Exclusive: Patrice Lewis predicts a continual downward spiral in U.S. public education system
It's not easy being a public school teacher these days. Not only must they contend with often-conflicting demands from school boards and parents, but they are frequently unable (or not permitted) to discipline unruly students, must contend with a huge variety of culture and language distinctions, and must often intervene in instances of physical or psychological abuse. Teachers are also facing a massive influx of migrant children, making classrooms even more complicated.
"Teaching has turned into behavior management day care," said one teacher. "It sucks the joy out of you all day, and then the parents are calling to suck out some more joy. A select handful of kids are incredible and fantastic. So many kids won't turn anything in as in earning a literal 0 for the semester. While all of this is going on you'll have admin and the network telling you the kids are failing because you didn't set them up for success, you didn't invent a new wheel, you didn't take enough data, you didn't love them into behaving better."
Another person observed, "I feel like most teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The school administrators fail to protect their teachers from those overbearing parents demanding good grades for their child, regardless of whether or not they earned it. They can't teach anything anymore for fear of some parent getting mad or taking offense. It's a mess."
This isn't to imply teachers are saints. Consider this hot mess of a headline: "Satan worshipping teacher who suffers from 'mania and psychosis' fired after Libs of TikTok exposé." When you see stories like this, I wonder how anyone has the courage to send their kids to public schools in the first place.
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And of course, academics are suffering, and not just because of the disastrous COVID lockdowns. Reading and math are steadily declining when compared to other nations. And yet progressive districts keep implementing more and more disastrous programs, such as the "equitable grading practices" that outlaw (outlaw!) "zeroes" for cheating or failing to turn in assignments.
As a result, many teachers are burned out and leaving the profession. Schools face massive staffing shortages. No one, it seems, wants to be a teacher anymore. Frankly, I can't blame them.
I confess I have mixed feelings about teachers. I had some tremendous instructors in my youth, as I'm sure you had as well. I have numerous friends and relatives who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching, and have done a phenomenal job at it.
But there are, unfortunately, all too many teachers whose sole and exclusive goal is to indoctrinate their students into the extreme leftist lifestyle. Rather than equipping children with the tools for a productive adulthood, these change agents are turning students into helpless snowflakes and professional victims. In fact, many teachers are hired specifically for that purpose. Some states are even mandating extreme leftist ideological training for teachers.
Teachers are also tasked with the impossible job of walking the line between two deeply divided ideologies: the radical left and the conservative right. Nothing they do will please both these deeply polarized sides. Nothing.
And so teachers are leaving the profession. And it gets worse: Fewer and fewer people are entering the profession to begin with. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, there is a massive drop in college students seeking degrees in education to pursue jobs in teaching. This decline has been going on for decades, but has accelerated in the last few chaotic years.
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This creates something of a doom loop. The teachers who remain get burdened with even more tasks and responsibilities, which leads to more burnout, which leads to more teachers leaving, etc.
The trouble, of course, is teachers are no longer required to teach. They're tasked with indoctrinating, and that's a whole different ball game. Tyrants throughout history have learned the most effective way to stay in power is to capture children while young, and America is no exception. As a result, public school kids can spew endless drivel about climate change (which contributes to a massive mental health crisis) but can't add fractions or subtract. In fact, the public education system has now become a laughingstock on the world stage.
Bottom line: The good teachers are working against the tide with a broken system, and the bad teachers are part of the problem. The good teachers are being drummed out or scared away from teaching to begin with, and only the nutcases remain.
So what will public schools do with such a teacher shortage? Well, in the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, there are all kinds of ideas now being put forth, all of which are determined to raise a progressive phoenix from the ashes of education.
One of those ideas – put forth, unsurprisingly, by Bill Gates – is to have AI teachers. While he stopped short of saying these would replace human teachers, he certainly feels it could supplement instruction in the classroom. Three guesses who will be programming these AI instructors.
All of this seems to me like rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. Public education has been subject to fads for decades, certainly since I was a child in the 1960s and '70s. Yet somehow nothing ever improves. Only when competition exists (i.e. private schools, etc.) do academics flourish.
As long as the extreme leftists have an iron grip on public schools, things will continue to spiral downward in American education. More and more good teachers will throw up their hands in frustration and retire, leaving the radical teachers to continue the doom loop.
The future of public education is anyone's guess.
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