impedimenta vocationis, or...

 "Why So Sad?"

It's back to school as Los Angeles Unified joins districts around the country in the post-holiday, in-person student and staff scavenger hunt, aka "Where is Everybody?" Oh Boy. 

As you know, across the country teachers and staff are sick and sick of the madness, and intelligent parents are reluctant to send their kids into the maw of the beast while equally intelligent students are refusing to offer themselves up as sacrifices to the ideological and economic deities reigning over The Greatest Country In The World. (Caution Nitwit Crossing: I am not referring to the deranged California anti-vaxxers pulling their kids out of school so they can march with them holding up dopey signs while they hack up talking points --"show me the science!" and "my child's body something something"--about shit they are too stupid to even want to understand).

Chicago Teachers are fighting the Good Fight. At some schools, thirty percent of the staff is out sick. Kids are walking out in New York. But across The GCITW, bazillions of people who spend a lot of time yakking about public schools without bothering to spend any time in them have thoughts. "Children need to be in school!" they declare, not knowing what that will look like but at least it'll be quiet around the house. And don't get me started on childcare! The howling intensifies--"schools must be open! in person! for the children!"--in spite of...well...anything. 

Chin Up, teachers! This is actually good news! Oh yeah. It's what we call a teachable moment. Here's a nugget, fresh from the "Every challenge is an opportunity" cliché dispenser.

Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.

Translated from the original Nietzsche and hammered into a paraphrase celebrating toughness and resilience, it goes something like "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." 

Only it's not true. Not true at all.

What doesn't kill you can leave you smashed and broken, exhausted, discouraged and depressed. If you are a teacher these days (or any other kind of human), you are running hard on a treadmill going faster than you are and you're ready to break. You might be thinking, "I'm working as hard as I know how to work and all I hear is how terrible teachers are. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I just can't take it."

Maybe you can't. There are a million reasons someone might want to leave the profession, but people saying mean things about you isn't a very good one. Nor is the fact that you don't get everything you want. Nor the fact that your bosses are idiots and make you do stuff you don't want to do while taking away every good thing. If a middle schooler can survive that nonsense, you can too. You did. You can survive this, too. 

But it is hard. I did it for twenty-five years and I understand. I certainly get that it was a lot easier "back then." Even though I retired barely a year ago, in that one year teachers have been dropped physically into the middle of a virus superstorm armed only with sham promises of new "safety protocols" and masks and hand sanitizer they bought themselves. You've had to endure the anti-vax, anti-mask maniacs and dodge the mountains of CRT bullshit. You've had to withstand the hostility of the ignorant and the ignoble who blame you for wanting to save the lives of your school families and your own.

And you've had to do all that while the usual suspects--venal climbers in the Principal's Suite, brain-dead district lackeys, the anti-public school crusaders in the Privatizer Brigade--have continued to damage students, undermine your work, and destroy the institution you have dedicated some or a lot of your life to sustaining. Well, at least that hasn't changed. 

We will eventually find a way to manage COVID and stay reasonably safe. The maniacs will find something else to rant about, and maybe it won't be schools. And the CRT thing? What CRT thing? It served its immediate purpose in Virginia and went on break. Even when they inevitably resurrect it for political ammunition, teaching the truth about racism will always be something worth fighting for.

COVID sucks in the extreme and there's nothing you or anybody can do except everything they tell us to do to keep ourselves and our friends and families safe. But the people who are making your life miserable are knowable and beatable. Some are just bad bosses in the way that bosses all over the known universe are bad, and you will find a way to impede them, ignore them or fool them in order to do what you know is right. 

However, the Big Project to Destroy Public Schooling that has been grinding forward for decades is kicking into high gear, and these enemies are not going to give up or forget about the multi-billion dollar reservoir of public funds they are itching to get their hands on. In fact, the pandemic offers the perfect opportunity to further ravage a system under stress and slice off another chunk.

Some of these weasels are plutocrats looking to cash in. Some hate public schools for providing opportunity across class lines. Some of the haters are still seething over the elimination of state-sponsored prayer in schools. And some are permanently appalled by integrated classrooms. All of them, though, are salivating over the big juicy pie of public money they've dedicated their entire so-called lives to getting a piece of.  

These demolition and excavation experts have already had considerable success. The Supreme Court will soon decide how much more. That part is familiar to anybody in the education biz anytime in the last two decades. It's also infuriating and exhausting. And heartbreaking. 

But here is the important part: Your heart is much stronger than you realize. That's how you ended up a teacher. You're smart and tough and you absolutely can survive this. Don't give up, is what I'm saying.

Of course I'm saying it from retirement. I don't carry a roster anymore, and I'm here writing about it, not there going through it. That's a fair criticism and I acknowledge it. But teachers have been dropped in the shit up to the eyeballs for as long as there have been clueless dilettantes and rapacious grifters cashing in, and I swam through it for twenty-five years. When I left, I left in my time, on my terms, when I had done what I set out to do. Don't let them force you out before your time. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

How? How do you not just say screw it and hit the snooze button? Get up tomorrow and find an easier job that pays more and where nobody hates you for being good at it. How do you carry on? 

I don't know for sure how you can, but I know that it can be done. I know that stubbornness helps. A bit of flexibility when necessary. I know you should never underestimate the value of outrage and pure, unalloyed anger. I  always felt I got strength and the energy to sustain my career from looking directly into the faces of those who are rooting for us to fail and making it harder for us to succeed. And saying--at least to myself and my friends--Fuck Those Bastards. 

In that spirit, I think Diane Ravitch has it about right when she asks:

Who is responsible for the widespread teaching exodus? Who demoralized America’s teachers, the professionals who work tirelessly for low wages in oftentimes poor working conditions? Who smeared and discouraged an entire profession, one of the noblest of professions? 

and goes on to assemble a rogues' gallery of culprits. She continues and puts a lot more meat on the bone in a follow-up post:

Last week, I posted my thoughts on “Who Demoralized the Nation’s Teachers?” I sought to identify the people and organizations that spread the lie that America’s public schools were “broken” and that public school teachers were the cause. The critics slandered teachers repeatedly, claiming that teachers were dragging down student test scores. They said that today’s teachers were not bright enough; they said teachers had low SAT scores; and they were no longer “the best and the brightest.”

The “corporate reform” movement (the disruption movement) was driven in large part by the “reformers'” belief that public schools were obsolete and their teachers were the bottom of the barrel. So the “reformers” promoted school choice, especially charter schools, and Teach for America, to provide the labor supply for charter schools. TFA promised to bring smart college graduates for at least two years to staff public schools and charter schools, replacing the public school teachers whom TFA believed had low expectations. TFA would have high expectations, and these newcomers with their high SAT scores would turn around the nation’s schools. The “reformers” also promoted the spurious, ineffective and harmful idea that teachers could be evaluated by the test scores of their students, although this method repeatedly, consistently showed that those who taught affluent children were excellent, while those who taught children with special needs or limited-English proficiency or high poverty were unsatisfactory. “Value-added” methodology ranked teachers by the income and background of their students’ families, not by the teachers’ effectiveness.

All of these claims were propaganda that was skillfully utilized by people who wanted to privatize the funding of public education, eliminate unions, and crush the teaching profession.

More villains follow, largely taken from suggestions made by readers of her excellent blog. In additional posts, Ravitch discusses the new private bounty hunters and the old "voucher vultures." And please do read through the comments, made by not-robots, many of whom are or were actual teachers instead of politically motivated bloviators looking for a consulting job. 

If you're wondering why teaching--even in a pandemic--is so much more difficult than it has to be, which is to say, more difficult than the practically impossible job it already is even under the best circumstances, you can start with these lists. Look your enemies in the face and learn their names. You may find that some you've known forever, but some you may have thought were your allies. They are not. Our enemies are mere mortals engaged in an immoral project. Identifying our enemies and calling them by their names gave me strength. And giant reservoirs of anger. Which kept me going for decades. It may help you.

It's hard, but in Chicago and New York and New Haven and Philadelphia and Fort Worth and Des Moines and Los Angeles and Oakland and a million other places around the country--in every other place around the country--students and parents and teachers and staff are fighting for their schools and figuring it out in real time. You are not alone.

No one is alone.