The federal Education Department has been making a lot of headlines lately.
The agency may be dismantled completely this year if President Donald Trump’s executive order is to be codified into law by Congress.
Believe it or not, there are a lot of mixed feelings about this in the education world.
Anyone who has ever taught in the classroom will tell you that there is sometimes a love-hate relationship between teachers and state and federal education officials. Most days, it’s mutual disdain, but there are holidays and such.
I thought that I would share some stories over the course of the next several weeks about my one year in the classroom, otherwise known as 181 Days of Hades.
I always preface my teaching stories by making it clear that I was as bad for teaching as it was for me.
My first and only teaching job was in my hometown at the high school where my parents had attended decades earlier. The district was a disaster, and the high school was the epicenter of the dysfunction. They had just hired a new administrative staff, and by the end of the first week I had come to realize that new administrative staffs at that school were an annual, and sometimes semi-annual occurrence.
During the first day of orientation, I sat behind a middle-aged man with long graying and somewhat receding red hair.
He turned around, and he reached out his hand for a shake.
“What are you going to be teaching?” he asked.
I responded that I had been assigned World History and Advanced World Geography.
He then told me that he was the U.S. History teacher and that he was the chair of the history department. He had decades of experience, and he even boasted about having been named in the Clarion Ledger years before Teacher of the Year for the state of Mississippi.
We chatted for a while, and then he started to tell me about the previous school year. Apparently, it had been pretty rough.
“If last year had been my first year, it would have been my last year,” he told me.
I chuckled.
“No,” he said, “I am serious. You know that Kangaroo store on the highway? That’s where I’d be working if last year had been my first year.”
At the conclusion of orientation week, the school district allowed teachers a half day on Friday to ready their rooms for the arrival of students the following Monday.
My new friend the history chair walked me to my room.
There we found a couple of dozen old pupil desks and a whiteboard that still had World History lessons on it from the prior year. According to the textbook, the teacher who came before me had made it about three months before giving up. That was consistent with the hour that it took me to wash off the “washable” marker.
On another wall, there was a chalkboard with historical maps hanging overhead. These were the old maps that history teachers would pull down to provide geographical context during lessons.
I pulled down the map of the world. I stared at it for a moment, and then I noticed that a large swath of Eastern Europe bore the title The United Soviet Socialist Republic.
“This map still has the Soviet Union on it,” I said to the history chair.
He looked at it to confirm that for himself, and then he turned back to me.
“That will come in handy when you teach about the Cold War,” he said.
The teacher before me had barely gotten to the Roman Empire.
Over the course of the next nine months, I learned three important words, “Resources are limited.”
As it turned out, resources weren’t as limited as we were led to believe each day.
While teachers purchased their own reams of copy paper for tests and lessons, the school had an entire room, under lock and key, with stacks of reams that were for administrative use only.
The district employed a total of four administrators for that one building, and yet, fights and academic failures persisted.
The mission to educate kids and equip them for practical real world scenarios never gained footing. Instead, the task each day was to comply with the failed No Child Left Behind Act and to make sure that as many people passed their state tests as possible.
And that mentality seemed to never be discouraged by the state department of education, which had a heavy presence there.
That is why many educators, while lamenting the current threats to funding, may also relish the idea of ed departments, instead of being rewarded for their failures, finally getting their comeuppance.
There are a lot of districts that do a great job of supporting educators, but for teachers who work at schools where little accountability is taken at the administrative level, getting thrown under the bus is a daily occurrence.
Watching the feds sweat a little for once has to be at least a little satisfying.
