Let’s state one thing up front: My first job, after I graduated from college, was as a high-school teacher. I loved the work, but I found my career elsewhere. My wife Jill was a kindergarten teacher for eight years, before and after we were married. We are both ex-teachers, then. We both think that teaching is a noble profession and that teachers deserve more respect in our society. Most of them deserve more money, too, but some of them do not, which brings me to my first point.
When, at age 22, I decided that I didn’t want to spend a lifetime in the teaching profession, my reasoning went something like this: I think I’m an excellent teacher, and I like the challenge of teaching, but 20 years from now, if I’m the best teacher in my school, my salary will be exactly the same as if I’m the worst teacher in the school. That proved to be a powerful disincentive. Teachers’ unions exist to protect the mediocre, not to reward excellence, and in their vocabulary “merit” is a dirty word. So I left teaching behind.
I won’t attempt to speak for Jill, but I believe that her complaint had much to do with the winds of change that swept the teaching establishment in the 60s, change driven by would-be educational revolutionaries, change we saw first-hand as we raised three children in public schools that served as laboratories for Harvard theoreticians. There was a period in the 60s and 70s during which the education of small children was secondary to the ambitions of the self-proclaimed pioneers and grant-seekers. Millions of children were educationally short-changed in that era.
Then came the era of political correctness, best described by an anecdote. Years ago, as a member of a town finance committee, I toured an elementary school one evening just before Christmas. I mentioned to our guide that I didn’t see any evidence of Christmastide – no crèche, no wreaths, no pictures of the infant Jesus. “Oh, no,” I was told, “we can’t have any of that in here; it wouldn’t be allowed.” Then I spotted, in the hallway, a large framed photo of Nelson Mandela. Mandela was a hero, Christ was not, at least not in that (Massachusetts) school system.
The web of political correctness now overspreads just about everything we do, but it is most suffocating in our schools. Public support comes with strings, we all know, and a minority of taxpayers has the power to drive the educational agenda. In Leningrad I once saw a church that had been turned into a roller skating rink and another turned into a museum by people whose mantra, like that of many Americans, was “separation of church and state.” Once you really separate church and state, the Russians discovered almost a century ago, the state holds all the cards.
Back to the schools. The “special education” budget in Massachusetts towns was an open invitation for parents to claim extra privileges for their children, and suddenly a disproportionately high percentage of all students were “special,” their status proved by an army of consultants that sprang up for just that purpose. New handicaps were invented (or rather, new names for old handicaps), each with its own lobby and its own charitable foundation. We undoubtedly had the same “disorders” in the 30s and 40s, but we never knew about them.
The foundations raise money, they create jobs, and they are unstoppable, because they represent “investments in our children.” How can any selectman, any budget director, any voter fail to support a program designed to help our children? And if you waver, there is a steamroller coming right at you: the teachers’ union, possibly the most powerful lobby in the country. Where I live, we spend well over $10,000 a year to educate each one of our children. It’s not enough. It’s never enough. If enrollment drops 10 percent, program needs will expand 12 percent. Count on it.
If you want to poke this hornets’ nest, ask, at your next opportunity, what percentage of your school department’s budget or personnel count is devoted to classroom teaching? I tried that once, and the school superintendent could not or would not answer. That’s because the percentage is usually embarrassingly low. If you persist, you will eventually be told that the explosion in the non-teaching budget is a byproduct of various federal or state mandates. Maybe so, but a few years ago I remember reading that the huge Chicago parochial school system was run by about a dozen administrators.
Teaching, as I said, is a noble profession. If I were running things, I would try to identify the really top teachers and give them six-figure salaries. I would replace those who were mailing it in. I would hire math teachers who knew math, whether or not they knew how to compose lesson plans. I would make sure that at least 90 cents of every education dollar went straight into the classroom. And this time of year, there would be, in the school cafeteria, a tall Christmas tree with an angel sitting on top.
