public school or for-profit business?

Over coffee, I attempted to explain to my South Korean friend what the organizational structure of Texas public schools look like. Starting at the bottom of my notebook page, I scribbled upward, trying to connect the dots between a school campus and the school board in my district. “Every state and district is different, so this is only one example of how things are structured,” I told her.

If I’m being honest, this is likely an inaccurate and comically incomplete understanding of the structure of the district. In my career as a middle school teacher, I only had brief glances behind the curtain of the machine that is an urban public school district, so my knowledge is limited. I don’t think that my ignorance is by accident. I only know what I know because I ask a lot of irritating questions and had the opportunity to serve in roles outside of my classroom while also teaching. From where I was sitting – behind my classroom door – it seemed to me that the district didn’t want folks to know how the sausage is made.

“It’s like a business, “ I told my friend. “The superintendent is the CEO and they answer to the board.” I went on to explain that there are two branches of leadership: the executive and the academic.

“But, who is in charge?” she asked.

“The executive branch,” I said. “The academic branch has no power.”

My friend blinked at me. “Then, what is it all for,” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I told her. And I really don’t.

I had the opportunity to “write” English Language Arts curriculum as a side gig for the district while I was teaching. I use the quotation marks because, while I was given the power to choose texts and activities for this new curriculum, I was also given a rigid state-sanctioned structure and language to follow and was told that the curriculum won’t be enforced, that it’s just a suggestion. And my teaching experience confirmed this. My principal gave me full license to teach whatever I wanted – as long as my test scores stayed on the upward trend. If my test scores were less than shiny, then I’d be scrutinized for straying from the curriculum.

And that was the unspoken rule I learned to live by. If your test scores are up and you volunteer to do extra free work and no parents are complaining about you and you’re able to look exemplary when the executives walk through the school, then you can teach and do pretty much whatever you want. Now, as a teacher, I loved this. Simply loved it. I got a lot of praise and appreciation, my principals never bothered me, my students loved me, and I was able to teach my students to oppose authority and to question the status quo without losing my job.

But there’s a but in this story.

During the pandemic, I spent some time on the outside of the circle of the beloved. I stopped volunteering, started saying no to a lot of things. I started pushing back against hybrid teaching as an “equitable” measure. I made a couple of libertarian/trumper parents angry while I was teaching Animal Farm. And the praise stopped coming. I had far more walk-throughs. I was asked how my instruction aligned with the curriculum (even though no one else’s did, either). I went from go-to superstar teacher of the year to the assistant principal sitting me down to ask me in calculated condescension if I really thought that what I was doing was the best thing for my students.

The thing is, what I was doing was refusing to cater only to the students who were in front of me in my classroom, instead of all of the students on my roster.

See, Texas sent teachers back to their classrooms before there were vaccines available. We were told that the safety and wellness of our students was in jeopardy and that our economy was suffering and that it was our jobs to show up to work to fix that. So, we taught students in our classrooms. And taught students in virtual classrooms. And taught students that we never actually saw in-person or virtually. All at the same time. In each class period, we had three audiences to teach for. In person. Virtually. Asynchronously.

And before I say anything more, I need to say this: online/virtual/asynchronous learning royally, completely, and fantastically sucks.

Anyway. In order to get marked present for the day, students had two choices: show up in person or engage online in any way. Now, this part is tedious, but hang in there with me. All students had to do to be marked present was make their presence known (log into an online school platform, turn in a blank assignment, email your teacher with a blank email, click a box on an attendance form, or any proof of engagement). So, this means, students could do zero “work” and be counted present for the day. This is important because funding is based on enrollment and attendance. If students don’t show up, then the powers-that-be can argue that we’re not serving those students and therefore do not need the fistful of bent washers and pocket lent the state sends to fund those students.

So, if a student, whose face I’ve never seen, whose voice I’ve never heard, sends me a blank email, then they are marked “present” because it can be legally argued that the student attended school. It’s basically the equivalent of a student coming to class, falling asleep for 8 hours, and being counted present (which happens a lot more than you might think).

Ask yourself this: how long would 14-year-old you be motivated to battle a shitty wi-fi connection to perform a meaningless task every day during a global pandemic to be given arbitrary credit for something that has zero impact on your daily life?

District administration started seeing attendance drop off for asynchronous students. Then virtual students. Because online instruction effing sucks. So, then the campus principals and assistant principals were all tasked with getting those attendance numbers back up, which means they started doing classroom walk-throughs (read: inspections) to make sure teachers were still creating engaging and compelling lessons every day. The new mantra was “focus on the kids in front of you.” The explanation was that we were losing the online kids anyway, so we might as well do good where we can – with the kids in front of us.

But guess which kids were the ones in front of us. I can’t speak for the whole school, but in my classroom, the kids in front of me – the kids whose parents had them attend school before vaccinations and amidst battles over the legality of mask mandates – were predominantly white, able-bodied, high-achieving students who enjoyed healthy immune systems and unfettered access to high quality healthcare. I was being told to focus on these students and not to worry about the rest of them.

We were also told to “extend grace” to the students who weren’t showing up. It was explained to us during a staff meeting that the pandemic had been really hard on families, that some of our students were sleeping in cars, that many had no internet connection, so please “extend grace.”

For non-teachers, I will translate: “We know you haven’t considered your students’ circumstances at all, so we’re asking you to pass students so you don’t make everyone’s life harder. If you decide to fail students – even if you never heard from them this year – you are required to submit a packet of paperwork on each student, justifying why you failed them. But we leave the decision and responsibility up to you.”

Folks, grades are arbitrary. Meaningless. Oppressive. But that’s a rant for a different post.

I was already saying no to extra work, already on the radar for stirring up the disapproval of the anti-socialist parents when my assistant principal showed up for an unannounced walk-through. She scribbled notes for about 5 minutes, then left. It was during my lunch break that she came back to ask questions about my instruction. She asked me why I was only providing online instruction for the students in front of me, instead of doing what I would normally do in class.

I told her, “because that’s not equitable. I’m not going to give these students more instructional perks than I give all of my students just because their life circumstances make it more convenient.”

She said, “I think you’re trying to make it equal, not equitable.” She told me that I must not understand what equity means.

On the back of her binder, she showed me a graphic of children standing at a fence, watching a ball game. She pointed to the crates that the shorter students were standing on and tried explaining that the crates are equity.

Because I was at an utter breaking point, and because I was unable to wrangle the immense frustration and welling tears, I couldn’t collect my focus enough to point out, firstly, the deeply troubling nature of the graphic. Brown kids at the fence line, struggling to steal a glance of America’s favorite pastime. Really? Is that education summed up in one graphic to teach the wayward teachers like myself about equity?

And secondly, I couldn’t find the words to express how what she wanted me to do, what the district and the state wanted me to do, was to take the crates away from those kids whose eyes have never seen the game from the stands and give those crates to the kids who watch the whole season from the boxes high above.

I said, “no. I’m not doing that. I’m not giving these kids construction paper and group activities and in-person experiences that those kids don’t have access to. I won’t do it. It’s not right.”

And that’s when she dropped the bomb on me. She asked me the question that cut the deepest of any question she could ask.

“Do you really think that’s what’s best for your students? Do you really think that what you’re doing is the best for them?

I lost all sense of space and time in the face of that question. I felt like the chair under my body abandoned me, that the floor and the sky were both rejecting my presence. That question from an evaluating superior absolutely destroyed me.

After 7 years as a classroom teacher, after all of the unpaid hours, the toll on my body, the missed moments with my own children and family, the constant negotiation of pain during school shootings, disaster drills, students’ funerals, teachers’ funerals, after 7 years of fighting every educational battle that my body could possibly fight because every battle was important, after my family getting covid from another teacher, after watching the light in my students’ eyes fade to hopelessness, one of my many bosses was now sincerely asking me if I was actively working against my students’ best interests on purpose.

I didn't say this because losing even one inch of ground as a teacher can be devastating to your career, but the answer to her question is no. Absolutely not. This is hands-down, 100%, without a blip of a doubt, not in my students’ best interest. At all. Of course it’s not. But because of the system, I – the teacher – will be granted both the responsibility and the blame for failing the children of the nation.

Because public schools are a for-profit business.

I imagine that the employees at your local Walmart have never and will never meet a Walton. Classroom teachers in a large, urban school district likely won’t ever meet the superintendents that cycle in and out of the district over the course of their careers. Nor is it likely they’ll meet the executive directors, assistant superintendents, instructional directors, or instructional assistant superintendents. Or the board members. School districts are sometimes convoluted political bureaucratic businesses that cloud the very purpose of an institution built to serve the public good.

Businesses in this country are built to turn a profit. And in business, those crates at the ballfield are an expense that, at the bottom line, are surplused to serve the profit margin. And so are the kids standing on those crates. So are the teachers showing up to serve. Those in the ivory tower send in the middle management to roll heads and clean things up so the numbers get better and the profit gets bigger.

And what is the profit to be gained in public education? Right now, it’s test scores and a numeric point system because that’s what businesses need. CEOs need a way to distinguish the red from the black in the ledger. They need a stat and a percentage to point to. This many passed. This many graduated. This many went to college. This many didn’t.

The ledger, though, doesn’t account for the humans in those stats. The identities and lived experiences, the heritage and wisdom of the children in the system are simply issues to navigate in the race to improve the profit margin. Like a shift in the market threatening stock value, the individual lives of children are chalked up to tally marks under the name of an employee meant to sap the most out of each tally mark on their roster. And in our struggle to move those tally marks from the red to the black, we all get so lost in the system that we don’t realize we are – each one of us – subject to the business model.

We lose sight of the notion that my assistant principal isn’t my enemy, that she's actually a fantastic leader; that the students who refuse to do work or show up are not a liability, that they are vibrant and invaluable facets in our collective existence; that the “diversity hire” central administration who’ve never taught in a classroom and who enact disconnected mandates aren’t my enemy, that they're a beacon in the struggle to rewrite the narrative of their community's legacy. These are all humans, stripped of their unique beauty and power in a system designed to keep them focused on the ledger.

What will happen to my students who remain red on the ledger? What will happen to the ones who sent me a blank email and got moved from the red to the black without so much as a second glance? What happens to these lives that we’ve legally required to show up in a system that doesn’t value them? As far as I can tell, they get filed away at the end of the year, along with all the other red tallies in all the other ledgers we’ve stacked up since the business was established.

Indeed, my friend, what is it all for?