Reminder: Why school choice WILL NOT fix the public schools.
The teacher staffing pool is the problem.
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This is your periodic reminder that school choice WILL NOT fix the public schools.
It makes sense to believe that giving parents options about where to send their kids to school would create competition between the schools, incentivizing better performance. If parents don’t like the school in their town, they can send their child (and the money that followers their child) to the one in the next town over. Easy, right?
Wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, school choice has a few benefits to it:
It will force parents to look at the schools their kids are going to more critically and ask questions about the quality of education they are receiving.
This will inherently result in parents discovering information about what’s going on in the schools they were previously unaware of.
This is a necessary part of the change management process of getting the public at large to shift their perspective of what public education is and should be.
All of those things are net benefits and will move as a society towards where we need to go: The complete separation of government and education.
We need this drastic revolution in education for one simple reason: The public schools are not fixable because the teaching pool is in inextricably corrupt.
The problem is not the curriculum - the curriculum is a symptom of the problem.
The problem is the teacher staffing pool.
Let me explain.
Where do teachers come from?
The vast majority of teachers are trained in colleges of education or have at least a bachelor’s degree from a different discipline.
Teachers learn how to be teachers in college, where they learn from professors who have been indoctrinated in the woke ideology for decades.
In addition, in some states, licensure requirements dictate that teachers undergo implicit bias or anti-racism training. So, if the teachers don’t get corrupted in college, they likely will after graduation.
However, most of the staffing pool is corrupted in college. That’s four years of daily instruction in a place where social justice is integrated into the curriculum in almost every subject they will take courses in.
That means that idyllic young students enter the universities…and come out as something very different. They are taught to believe it is their job to teach kids to be activists, sometimes even before they teach them how to read.
And remember, because this is what they’ve been taught by the people they trust, they don’t know any other way. The students who learn how to be teachers in these colleges believe this is what good teachers look like. They are victims of the ideology as much as anyone.
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School choice will not change what the colleges teach, and this is the critical point at which the teacher staffing pool is corrupted.
After college, the new indoctrinated graduates enter the teacher staffing pool. And for every one great teacher who makes it out of the colleges of education without indoctrination into the far left woke ideology, there are nine who succumb to it.
This collective staffing pool is what all schools have to hire from, including every public school, charter school, and private school.
Just because you are given a choice regarding which school to attend does not mean you are given a choice of the staffing pool those schools hire from.
That means it doesn’t functionally matter which school your kids go to - they will be taught by teachers who have been indoctrinated into the woke ideology.
This is virtually inescapable.
Good teachers will exist in every school, but most of the time those teachers are afraid to speak up because they know they are surrounded by people who will try to destroy their careers if they do.
Now, here’s the really scary part:
If we fired every woke teacher tomorrow, it still wouldn’t solve the problem. We wouldn’t have enough non-woke teachers to replace them with.
Getting rid of indoctrinated teachers does not create good teachers.
That is why we cannot fix the public schools, because it will take at least two generations (and that’s with a lot of luck) to create a new teacher staffing pool:
We need to train an entirely new staffing pool of teachers
We need to train an entirely new pool of professors in the colleges of education
And then, we need to completely overhaul the standards for teacher licensure that exist in the state boards of education
This is a herculean task, a problem we will not fix in our lifetime. But we can make progress by acknowledging the problem with are facing and grappling with what will be required to solve it.
This is why the public schools cannot be saved - they are not where the problem is being created in the first place.
The problem exists in public schools because the colleges of education have completely corrupted the teacher staffing pool, and the boards of education reinforce the woke ideology in their licensure standards.
To solve the problem, you must first identify the root cause of the problem.
Republicans believe the root cause of the problem in the schools is the curriculum. And they are wrong.
The teacher almost always selects the curriculum. Even if the school has a standard curriculum, once the classroom door shuts, the teacher runs the show.
The school boards can’t fix this. There are only two states where school boards have a say over the curriculum - Vermont and Connecticut.
The teachers select their curriculum based on the training they’ve received in the colleges of education, where they learned how to be teachers.
The root cause of the problem isn’t the curriculum - it’s how the teachers are being trained.
School choice doesn’t solve for that.
It simply gives parents other schools to send their kids to, but the teachers in those schools are coming from the same staffing pool that’s been corrupted by the colleges of education and reinforced by the state licensure requirements.
School choice is a worthy step forward that teaches the public what it’s like to have choices beyond what the state has given them. But it will not fix the public schools because it will not fix the problem where it is originating.
What do you think? Do I have this right or wrong?
Leave a comment and let me know!
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My son was an English major who graduated with a Bachelor's in English and a Bachelor's in Linguistics at the same time. He had never even thought about teaching, but the pandemic struck. The state offered him a free Master's in Teaching (not education) if he would teach in an underprivileged part of the State. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do yet, so he took them up on their offer. Because he hadn't majored in teaching, he wasn't brainwashed, but oh, how his new girlfriend was. She injected every woke idea wherever she could. He was there to teach English, so he focused on 8th grade kids with a 3rd grade reading level for 2 years. Did you know they do t even teach sentence structure anymore? He was a little tiny liberal when he started, lol. 2 years later and a slap in the face with life, he had taken all he could. The administration didn't want him to teach. They wanted him to babysit. He's in Liverpool now, at age 24 with a Master's in Teaching getting a new Master's in Psychology and found out they are also awoken. 😳 He's coming home very educated in September to help us run our Diesel Repair business. Yep.