For most of my life, I’ve wanted to do two things: teach and write. I’ve now done both, but I’ve been more successful at one than the other. I went to college to be a teacher. It took me five and a half years to get my degree and teacher certification. It took me a year and a half of substitute teaching to get a teaching position. I taught 9th-grade English and, later, World Geography at a majority minority high school southwest of Houston. I was teaching there on 9/11. I quit two years later. I lasted all of five years. It took me longer to get my degree and teacher certification than the time I was actually on the job.
Why didn’t I stay longer? There is a very long list of reasons, far too many to list here. Had the public school system been the one I had graduated from 10 years before, I might have stayed in the classroom. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The public school system is a mess and has been for decades. People wonder why public school teachers today have purple hair and like to talk about their sexuality with their students. They wonder where the normal teachers are. The normal teachers quit like I did. It’s simple, really. When you chase away the people who want to be there, like me, you’re stuck with what’s left, including the purple hair people.
Don’t believe me? The turnover rate for the state I live in, Texas, is 12%. Twelve percent of all teachers hired do not return for a second year. In the state’s largest district, the Houston Independent School District, the turnover rate is 15% higher! Nearly 30% of all teachers hired by Houston I.S.D. do not return for a second year. This absurdly high turnover rate is one of the many reasons that Houston I.S.D. is being run by the state right now and not the school district.
What is the problem? Why do so many teachers quit? What can be done to improve the public school system, if at all? The main problem, as I see it, is that teachers are no longer valued. They’re appreciated a couple of times a year, but they’re not valued. Teachers are interchangeable. Today, teachers are seen as the hired help. If one quits, you just find another. No big deal. My school district, the district I graduated from, did not see me as a teacher. I was a babysitter at a “problem school.” The district would never say that in public, but that was the very clear implication.
Students are believed over teachers. Teachers are expected to solve all the problems thrown at them without help or backup and without stopping the lesson. If the problems aren’t solved, it’s the teacher's fault. In fact, it’s ALWAYS the teacher’s fault, ALWAYS. Misbehaving student? Teacher’s fault, poor classroom management. Lack of supplies? Teacher’s fault, they didn’t bring enough. Not enough copies for the classroom? Teacher’s fault, they used up their allotment before the end of the month. Higher than average failure rate? Teacher’s fault, the lessons aren’t interesting enough. Do you see a pattern? I certainly do. It turns out that constantly being told you’re terrible at your job and that you’re wrong about everything is not conducive to teachers wanting to return for another year.
I would hope that this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this. Teachers do not teach for the money. I promise you, they don’t. I didn’t. I taught because I was good at it and I enjoyed it until I didn’t. Why complain? Teachers get the summers off. Surely that’s enough time to recover. It might be if teachers were paid during the summer. They’re not. Not unless they’re teaching summer school. Teachers are paid for nine months. They stretch nine months of pay to cover all twelve months. I know, I’ve done it. Who gets paid all twelve months? Administration. All the paper pushers sitting in their nice offices, making twice or three times what the average teacher makes, miles from any school, making sure they justify the continuation of their job, those are the ones who take an ever larger chunk of the money the school district receives. Those are the ones who need to go. Every last school district in the U.S. needs to be DOGED. Every last one.
There has been a fundamental shift in public education in the last twenty to thirty years, moving from student accountability to permissiveness, under the guise of equity and inclusion. Everyone, from the students to the faculty to the staff, is allowed to live their truth. Now, it’s okay for students to run wild, talk back to the adults, and assault the teachers. Anything goes nowadays. It’s not even babysitting, it’s chaos with an educational imprimatur. What happened?
Progressives happened. They rule with emotion, not logic. If they hear something they don’t like, they ignore it. Boys in the girls' locker room? What’s the big deal? The boys identify as girls; it’s sexist to kick them out. The girls should be more understanding. It’s never a progressive’s fault, either. They mean well. They just want everyone to be happy and equal. Yes, equally miserable.
With progressives in control, there is no one to enforce standards and accountability, so there are no standards or accountability. The agency supposedly created to enforce educational standards, the U.S. Department of Education, has been an absolute disaster. After its creation, the U.S. was no longer #1 in the world in terms of education. Today, according to the World Population Review, the U.S. is 38th in Math and 24th in Science.
Is there a solution? Or is the U.S. doomed? Yes, there is. It just takes people with a spine to bring it to fruition. The first step has already been taken, the closure of the Department of Education by the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon. While it is not as simple as clearing a building and turning off the lights, the process has begun, and that is a very good thing. Another step is the removal of tax money to the school districts via school choice. Currently, 12 states, including Texas, have school choice programs, and nearly 50% of students nationwide have access to some form of school choice program. Remove the money, remove the power. School districts waste eye-watering sums of money because they know more money is coming. More money is always coming.
I watched my department head explain, over the phone, to someone in the purchasing department, why she hadn’t gone through the “approved vendor” when buying dictionaries for the classroom in her department. At the time, dictionaries from Barnes and Noble cost $10 apiece; dictionaries from the vendor were $25 apiece. Rather than thanking her for saving the district money, the person on the other end of the phone was annoyed at her because the vendor was unhappy. I can’t repeat what she said when she hung up the phone because I don’t use language like that in public. This was 20 years ago; it’s only gotten worse.
A more recent example is from Houston I.S.D., the school district mentioned earlier. They were using expensive charter buses instead of regular school buses to take children to school, claiming a shortage of bus drivers stemming from Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Three years later, in 2020, Houston I.S.D. was still using charter buses instead of regular school buses. This practice came to an end after an investigation by a local television station.
Another step is returning accountability and standards to the schools. This will be far harder than it has to be because accountability and standards were tossed to the side a long time ago in large portions of the country. Making things look good replaced standards. Make sure you pass X number of students, so the failure rate is kept low. It doesn’t matter that the students can’t read or write. It doesn’t matter that the students can’t, or won’t, do the work. Report as few students as possible for class disruptions, fighting, assault, and truancy. Less reporting results in better-looking reports to the district, and that’s all that matters. Massage the state-mandated test scores so that not so many students fail. It looks bad if the scores are too low. Make it look good. It’s the Gilded Age all over again, this time in the public schools. As long as everything looks good on the top, the reality doesn’t matter. I, personally, was not allowed to give a grade lower than a 50. It didn’t matter that the student hadn’t done any work, any assignment, any test; they got a 50. Too many zeros look bad.
The shift from student accountability to make it look good will have to shift back to student accountability if the public school system is to survive at all. I don’t know if that can, or will, happen. There are plenty of people who are invested in keeping the public schools where they are, like the teachers’ unions. It is in their best interest to keep the public schools where they are because the school districts are where they get their money. They must be disbanded. The heads of both national teachers’ unions, American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, make six-figure salaries, and, while they were both teachers, it’s been a very long time since either was in a classroom.
All is not lost, however. There are some people working against the tide. One such person is Jared Lamb, a principal at a K-12 charter school in Baton Rouge, La. He doesn’t have an office. He roams around the school with a rolling cart, himself and his assistant principals. He supports his teachers in any way possible. Does a teacher need a bathroom break? He’ll step into the class. Do they need supplies? He’ll get them supplies. Disruptive students? He removes them. He needs to be cloned. He has the wonderful idea of ‘Let the teachers teach. Let them do their job.’ He is on Instagram, @principal_lamb and Facebook, principal_lamb.
Another standout is Trell Allen, a vice principal in Greensboro, N.C. It’s not known whether he is at a junior high or high school. He speaks to accountability and responsibility from, and for, parents, students, teachers, and administrators. He says what a lot of people are thinking, such as ‘Don’t expect the schools to solve the problems that a parent can’t (or won’t). There is one video he made of a student throwing a fit because he told them he was calling their parents. He waited for the fit to end and then called. It was a Master Class in behavioral expectations. He has an Instagram account, @viceprincipalallen, and a Facebook account, Trell.Allen.14.
Corey DeAngelis is an advocate for school choice. In 2024, he published a book on school choice titled The Parent Revolution. Parents, he argues, are their children’s first teachers and need to have more of a say in their child’s education. People aren’t assigned to a grocery store by their zip code or their address; why are schools like that? It’s not that hard to advocate for your child, but it does take time and effort, two things not in great abundance today. He has a Facebook account, coreydeangleis and an X account, @DeAngelisCorey.
Had I worked for someone like Principal Lamb or Vice Principal Allen, I might have stayed in public school teaching longer than I did. With people like them, teachers are actually allowed to do their job; they’re actually allowed to teach. What a relief that must be. What these two men do is simple and yet so effective. Support the teachers, help them whenever needed, and you will have people willing to follow you anywhere. It’s simple, but so many principals and vice/assistant principals don’t do that, for whatever reason.
Teachers and students are the foundation of the public school system. Without them, nothing else exists. When that foundation is undermined, everything else falls apart. The U.S. used to be #1 in the world in education, but that was a long time ago. I truly believe that the U.S. can regain that, but only if enough people are willing to stand up to the education establishment. I don’t know if that can happen.
For myself, I do not regret for a moment becoming a teacher. I’m really good at it, and I enjoy working with children. If I have any regrets, it’s that I went straight from college to a teaching job, but even with all the problems at the school I taught at, and there were plenty, I don’t regret working there, not for a moment. You learn from everything, the good and the bad. That’s a lesson that more people in public education need to learn, fast.
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