And they're way too expensive!"
Election
Constituents: "You said the schools suck and are too expensive. Now fix the schools! And cheap!" 
New Incumbent: "Uhhhh..." (sound of deck chairs being rearranged) "Look what we've done for your kids!"
Challenger: "The schools suck!"

The punchline is that the ship has not collided with an iceberg. Nevertheless, candidates pretend it has so they can blast their opponents while offering themselves as the only ones who "can fix this." Sounds familiar, yeah?

The punchline to the punchline is that the media are dedicated accomplices because the fight is where the money is. Double-dipping is the rule of this road to hell as reporters pump the fight before the election and don their **somber voices** to tsk tsk the failure afterward. For an excellent breakdown of press complicity manufacturing a preferred (who's your education party, now?) narrative in the context of the Virginia Governor's race, Eric Boehlert has this.

And since comedy works in threes, the final punchline to the other punchline to the other other punchline is this: Almost everything politicians propose to "fix" the "problems" in schools and schooling--school choice, vouchers, incessant testing, the crusade against unionization--every silver bullet cure is pointed right at the head of the patient, who just gets sicker and sicker because the quick-fix medicine is actually poison.

I don't imagine any of this is news to you. But what you gonna do?

We have been the victims of bullying and intimidation and we see the result. There are crippling shortages of teachers and support personnel all over the country. This is the way this world ends.

If it is to end any other way, it's time to stand up, push back, 

and stir shit up. 

1. See the enemy and the enemy's game clearly.

    We want to believe that we're all in this together. We want to understand and serve our students, and we want to believe that everybody wants that. It's not true. 

    For the enemies of public schooling, there are a million masters to serve and promises to keep. For frightened or venal administrators, there are district overlords that open doors to promotion or pull the kill-switch on a career. There are private equity firms with shareholders and bogus non-profits with their donors. There are officials whose constituents expect them to fix the schools for free and get rid of the damn teachers. There are the constituents themselves, privileged in full flight whose kids will always be alright, or scared of a changed and changing world and duped by the disinformationists. And there is the media/press with its corporate mindset and horror of tax money spent on someone else's kids.

    These are some of the enemies we face. They are playing a long and brutal game and, make no mistake, they will settle for nothing less than complete victory. The sooner we recognize them for who they are, the better chance we'll have.

2. Find ways to serve students while resisting the worst of it.

    This is a tough one. When I was in the classroom I did my best to confront and subvert consultant culture, and I tried to throw sand in the gears of the runaway testing locomotive. 

Hey, sometimes you don't have to send kids out of your class for make-up exams. You might forget. And you might raise such a ruckus at a Professional Development that make-ups are given by out-of-classroom personnel during Advisory instead of during math class. I was a tenured teacher with a strong union and got away with it. Conditions may vary. Do you have any thoughts?

3. Find a way to shift the balance, retake the high ground, and beat the bastards. 

    Yeah, this is the big one. I'd say something like join the governing board, run for school board, become a principal (Caution! Body snatcher alert!), or a superintendent or a mayor or a governor, but who has the time? Certainly not you with your 150 students and grades coming up. Maybe old geezers like me... Now there's a thought.

    Also, there's this: Parents. Yeah, yeah, we see the evening news, but like I said, I don't know those people. The parents I knew were my allies and entirely dedicated to the success of their kids. They were thoughtful and engaged, and the only thing preventing them from being more active in advocating for important changes at the school site and at the district level was time (and I thought I was busy) and the built-in barriers to participation such as language and institutional mistrust. If teachers could only step forward as safe conduits for parent concerns and advocates for parent aspirations, this could be our most powerful alliance. I know this is happening at schools in L.A. Is it happening where you are?

    Anyway, this is where we really need the best and brightest to chime in. Answer Key is entertaining all offers.

NOTE: Writing this blog is so far similar to teaching remotely--nobody is turning on their screens. Please, if you are here, make a comment. If you are struggling with hostile bosses, parents and lawmakers, please let us hear your story. 

And please, if you have successful strategies for resisting, pushing back, or just surviving the onslaught, share them here.