Hats & Masks

When I was in 8th grade (in 1985), my mom and I went to Japan for three weeks in October.  It was field trip season, so many of the sites we visited were full of school groups.  As an 8th grader from California, I couldn’t help but notice the hats.  Each class wore the same hats while they were on trips, so place like Mt. Fuji were awash in waves of yellow hats, white hats, red hats, and blue hats.  Even as an 8th grader, I remember thinking that this would never fly in the United States.  I couldn’t even imagine what would happen if our school tried to make every kid in my class wear a hat for any length of time, but I imagined that many would end up getting thrown, getting lost, getting crumpled into backpacks or back pockets, floating down streams, or being worn in any way besides on people’s heads. I imagined that our teachers would quickly get tired of telling people to put their hats back on and that the expectation to wear hats would fizzle out pretty quickly.  

When the CDC (before Trump took it over) came out with its guidelines for reopening schools last May, I (like many teachers) had questions.  How will we get our students to keep their masks on?  What will happen if a child refused to wear a mask?  What if they hadn’t brought a mask?  Would we need to buy extras, or would the school supply them?  What if a child slimed their mask after a sneeze or a cough, or dropped it in the toilet, or chewed through it? Would children with sensory or other issues be able to handle wearing masks all day?  And what would happen if they NEEDED to wear a mask in order to be in a classroom?  How much would our administration be willing to back us up?  What would we do in the more likely scenario that our administration wasn’t going to do much to help with this?  How many days would probably go by before a parent sent a note saying that their child thought her mask was uncomfortable, and so they were giving her permission to not wear one?  How many days before a parent said that they felt the mask requirement was an infringement on their child’s freedom and personal rights, so they weren’t going to make their child wear one, weren’t going to send their child to school with one, and weren’t going to support the school when their child refused?  I wondered whether teachers should start a betting pool now. Teachers started making videos about what they guessed that wearing masks would look like in their classrooms.

People talk about schools’ reopenings and say that other countries did it successfully.  But they’re ignoring that other countries have more of a concept of doing things for the good of their community.  We are comparing ourselves to other countries where people trust the government and follow reasonable mandates.  When the government says, “each child must wear a mask to school,” children in Hong Kong all wear masks to schools.  People don’t argue about it.  They don’t ask for personal exceptions.  They don’t make it into an issue about freedom or personal choice.  They don’t fall back on the self-centered relativism of “Respect my choice to not wear a mask and I’ll respect your choice to not wear one” (while conveniently ignoring the fact that wearing a mask protects other people from THEIR germs). 

This is why other countries have flattened their curve.  This is why their schools can reopen without taking as much risk of spiking rates.  Maybe questioning authority, thinking independently, and not joining the herd is part of what makes our country innovative and dynamic.  But it doesn’t work during a pandemic, when collective action is required of EVERYONE.  But our country’s political divisions sabotage any effort at collective action.  Even simple steps like “wear a mask” become a political debate, and become about larger, more existential issues like “freedom” and “choice.”  Maybe the U.S. will never embrace wearing matching hats, but country that cannot even summon the collective will to all wear masks or follow basic health guidelines is not ready to reopen its schools.

Genre Lag and Online Instruction

The content for new genres is usually grafted from old genres.  Many of the first written texts -- ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, to Ireland’s The Tain, to India’s Vedas -- were transcriptions of epic poems that were told orally, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of years before they were written down.  But what is entertaining when told over an entire winter -- or even years -- can seem a bit slow and repetitive to a person reading it in a book, particularly with the repetition and mnemonic devices (such as Homeric epithets like “white-armed Hera”).  We don’t need the same features in a written text we might read over a few days as we do in a poem we are listening to around a fire over the course of an entire season or longer. 

Newer genres have followed the same pattern.  Many of the first radio shows were classical concerts and vaudeville acts. Many of the first T.V. programs were radio news, variety shows, or dramas that included the innovation of showing the people talking.  Many of the first “talkie” movies were plays, and initially the only camera angle was the front view an audience would see when looking at a proscenium stage.  The first websites were printed texts posted online.  Many of the first youtube videos were basically home videos.

                    "42nd Street" 1933 film of a stage play

With any new genre, it takes us time to figure out how to best use that genre.  We need to go through the learning curve, go through a trial-and-error process, play with it, to find out what its strengths are and how to best engage the reader, viewer, or listener.  It took millennia for written literature to fully separate itself from oral storytelling, and for authors to realize how they could use spacing on the page to communicate visually, and how stories and poems that are meant to be read should present information in a different way than stories that were meant to be heard.  It took several years for film directors to start to play with the zooms and camera angles that film allowed, but viewing a stage performance did not.  It has taken us a couple of decades to go from web pages of static text to pages designed to be read on screens, with hyperlinks, images, and shorter blocks of text.  Similarly, youtube videos have evolved into their own sets of genres and sub-genres designed to engage viewers within their ten-minute medium.

Although online instruction has been around for awhile, and although many long-time online instructors have already been exploring and improving on advantages offered by that format, many of us had only recently begun to teach online and hybrid courses.  Many more of us did not begin until COVID-19 forced them to move our courses online, often with a week or less to transition.  Often this transition to online instruction, and our likelihood of moving to hyflex this term, has centered around putting our in-person courses online by recording and posting lectures, or by having students take quizzes online and turn in papers online.  

Genre lag still permeates the design of our instructional technology.  Course management systems like Canvas include many innovations, but they are still designed around the idea that the instructor will send out content to the class and will view and respond to each student’s work individually; it has few robust systems for fostering interaction among students or for creating spaces for students to collaborate. 

Zoom has been a godsend since March, but it is largely designed around, and being used for, allowing an instructor to provide lectures to a screen full of thumbnail faces instead of a lecture hall full of faces in desks.  Its “interactive” features such as polls and chats also give students only limited ways to share information or to interact.  Breakout rooms are useful but they can be clunky because they don’t allow the instructor to monitor all the rooms simultaneously (the way we could monitor multiple table groups in a classroom).  Plus, we can’t administer groups unless we are in the main classroom, so if any student has trouble getting into a group (which can happen with some browsers), we have to leave the breakout room we’re facilitating and go back to the empty classroom to place that student in a room again.  

As with other genres, online instruction is its own medium, with its own strengths and weaknesses.  We can’t teach online the way we have taught in-person classes, because people process information differently in online formats than they do in classrooms.  We have to adapt our teaching to the strengths of the online format. 

A lot of us are still trying to figure out what that will look like.  For me, transitioning to online instruction is raising questions about traditional course structures, and what else they could look like if we’re not bound to specific locations or perhaps to specific times.  I’m starting to ask:

• Do we all need to meet as a whole class every Tuesday and Thursday, or Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?

• What are the purposes of a whole-class meeting, and what information is the most useful to provide in that format?

• Are there types of interactions that would work better in small groups?  What if I met with several small groups, but for less time each?  

• Are there times when individual conferences with students would be the best option?  

• What information could students get on their own, asynchronously?

• What is the best balance of these forms of interaction?  What would be most sustainable for me and for students?

• Is written work, such as papers, the best form of assessment?  Or could I have them present their writing in small groups and then grade that while reading their assignments from their screen share?  If I can grade work during small group meetings, could that take less time than planning a class and then grading later?  What forms or interaction and response around their work are most meaningful for students?

• Are there forms of interaction, such as shared google documents or slides, or small groups or breakout rooms, that might encourage even more collaboration than meeting in person?

As we move forward with exploring online instruction for a more diverse group of learners than we have had in previous years, we will have to adapt our teaching to the new medium, and consider how to create courses that utilize its strengths, rather than simply shifting our classroom instruction onto Zoom and a course management system.

Real-life Trolley Problems

All this talk about reopening schools is feeling like a real-world trolley problem.  So-called “trolley problems” are ethical dilemmas in which people are asked whether they would flip the switch to divert a train if it would make the train hit one people instead of five.  Or what would people do if it was the same situation, but they had to push one person off a bridge, sacrificing one person to save five?  Scientists have found that while 90% of people say they would flip the switch in the first problem, only 10% of people would push someone off a bridge.  They have also found that we decide with different parts of our brains, and that this is evidence of internal conflicts within our brains between frontal lobe logical reasoning and more deeply-embedded, emotional parts of our brains that make taking another person’s life taboo.  Balancing the good of the many with the good of the few is not a simple process and it can be something that glitches our brains, particularly as more specific, hands-on action is required from us.

Decisions about reopening schools are thrusting us all into real-life trolley dilemmas.  If in-person school is better for most children, is it worth taking the risk that some children might get sick and that about 1 in 1000 might die?  Should teachers accept the risks of being on the front lines of reopening the economy, even if it means that some will certainly die alone, on a ventilator?  On the other hand, if online instruction is a safer option that works well for a subset of students, is it worth requiring that even if it is not good for many students, and even if it is totally unworkable for our least advantaged or most vulnerable students?  Should we allow individual families to choose their level of risk, even if doing some might negate the collective actions of others?

As we all debate these scenarios that are no longer the hypothetical domain of psychology classes, maybe it’s worthwhile to take a step back.  Many scholars have criticized the trolley problems as too hypothetical, and other scholars have found that what people say they would do doesn’t always match what they do in a virtual simulation or with mice.  Perhaps in our current situation, the reverse is also true.  If we are debating what is supposed to be a hypothetical scenario in terms of what we should actually enact next week, there is a bigger issue at play.  Who feels comfortable pulling the lever and making a choice that could cost lives?  Who is prepared to take responsibility for these morbid calculations?  And what if they underestimated?  

Instead, we should be asking ourselves why we are being forced to make these choices in the first place?  Why do parents need to choose between paying their bills and caring for their children?  For that matter, how did our economy get to the point where two people NEED to both work in order to even have a shot at a middle class life?  Some of us who are not THAT old can remember a time then one of our parents was able to stay home, which would have meant that supervising us while we learned online wouldn’t have been as big of a deal logistically.  If schools really are the lynchpin of our economy, and if our economy can’t “reopen” without our public schools, why have we been underfunding them for years and attacking them as “failing?”  And why are the same teachers who have constantly been criticized for “notdoing their jobs” (while having to do more and more jobs) now being declared to be “essential workers,” you know, like grocery cashiers, (people tell us this as if it were somehow a compliment), and then told that we need to line up to make the sacrifice -- for the good of the country, of course.  Not to mention that parents need free babysitting, businesses need cheap workers, and people with investments don’t want their stock portfolios to take a hit.

If we find ourselves debating about trolley problems, we’re having the wrong debate.  There is something seriously wrong with arguing about whose “needs” take priority, who should benefit, and who should willingly lie down on the tracks and take the hit.  

 

Our Classrooms Were Already Unhealthy

I’d thought it was just me. 

Being asthmatic, I’d assumed the issue was that I had a crappy immune system.  That must explain why got sick several times a year, why some of the sicknesses morphed into sinus infections, why I seemed to get every bug that went around -- plus some new ones.  One of the reasons why I ended up leaving teaching and going back to graduate school was because I was getting sick all the time.  With that, plus the long hours that left little time to exercise, the stress, and the late nights, I started thinking that being a teacher was going to take years off my life.

In my last year of graduate school, I started teaching Teacher Education classes.  The very first week I got Whooping Cough.  It turns out teaching a room full of people who go to ALL the schools in the region is almost worse than teaching 150 high school students each day.

This week, I posted a question on a feed for teachers, asking: “What illnesses have we caught at school during NORMAL school years?  I got over 230 responses.  Some named illnesses I had to look up.

Among the common or notable illnesses:

Flu

Strep throat

Anal strep (who knew that was a thing?)

Staph infections

All the colds, viruses, coughs, and head colds

Colds, viruses, coughs that turn into sinus infections

Colds, viruses, and coughs that turn into walking pneumonia

Bronchitis

Laryngitis

Norovirus

Swine Flu/H1N1

Fifths Disease

Ear infections

Whooping Cough

Hand, foot, and mouth disease

Shingles

Scabies

Cellulitis (a swollen, red, rash)

Mysterious rashes

Heat Exhaustion

Lice

Pink eye

Gastrointestinal illnesses

Chicken pox

ER visits from severe illnesses

Going into pre-term labor after being run into by a student

We need to talk about teachers' working conditions. Even without the constant fear of active shooters, our classrooms were already hazardous and unhealthy.  Many classrooms are poorly-ventilated.  Some have black mold.  Some have leaking ceilings.  

Multiple teachers mentioned Urinary Tract Infections as a result of not being able to use the bathroom frequently enough.  Let that sink in -- in many schools, teachers aren’t even allowed to pee when they need to.

Our classrooms were already petri dishes that potentially carried every illness our 20-30 elementary students or 150+ middle and high school students brought in with them from their homes, their jobs, their friends, and anything else they did.  In areas where not everyone gets vaccinations or access to basic preventative health measures, that can include illnesses, infections, and even parasites that people in most professions never see.  Some things teachers catch are uncommon outside of hospitals, nursing homes, and day cares for young children.  Anything that anyone in this country can possibly catch is probably in our schools.

And now we wonder why teachers are concerned about being in these rooms as COVID-19 rates continue to rise.  Is there any surprise that many are writing their wills?  Or that some are having panic attacks?  

The Tragedy of The Commons -- When Teachers Are The Commons

7/31/20 #HappeningNow Description: Greetings Castle Rock - Gary Godfrey here covering the Live Protest at the Douglas County School District building at 6th and Wilcox. The a e parents of school age children want the schools to open in normal fashion. It is growing! More to come so stand by!

EDIT: Hosted by

Castle Rock Unfiltered

and supported by

FEC Colorado

“The tragedy of the commons”  describes situations in which people share a common resource.  Often, since it is in each individual’s best interest to use more than their share of the resource, a resource gets over-used and diminished over time, often to the point where it is no longer useful for anyone.  This was originally described in 1833, by William Foster Lloyd, who described a common pasture that was shared by several families.  As each family optimized their own economic gain by bringing more cows, the pasture became overgrazed.  This is summarized in this video, and is also illustrated in the comic below.

Source: God, Politics, and Baseball

“The tragedy of the commons” has been applied to overpopulation, pollution, roads and traffic, resource extraction, and many other environmental and economic scenarios.  But I haven’t seen it applied to situations where a worker is the resource.  

Nevertheless, let’s consider a typical elementary teacher, where 22 students share one teacher.  Or a typical high school, in which one teacher is shared by 5 classes of 30 students each.  In such cases, wouldn’t the teacher be a shared resource, and therefore essentially function as a “commons?”  

As with other types of “commons,” teachers can be subject to overuse and depletion.  It is in each family’s best interest to maximize the teacher’s time and attention for their own benefit.  In a society that emphasizes “getting ahead,” and that often frames schooling as a competitive endeavor, and which valorizes putting our own individual benefits over benefits to our neighbors or society as a whole, using more of the commons in order to maximize our own gains is seen as rational and intelligent.  In such a system, parents and students may think little of asking teachers for extra meetings, opportunities to revise work, expecting teachers to spend Memorial Day Weekend grading classwork that wasn’t turned in over the course of the entire term, extra tutoring, special accommodations, special hand signals for behavioral issues, and the list goes on.  Just as bringing an extra cow to the commons makes sense for the family that owns it, pressuring a teacher into giving a higher grade or spending extra time to resolve an issue for someone else makes sense for that individual parent.  But, if each family brings an extra cow to the commons, it will get grazed down until it doesn’t feed any of them.  Similarly, a teacher with too many demands pulling him in different directions will lose focus on the primary objectives he is supposed to meet, and will also face exhaustion and burnout -- all of which risk making him a less effective teacher for all his students.

It is also in the schools’ (operated by taxpayers) interests to maximize the resource of the teacher.  It often becomes easier to add another task to the teacher’s already-full plate than to find another way to get it done or pay someone different to do it.  One of the constants in public schools seems to be budget cuts, and the other is unfunded mandates.  When someone at the national, state, district, or school level decides that all students’ reading levels should be above average, or that progress reports should be sent out weekly, or that all classrooms should have websites, or that all teachers should do Title IX training, or that teachers should track the amount of time each student spends out of the classroom, or that instead of a letter grade, teachers should write a narrative evaluation of each student, those tasks fall to teachers to implement.  New things are constantly added to their plates and responsibilities are rarely removed.  Teachers are left to figure out how and when to fulfil these noble-sounding wishes that may or may not have proven effectiveness and that rarely come with funding or with allotted time.  

This may be part of the reason why so many teachers end up wearing so many different hats: drop-off zone traffic director, recess and/or lunchroom supervisor, hallway monitor, counselor, school play coordinator, club sponsor, fundraiser, school publicist and marketer, assessment analyst. . .  Oh, and provider of instruction on multiple topics.  

But where does that leave teachers?  Are their jobs sustainable?  And, if not, what can be done?

Research on “The tragedy of the commons” has found that it can be prevented through privatization, regulation, or community norms.  For example, a field that is overgrazed could be subdivided so that portions are given to each cow owner (privatization).  Or only cows with tags could be allowed to graze on the commons, and only a certain number of tags would be sold, but then could be traded on the open market (privatization).  Or, only a certain number of cows from each owner could be allowed on the common pasture (regulation).  Elior Ostrom  researched how different communities around the world manage commons, and found that some cultures successfully share commons -- sometimes for centuries -- without privatization or outside regulation.  Instead, there is constant cooperation and communication among all the users, and also cultural norms around what is, and is not, appropriate use of the commons.   But I would argue that community norms tend not to work well in the U.S. culture, where the concept of a “commons” is more foreign and where we generally value individualization and private gain over collective effort.

Perhaps many communities in the U.S. used to have norms around respectful uses and limits on teachers’ time and energy, but those seem to have dissipated, particularly under the “teachers aren’t doing their jobs” media blitz against public schools.  Privatization also doesn’t seem like an equitable solution for public schools, which serve students with widely differing access to resources.  Although I do confess that my colleagues and I at one public high school I worked at used to wish we could do billable hours, like lawyers do, for THOSE parents who thought nothing of taking up a ton of our time with sometimes-frivolous requests.  Regulation (which I would call “boundaries”) around how many hours a teacher can work or how much time individual students or parents can ask for would be too unpopular for school administrators to even consider.  

In the absence of these options, teachers, like other types of commons, will continue to be overused, and overall usefulness with continue to be compromised.  Like a field that has been grazed down to the grasses’ roots, many teachers who are overwhelmed, exhausted (and often working a second job) will lose effectiveness and provide less benefit. 

As people debate reopening schools as COVID-19 rates increase, the expectations put on teachers as “the commons” are increasing yet again.  Districts and parents are not only expecting teachers to spend their own time and money on the crucial (but too often unfunded) mandate of sterilizing learning spaces and ensuring that students wear masks and follow social distancing protocols, but this time they are asked to risk their very lives.  “The Commons” of teachers’ time and energy has become “The Commons” of teachers’ physical bodies and lives, with some parents and administrators assuming that if they are depleted, there will always be other, greener, pastures to move to next. But they seem to be forgetting that our state has had a teacher shortage for several years.

Letter to Colorado's Governor Polis On Distance Learning for K-12 Schools

Dear Governor Polis, I noticed in your VIRTUAL news conference that you have declared it is safe for children to go back to schools.

1) Children also get COVID-19. Some get very sick and need to be hospitalized. We don't yet know the long-term effects of COVID-19 on children.

2) Children spread COVID-19 at the same rates as adults.

3) Teachers and school staff are at a significant risk of getting infected.

4) Colorado is flooded with tourists, who are contributing to our increasing rates of COVID-19. Down here in Durango, about 1 in 5 license plates are from out of state. Yesterday I saw plates from TX, AZ, NM, UT, OK, MO, KS, SD, IN, OR, HI, CA, WA, the Yukon, and other states. Whatever is in other states is now here.

5) There still is not enough funding to safely reopen our schools, and there is not enough information on how to reopen schools safely. We need input from actual teachers on what resources we need, what class sizes allow adequate social distancing and supervision to follow health guidelines, and what is age-appropriate for our students.

6) Reopening schools communicates to teachers (who often weren't even asked about our needs or preferences) that our lives aren't worth as much as other people's comfort and convenience. It also sends the message that our primary job is to keep the economy going so that more wealthy people's stocks can continue to go up, and that no one has a problem with asking us to bear the costs. Colorado already had a teacher shortage before last March. How are teachers supposed to be motivated to start or continue a career in a profession that prioritizes free babysitting over our lives or welfare?

7) School budgets were already cut past the bone before this. Teachers have been "doing more with less" for decades. We have been working unpaid overtime and buying supplies out of our own small paychecks for decades. We keep being told that the state will fix its chronic school underfunding issues, but it hasn't. We keep getting admonished to just try to keep going and make it work for another year or so while the courts (Lobato vs. State of Colorado), state government, and Governor's office play "pass the buck" with our children's futures and our careers. We keep being told that if we care about the kids, we will find a way to make it all work. At this point, state and local governments basically bank on having teachers spend their own time and money to subsidize other people's TABOR and Gallagher Amendment tax cuts. This was already unsustainable before COVID-19, and there is no way we can do everything required in the face of additional cuts. Given that safety during a pandemic is a matter of life and death, teachers cannot solve this for the rest of Colorado with dollar store purchases and Pinterest hacks. If Colorado wants schools to reopen safely, our citizens need to find a way to pay for it.

8) Having sat in on planning meetings for two districts or institutions in my area, and having reviewed leaked plans from a couple of other districts, I know that local leaders are trying their best to follow directions from the state and federal government. They need firm mandates and guidelines, rather than "each district can decide what is best for them."

9) "Make your own choice" is NOT an appropriate option during a pandemic, where decisive, collective action is required. This is why we need school closures to come from your office rather than from communities where a majority of voters might have been brainwashed into believing that COVID-19 is a hoax. "Majority rules" doesn't protect children's or teachers' health or lives.

As someone who is starting her 12th year as a Professor in Teacher Education, many of my former students are now teachers in schools around my region and state. Some are new in their professions and don't feel able to speak out about their own safety or the safety of their students without facing persecution from their districts (this has already happened to at least one person I know and now her district will probably lose an excellent teacher). Many of my former students and friends and colleagues in the schools are having trouble sleeping at night. Have you been waking up at 4:00 am having panic attacks?

Teachers are discussing whether to buy their own scrubs, ordering masks in bulk, buying face shields, exchanging strategies for making PPE screens out of dollar store shower curtains and PVC pipes, exchanging recipes for making their own disinfectant that is in compliance with early childhood standards, etc. They are spending their own money to keep themselves and their students safe because the necessary money and materials have NOT been supplied by their districts. Many are trying to do COVID-19 math and figure out how to fit 30 students into a 20X30' space, or how to sterilize the classroom between groups of students when there are only five minutes between classes, and they will need to sterilize 20 desks and chairs plus tables, doorknobs, etc, and when the spray is supposed to stay untouched for five minutes, and when that will be the only chance to use the bathroom between 7:30 am and their lunch at 12:20. We're trying to figure out how to get young children or teens to keep masks on all day and how to stay six feet apart -- without coming within six feet of them ourselves. We're trying to figure out what we're supposed to do when a child decides they aren't going to wear a mask -- or when their parent sends a note saying that they don't think their child should have to wear a mask. We're asking what will happen when a child gets sent to school sick, which was previously almost a daily occurrence in many classrooms. Some clarification from your office on how we should do all the things that are required to keep ourselves and our students safe in the midst of budget cuts would be helpful.

What Is the Real Reason Teachers Are Being Asked To Return to School?

Someone on a teaching feed I'm on asked, "What is the real reason why teachers are being asked to return to school?" The real answer is a long one which involves the whole history of school funding, so I made it my blog post for this week.

People can't go back to work if their children can't go back to school.  Trump and Republicans need people to be working so that their donors' stocks will keep going up and so that they can keep denying the effects of COVID-19 in the 100 days before the election.  But they also refuse to provide funding to make this happen because the Republican doctrine is that they are fundamentally opposed to "big government," "socialism," or anything that would involve using tax money to assist working people rather than corporations and the wealthiest 1%.  There is also racism embedded in this as many of their followers oppose funding schools if it means it might help "those other children" and promote more equity, which they fear might endanger the advantages they get from a racist system.  But of course they don't want to say that, so they mask it with terms such as "freedom," "choice," and "opposing socialism." 

 

Teachers have been caught in the middle of this political debate for the past 20-30 years.  As the Republicans have been hacking at the social safety net and the middle class, more children and working families are looking to schools to replace the services they've lost.  As a result, the work load for teachers have been increasing. 

 

On the other hand, Republicans have been vehemently opposing increasing funding to public schools for the reasons I described above.  Betsy DeVos, our "Secretary of Education," is openly calling for dismantling public schools and instead using the tax money that funds schools to fund vouchers for private and charter schools.  She is even using this pandemic as an "opportunity" to make that happen.  But this has been on their agenda since the Reagan Administration, and even Arne Duncan under the Obama Administration was often an ally to this movement.  This, too, has a racial component: the "school choice" movement became part of the Republican agenda during the Johnson Administration's "War on Poverty," school de-segregation laws, and its elimination of any tax cuts for private schools with discriminatory admissions policies.  "School choice" is really just code for "segregation," which is the real end goal.  The insistence to cut funding for public schools also came out of this -- particularly once it became clear that our tax money was going to be funding public schools for everyone, not just the white kids.  This is also why schools are still locally funded, which is why children in wealthy areas get a very different quality of education than students in poor areas. 

 

In a further attempt to sabotage public education, Republicans (and pro-privatization Democrats) have also increased the amount of testing, red tape, and other requirements that schools and teachers must meet.  This is a classic Republican strategy:  cut funding and increase required work until you run an undesirable agency or institution into the ground, then when the agency can't possibly meet all the requirements imposed on it with the budget it's been given, criticize it for being dysfunctional and either eliminate it, reduce it, or restructure it to something more to your party's liking.  They have done this with the EPA, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc.  They have been attempting to do this to our schools for over 20 years. More and more funding that was supposed to go to schools has gone to creating, printing, distributing, collecting and grading state tests -- a massively expensive endeavor that does almost nothing to improve the quality of education, and that in fact detracts from students' learning.  In any case, no amount of measuring gaps in education will resolve the issue that the system I described above created.  Nevertheless, all these measures have massively expanded teachers' workloads because they are required to spend more and more time on test prep, pre-tests, pre-pre-tests, and tracking all of the data these generate for each student.  In addition, the amount of other documentation we're legally required to do has increased exponentially.  Teachers have to follow and document information for IEPs, 504s, social-emotional needs, students who require counseling services, students whose reading or math scores are below grade level, plus produce written lesson plans for each day.  While many of these things aren't bad things to do, teachers have not been given any additional time or compensation to make this happen.  As a result, many end up working weekends and evenings.  At the same time, low pay means that many need to work second jobs. Along with trying to gut schools' funding while sabotaging their effectiveness, Republicans have also led a massive media blitz against schools. They have propagated the myth that "our schools are failing" so loudly and so frequently that now many people blindly repeat that as if it was an axiomatic truth -- despite the fact that most of this "failure" can be attributed to funding issues, and despite the fact that many families like the public schools that their own children attend. Nevertheless, almost everyone seems to have had at least one "bad teacher" (out of the approximately 50 teachers they would have had in their K-12 education) and uses that as a justification to tut that "our schools are failing." The dichotomy of the "bad" teacher" vs. the "saintly teacher" is another insidious myth which is used to both justify expecting teachers to "go above and beyond" and blaming them when they can't do so successfully enough to overcome all of the funding and red tape that have been purposely used to attack schools. All of this is coming into play during this pandemic, when teachers are being called on to be saints and potentially martyr themselves by reopening their classrooms for the good of society, or are being blamed as "uncaring" if they raise legitimate concerns about their own safety and the safety of their students. Republicans, led by Betsy DeVos, are using teachers' reluctance to risk their own and others' lives as an opportunity to declare that "lazy" teachers won't do their jobs and to further de-fund, dismantle, and privatize (and segregate) our public schools. Once again, teachers are being voluntold to "make it work" or are being threatened with liquidation if they refuse. I don't think Trump and his followers realize what a short stick they are threatening us with.

 

As a result of all of this, the resources and materials provided to teachers, as well as the staff in our schools required to meet all these mandates, has decreased -- even as students' and families' needs have increased.  This is especially the case in areas that need the resources and staffing the most.  Class sizes have increased.  Pay has not kept pace with inflation or cost of living, so in real wages, teachers make less than they did in previous decades.  Colorado's teacher pay ranks 50th in the nation in terms of wage competitiveness.  Teachers are caught between a public that increasingly demands individualized learning, adaptation to individual children's and families' needs, personalization, and customization, services for for students with disability and trauma, and additional services such as providing meals, but within a system in which the numbers, funding, and time constraints make that impossible and in which the compensation does not come close to being adequate.  Inevitably, teachers get blamed when they "fail" to create success out of an unworkable system.  When teachers bring this up, administrators shrug and say, "there isn't any money," and inveigh their teachers to "do more with less."  Then families, politicians, and administrators all fall back on saying that if the teachers really cared about the kids, they would find a way to make it work -- with the implication that if they don't want to spend their own time and money to subsidize other people's tax cuts by finding or creating the resources that no one else could "afford" to provide, then they must be "bad teachers" who "don't care" and that maybe they shouldn't be working as teachers at all. 

 

For decades, teachers have been trying to patch the broken system with hacks that often involve dollar-store purchases and clever DIY projects they found on Pinterest.  Now they're spending their summer vacations and weekends making shields with PVC pipes and shower curtains because the same pearl-clutchers who insisted that schools HAVE to reopen "for the good of the children" couldn't seem to find the money for plexiglass shields.

 

The center cannot hold.  Teachers cannot keep mending a broken and chronically-underfunded system with elbow grease, duct tape, and late nights.  It's one thing when they're trying to decorate a classroom, or build cubbies for student storage, or create a more efficient grading system (although teachers really should be getting the funding, time and resources for all of these as well).  It's another when the materials are needed to increase the odds of keeping everyone alive and free of a disease that could also cause life-long health implications.  It is not our job to sacrifice ourselves and endanger the children we are supposed to protect because other people have realized -- too late -- that our schools are essential to a functioning economy.