As a public high school teacher, it’s difficult to blog about the state of education in Arizona without sounding like a whiner. After all, we are privileged enough to work with young people who are caring, talented, and enthusiastic as opposed to corporate minions who are jaded, backstabbing, and Machiavellian. The snarky accountant who shares your office would probably make the occasional paper airplane seem like a love letter from the gods. Shamefully, public schools in America are no longer places to celebrate academic achievement, community involvement, and athletics. Public school today is the supernanny of government services, operating as a central feeding station 365 days a year, a day care provider, emergency hospital, psych ward, and an industrial dispensary of services previously provided by family. Consequently, public schools in Arizona are little more than staging areas for low-skilled workers. Rockefeller once said of public education, “I want workers, not thinkers.” He is well on his way to achieving the robber-baron’s wet dream.

Bussed to school in caravans, students arrive in time for their morning feeding. Having consumed high-calorie industrial-flavored mystery meats, sugary juice, and watery milk, maximizing their calorie intake and conditioning them to crave sugar and saturated fats, they proceed to classrooms packed with 30, 40, even 50 children, repeated seven times daily at the high school level. P.E. classes, electives like music and art, have gone by the wayside as budget cuts eliminate all subjects that are not required to pass mandated standardized tests. Each students represents approximately $7,000 for his/her receiving school, and interest in entertaining and providing for this demanding clientele takes precedence over true academic achievement.  “Dropout prevention” has less to do with concern for the child’s future than concern for the school’s bottom line. If teachers are not proficient at juggling or dancing and actually challenge a student to think, the teacher is a villain out to destroy the client’s self esteem. A student might graduate with enough literacy skill to fill out a McDonald’s application, although grade inflation would have parents believing they’ve raised the next Einstein.

Teaching, sadly, has become a starter job. We here in terminally underfunded Arizona have heard the myths about east coast teachers earning six figures, but for our purposes I will address the 99%ers who earn a fraction of that amount and haven’t had even a cost of living raise in eight years. Our pay checks have been slashed as our jobs have become increasingly more demanding and complex. At the same time, class sizes have mushroomed, supply budgets dried up, and students arrive who are not only unprepared to learn, but are often so differently abled that the threat to other students and staff is quite real. For example, exceptional education students, i.e. those who need accommodations such as diapering, full-time aides, or feeding tubes due to physical or mental disabilities, cost the taxpayer four times what an average student costs. Thus, more students with acute problems are being mainstreamed into regular classrooms to save money. Administrators celebrate their “achievement,” a mouse-click changing the student’s schedule to a mainstream class, while teachers are overburdened with a growing population of students performing far below grade level. No resources are available for support, and paper, ink, and pencils for 180 students can put quite a dent in a struggling teacher’s wallet.

Where, one might ask, are the parents of public school children in this equation? They have been absolved of all responsibility for their children from birth until age 26, which is now the hypothetical cut-off
age for health insurance coverage under a parent’s plan. Parents demand individualized education plans and accommodations for all of their children’s challenges. At the same time, most public school parents provide little to no academic support at home. Public school families are more likely to include teen parents, who are often unprepared academically and financially. Behavioral issues arise when children have little structure in the home. Public school students might not know their multiplication tables, but they do know which Kardashian is married to an NBA player.    

 Private schools often require students to pass entrance exams, effectively barring exceptional education students and the most challenging public school students. Even charter schools are allowed to exclude underachievers. For example, BASIS, a school touted by Time magazine as one of the top charter schools in the nation, requires that applicants score 90% or higher on “placement tests” in order to be admitted. Obviously, the deck is stacked from the beginning. BASIS is not working miracles; they simply took advantage of the lax oversight for charter schools in Arizona. Anyone can print up a placard and re-purpose a defunct 7-11, hire teachers who are not qualified in their subjects, pay them minimum wage and rob the public school system blind. Charter schools are championed by the Far Right who want their children in Bible Study instead of Biology. The godless hordes who insist that public schools are the last great melting pot deserve to rot in hell.

I am often asked why I don’t teach at a private school where the young Rockefellers become connected and where my car, the least new and shiny in the parking lot, would be under no threat of being keyed. After all, private schools can set their own rules when it comes to teacher pay and behavior standards. For a price, private schools offer parents the chance to exclude the Honey Boo-Boos in the gene pool from access to their children’s overactive gonads. Private school children’s success later in life is immeasurably improved, not by some miracle of teacher performance, but by bumping elbows or other body parts with acceptable future mates and business partners. Private schools are allowed to hold students and parents accountable by enforcing standards of behavior. Expulsion from private schools is commonplace and not subject to outrageous litigation by parents seeing dollar signs. Conversely, even public school students who stab, rob, and fight others are never expelled. The worst cases are simply transferred to another unsuspecting school with privacy laws making it illegal for schools to share information on the expulsion. Your child could be sitting next to a youthful Jeffrey Dahmer who’s been expelled several times for violence, but who still has a right to a public education at taxpayer expense.

However, private school standards such as listening and speaking at appropriate times, academic performance, and reasonable dress codes somehow infringe on individual rights in a public school setting.  A nun at a Catholic school can still ruler-smack miscreants, ensuring that one student who cannot control himself does not rob 30 others of their chance for an education. Conversely, a public school teacher would be sent up on abuse charges and the district forced to shell out millions in pain and suffering claims if a public school teacher made students do push-ups as a consequence for cussing in class.

Having sworn an oath of poverty when I entered the profession, I have learned the value of couponing and how to choose a secondhand professional wardrobe. My public school students always arrive in time
for their meals, often without a backpack, but never sans iphone, usually sporting this season’s spendy styles from Abercrombie & Fitch. Funding formulas must be re-worked to eliminate costs which should be covered by parents. School supplies for 180 students should not come out of teacher pay. We must get real about the next generation, or prepare to write the Declaration of Dependents.