"Best and Brightest" Are Experienced Teachers

My first published essay appeared in the April 17, 1999 editions of the South County Journal and The Eastside Journal, two Washington State newspapers.  The work offered my perspective on the ongoing struggle for a statewide teacher pay raise.  Hindsight reveals references to the struggle traditional teachers faced in opposing “progressive” transformations of public education.  Editors posted it under their title, “TIRED TEACHER: Worn out from fighting the good fight.”

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"Best and Brightest" Are

Experienced Teachers

My father fought in the “Forgotten War,” the one before Korea.  For those who don’t watch “The History Channel,” that was the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II.  Thanks to him and the other veterans of his generation, my battles have only been intellectual.  Still, I can identify with sacrifices made for a forgotten cause.  I know about forgotten.  I’m a veteran teacher in my twenty-eighth year of service.  Unfortunately, during that time, I’ve had to fight more than the temporary ignorance of my students.

When language professionals abandoned phonics, I refused.  When technophiles invaded math, I still drilled times tables.  When progressives mothballed spelling, vocabulary, and grammar, I kept them on active duty. When multi-culturalists scuttled the classics, I maintained them.  When specialists touted process, I shouted, “Content first!”  When “New Age” experts preached cooperative education, I championed old-fashioned individual effort. When egalitarians demanded equal success for all, I only guaranteed opportunity.  When sociologists found excuses for why kids can’t learn, I insisted they could.  When psychologists packaged self-esteem, I barked,  “Earn it!” 

Grade inflation?  Not in my classroom.  An A is rare; so is exceptional achievement.  Discipline problems?  Not in Portable 908.  My charges still call me Mister, and I’m not their buddy.  The classroom is not a cafeteria, and students can’t really concentrate and chew gum at the same time.  Gum loses.

To succeed, a teacher must get results. To survive over a career, a teacher must practice principled insubordination.  Administrators are not amused.  There are no tangible rewards for teachers, no bonuses for the extra effort required to succeed AND survive.  The “profession” cannibalizes its own.  I am amazed how often I hear some new acquaintance admit, “I used to teach.”

Olympia’s latest scheme to placate the W.E.A. calls for boosting base pay to secure the “best and brightest” new teachers. Sorry, guys, wrong again.  The “best and brightest” are experienced teachers, veterans tested under fire.  New recruits learn their survival skills from vets in the trenches, not rear-echelon ed. profs.  Olympia, why have you forgotten us veterans?  After fifteen years service, experience counts for nothing on your salary schedule.  Where is the incentive to continue to “fight the good fight”?  Olympia, how are you going to KEEP the “best and brightest”? 

I’m worn out.  It’s not my students. I’m tired fighting, and I’m tired of being forgotten.  I remember saying in frustration last year, “Don’t anyone offer me two cents, because for two cents, I’d quit this job.”  I recovered over the summer and returned, but it’s no stretch to anticipate saying at the end of this school year, “Don’t anyone offer me two percent, because for two percent, I’d quit this job.”

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Two Seattle area papers ran edited versions of this essay in mid-April, 1998.  Two weeks later the state legislature gave veteran teachers 10% over the next two years.  This year’s salary fight is over.  We won and I did something.  I ought to feel proud.  Perhaps I persuaded someone.  Maybe I gave pause to another.  Though I wrote for myself, I hope I spoke for others.  Teachers are not at the front alone.

My R. & R. will come again in the summer. This year’s recovery will be more complete than before.  Support from friends and colleagues have buoyed my spirits.  An encouraging letter from an eighty-four-year-old stranger made my year.  Thank you, Mrs. Fallert.  Most of all this victory has taught me a personal lesson I should have learned long ago.

In my original essay, I used the phrase, “fight the good fight.”  I thought it was Hemingway.  I should have done my homework.  The exhortation from the Apostle Paul to his son in 1 Timothy, 6:12 reads:  “Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold of eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses.”  I now understand why I am a teacher.

The Tree Syndrome

After school one day in 1990, Helen Graf, cherished colleague and English teacher par excellence, entered my room in tears. Our brand new principal had just evaluated her for the first time. With clipboard in hand, he’d check-listed her according to the latest administrator in-service criteria. 

Now, Helen was among those ultra-conscientious, self-motivated, unsung heroes in every profession who can always be counted upon to give their all.  She had. The lesson was creative, perfectly planned, and well executed. The kids were engaged and eager to demonstrate what they had just learned. Light bulbs blazed above each kid’s head.  Did the new principal recognize Helen’s gifted-teacher status? Not a chance.  He cited her for a “T” syndrome violation. 

She had addressed the class primarily from across the front of the room and down the center aisle, hence the “T.”  Helen was stunned and reduced to tears of frustration.  I tried to cheer her up on the spot, but the best I could do at the time was commiserate.  Later that night I wrote the following poem and made sure it was waiting in her mailbox before her first class the next day.  Made her smile—me, too.

Twenty years later my friend, Laurie Rogers, author of Betrayed: How the Education Establishment has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about it liked the poem so much, she included it in her book.  What goes around comes around.  I’ve lost track of Helen. I heard she moved to North Carolina. Hope she’s still teaching.  Every kid needs a Helen Graf for English.

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The Tree Syndrome

Firmly rooted in fertile

Research, the sapling

Sends no buds aloft.

Its destiny lies in the

Stunted undergrowth;

Its only acquaintances—

Scrub of similar stature.

Pity the life not knowing

The forest of towering oaks

To which it ought to aspire.

America's Secret Education War

The essay below was my second published op-ed piece. It ran in August of 1999 in the South County Journal (Kent, WA) and the Eastside Journal (Bellevue, WA) under the editor’s title, “Hang Down Your Head, John Dewey.”  Have things changed for the better in the intervening years?  My writing career was just beginning.  My teaching career had less than a decade left.

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America’s Secret Education War

The most important war nobody noticed began in 1968. Its first hero was Dr. S.I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College. Armed only with the courage of his convictions and a small bullhorn, the diminutive linguist stood alone against a mob of protesting students bent on shutting down the school. The Battle of the Little Bull Horn was a Hayakawa victory, but it became traditional education’s last stand.

In the thirty-one years since, the enemy has won decisive victories on every front. The enemy is progressive education. Inspired word, progressive. Who could be against progress? John Dewey’s progressive model empowers the child. Traditional classrooms with authoritarian taskmasters were just too demanding, too achievement oriented. For Dewey, learning was a natural outgrowth of each child’s innate curiosity. Little wonder why his ideas still appeal. What child would choose drill over play? Though Dewey’s methods failed in experimental schools, a progressive underground survived.

It took the turmoil of the Vietnam War to provide Dewey disciples with the smoke screen they needed to infiltrate college campuses. America’s sons faced death in Vietnam daily. On the home front, the youth of the ’60’s challenged every American tradition. With America’s social fabric being torn apart, who could worry about curriculum?

Required courses were the first casualties in the education war on America’s campuses. The revolutionary battle cry was, "Give us ‘relevant’ courses." Inspired word, relevant. It quickly made converts; especially when students learned relevant was just a euphemism for easy. Soon traditionalists found themselves out-numbered or at least out-shouted. Pandemic rioting forced curriculum surrender. Progressive-inspired anarchy replaced traditional standards on American campuses. Students gained the foothold Dewey zealots needed.

Undergraduates stopped learning facts and started sharing feelings. Rebellious protesters held group therapy "seminars" and called it learning. Empowered by their curriculum victory, hardcore progressives expanded the battlefront. They set their sights on the next generation of teachers. When protesters from the ’60’s became education professors, the hallowed halls of traditional education came a tumblin’ down. Dewey’s ideas now had clout. Traditional education was doomed. Capitulation soon followed.

Structured classrooms were purged. Student-centered learning environments were promoted. The format clicked at the college level. Why stop there? Soon teachers at all levels metamorphosed into facilitators. The new "guide on the side" emerged from the old-fashioned "sage on the stage." Educators everywhere chanted, " I don’t teach subjects. I teach children." Few saw the ironic half-truth of their mantra. Most couldn’t teach grammar, for instance, because they’d never learned any. Traditional requirements for education degrees no longer existed.

Now-a-days memorization is a relic; discovery is the future. Educators eagerly embrace higher level thinking skills—even in primary grades where kids aren’t ready to analyze or synthesize. Everyone blindly accepts that children naturally want to learn. Everyone eagerly agrees that each student must learn at his own pace, in his own learning style. John Dewey’s ideas have won.

Progressives are in charge from the federal level to the local level and most union positions in between. Most traditional teachers have quit or retired by now. A wise minority switched to church schools or private schools. The isolated few who remain in public schools have become the Neanderthals of education.

So why are home-school numbers at an all-time high? Why are most Americans fed up with public education? Because thirty-one years of frivolous fads and techno-panaceas have made NO progress. The work I did in high school thirty-three years ago would pass for college work today. I’d call that REgressive, not PROgressive education.

The latest silver bullet, universal testing, won’t change a thing. My state’s test, the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), is a sham because progressives concocted it. Progressives also evaluate it, and public schools will teach to the test until the results prove kids ARE learning what progressives value. It’s a self-fulfilling heresy, and it’s shameful.

If my nine-year-old daughter doesn’t understand the symbolism of the poem on the state-mandated test, I DON’T care. Can she spell? Can she punctuate? If she fails to explain a mathematical process in her essay, so what? I really DON’T care. She’s just a fourth grader! I want her to know her times’ tables. I want her to do her arithmetic without a calculator. The WASL doesn’t test the skills I value.

It’s time for those of us who still believe in traditional education to fight back. Though we seem outnumbered, and we face an entrenched bureaucracy, perhaps our time has finally come. We should start by confronting those addicted to progressive ideas. They need to admit they have a problem. Their methods have never worked.

We should be prepared for widespread denial. Our best intervention tool is Project Follow Through, the most comprehensive education study in history. It PROVES progressive methods don’t work. Follow Through covers the years 1967 through 1995, that is, from around The Battle of the Little Bull Horn until mid-Clinton. Could the timing be more perfect?

Progressives will find it hard to argue with the cold, hard facts. Whole language does NOT work; traditional phonics does. New math does NOT work; traditional drill does. The billion-dollar study says direct instruction gets the best results. Student–centered classrooms flunk. So says the study. So what are we waiting for?   

Public education has sacrificed America’s sons and daughters on the altar of John Dewey’s specious dream. Progressive education has been a monumental mistake. To have a future, the entire system must change. We must re-establish proven traditional methods. We need subject experts in structured classrooms using direct instruction. We need a balance between content and process, and we need high standards. Not everyone will earn an A. Not everyone will have fun. Learning will require hard work. Who said growing up would be easy? Who said life would be easy? Saving public education won’t be easy either.

Great American leaders have always rallied this country behind the great causes of our past. At the beginning of a new century, we need a new leader to rally the public around the great cause of our present. Traditional America must reclaim the public education system. When our public schools abandoned tradition in the sixties, they turned to the left to follow progressives. We’ve been herded their way for over thirty years. Enough! To save our schools, we need to return to traditional methods that we KNOW have worked. That return will require a focus to the right. It’s not just a question of politics. It’s the right course for all Americans. It’s not just the future of American education at stake. It’s the future of America.

Mentors

Mentors

Mentors should be pathfinders

Scouting tangled trails,

Questing surest, safest route—

Selfless in that search.

Only the heartless abandon

Neophytes to feckless drifting,

Only the mindless christen 

Such futility

 “Learning experience.”