“Education is being swept away in a tsunami of ignorance, a lack of foresight, and a love of the dollar”

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 | 11:01 a.m.

Elsewhere on this blog, I have posted a plaintive letter from a teacher who says he and his wife are leaving Nevada despite their success here because of the value placed on education.

I have received another one that is just as poignant and worth reading:

Rarely do we witness paradigm shift that takes place at a pace that is rapid enough to even be measured, but in this nation, we are standing by and watching change at warp speed. Sadly, the shift is not for the better, and in Nevada, the growing state of mind seems to be that our service industry base does not really require a huge educational background; thus, all legislators need to do is minimally fund what would appear to be free public education. If one wants real educational settings, go private, go charter, go expensive. If one simply can't afford that, go free with what they have to offer at our educational institutions, and when we can't produce a functionally literate generation of test-takers in classes of 55 for $1.98 a student, well, blame it all on the ultimate scapegoat, public educators who clearly don't do their jobs and whine and moan about pay and benefits. Hmmm...I suppose if one has the cash, and the contacts, keeping an "appointed" school board on your side would be simple, and when people become critical, sacrifice some CCSD teachers, students, administrators. Why worry? That method has always worked in the past. Spin the story. Alter the statistics. Hide the reality of the waste and keep the fat at the top. The public will buy what is sold because they are products of a grossly under-funded educational endeavor. Keep them ignorant! One need not fret about being analyzed by an uneducated and ignorant populace.

How convenient.

Wasn't it Hitler who said, "Knowledge is ruin to my young men?"

Makes one think, if one takes the time to do so.

No worries there. We can keep the masses happy with distractions and glitz. Keep those episodes of Jersey Shore coming. We wouldn't want to make room for critical thinking. As for staging meaningful protests, well, if Jersey Shore is cancelled, we might get a few more to show for rallies. I have always been one to feel that if someone violates my rights, or denies me due process, I stand up and make noise and lots of it ; however, the pitiful failures of rallies prove a sad point. People are rampantly apathetic until they take a hit personally, and the deciding powers that be will not be impacted by the abyss of mediocrity, if we even meet that lovely standard, because those with the money will have education that works. The rest of us, we get the welfare version with too little funding, too few qualified teachers, too many students in a room, and a plethora of tests and teacher evaluation tools to track all of the nonsense. We worship the educational reformers who can afford to pay for their statistics. We even welcome them to this state and publish their opinions in our papers. Maybe public educators should do what may be the reality of the future. Offer one room school house old-style teaching sessions and freelance. Students would get one on one attention, and the meaningless fat could be cut.

If all they want are test scores, I guarandarntee you I can produce stellar results whether I teach fifty students or ten, but if I am put in a classroom and continue to be required to maintain miles of records and “cover our backsides†forms all while fulfilling a myriad of other duties and extra curricular activities, on my own time, in a set schedule that does not mind current trends regarding what is conducive to real learning, well, I can still produce results, and most of us do just that even with the current testing formats. Dare I even address this aspect of our lovely educational system? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Unfortunately, the testing measures used today cater to methods of measurement that work for the masses. They do not measure genuine and valid growth and performance gains. Multiple choice simply is not an adequate form of assessment. My student portfolios with writings and exercises implemented over a period of time will document genuine achievement gains quite effectively. Teachers today still function under the weight of the mighty microscope, but the drive to do so at great personal costs financially and in massive amounts of personal time donated, in an environment where education is not valued as a culturally important foundation for a people does wane a bit when faced with such challenges. Why would young people want to put their time and energies into something we prove is worthless when we gut it and devalue it?

I have been a teacher here for over twenty years, and I promise you, the students are the only reason I keep working and loving my work. No one goes into education to get rich unless they have suffered massive brain injury. At the current pace of change, no one will even consider going into education without having suffered massive brain injury.

Ask students in classrooms today if they want to be teachers. A roar of laughter is all that will be heard. This is tragic. No melodrama. Really, tragedy of Greek proportions. I love my work. I value my students. I believe in education as the backbone of our society, but when I stand before my students and work to motivate them to see that learning for the sake of self-discovery and wonder and personal growth is critical and worthy, I feel like a liar when they listen to me and then look at what is taking place locally and nationally.

Given the horrifically large number of students who struggle in homes where they are abused, neglected, or simply tossed away like rubbish by adults who have lost their way to addictions of many types, student achievement is secondary to survival. Child Protective Services rarely even bothers to make a report on most teen abuse. They simply don’t have the time or resources. Engaging in meaningful interaction with parents grows increasingly rare when everyone works varying schedules and multiple jobs just to put food on the table. Somehow, these young souls do manage to make their way to school. So, we keep on hoping; keep believing; keep teaching and figure maybe some of them will be able to keep the torch alive so that our future is not a dark wasteland and new Dark Age. Young people are the burning hope for the future, and they have so much light to share with the world, but at this rate, I am not sure those of us left in education have enough energy to keep fanning the embers to keep them at least smoldering when the great raging storm of greed, political game playing, and a lack of respect for knowledge culturally and socially keeps producing a deluge. Education is being swept away in a tsunami of ignorance, a lack of foresight, and a love of the dollar and the power it grants for those who sit on the mountains and say, "Oh, look at that- the little social experiment of public education was just obliterated. Hmmm...sad that didn't work out." Okay, now that was melodramatic, but it feels pretty accurate. I have to go now and put on my lifejacket and find something resembling a boat because come Hell or high water, I am a teacher. Teaching is what I do, and when the waters recede, I will be drying out my Shakespeare, my Hawthorne, even my stick to draw diagrams of sentence structure in the sand because without knowledge, without learning, the thing with feathers dies. Even hope has to be kept alive, and I won't ever stop believing in the value of learning. For me, hope will spring eternal because I will make it so.