A Is for Awful : When It Comes to Education, Public Schools Don’t Pass the Test

IT’S NATURAL at this time of year for young people to dread the turn of calendar pages that dictates a return to school. It is, perhaps, less natural for teachers to dread it, although nobody likes to kiss a three-month vacation goodby.

But recent conversations with child-rearing friends have convinced me that our public schools now operate the way they would during the aftermath of an earthquake: Nobody’s there except the people who have no choice.

Public schools were the children’s melting pot, constitutionally proclaimed so by Brown vs. Board of Education. Now, it seems as though half of the truly unpleasant well-paying jobs around here are held by parents grimly determined to save their kids from the pot, which has long since melted down.

As a public school student, I encountered the standard number of good teachers--two per school--but I was able to convince at least one local university that I had received a semblance of an education. It was during my brief stint as a teacher, though, that I became truly educated about the ways of the public schools.

When I began to teach, I was young enough to talk to students as near-peers, which prompted this advice from the woman who hired me: “You’ll never have a chance if you don’t act 20 years older than you are.”

A fellow teacher, old enough not to need that trick, had come up with an even cleverer distancing device: Every day, he wore a black three-piece suit to school, with a Phi Beta Kappa key clearly dangling from the watch pocket. Everybody I knew who made Phi Bete had stashed the key in a desk drawer and forgotten it. Once I asked a teacher who knew Black Suit why he insisted on flaunting his achievement.

“Oh, that’s not a Phi Beta Kappa key,” she said. “It’s a Phi Delta Kappa key.”

“Uh huh. What’s Phi Delta Kappa?”

“It’s a national education honorary society.” Ah. In other words, an organization devoted to giving out keys that look like Phi Bete keys. And school principals think Bart Simpson is a bad role model.

Admittedly, these were more innocent days. Kids gathered in the bathroom to do downers, not crack. A young man expelled by another teacher ran into my classroom and punched me in the jaw; he didn’t spray the room with automatic-rifle fire.

But some things, I suspect, remain sadly the same. A high school senior sat in one of my classes, asking cogent questions. But he failed every test he took--tanked them pathetically. Other teachers, consulted in the grove of canned tuna and cottage cheese that was the teachers’ lounge, confided that the kid was just a dummy, not even worthy of the vaguely optimistic label of Educable Mentally Retarded (known to all the kids as the kiss of brain death--as in, “Hey, you’re an EMR!”)

Away from the bracing fragrance of solid-pack albacore, the truth turned out to be even grimmer. The kid had simply made it to the 12th grade without ever having been taught to read.

What keeps the few good teachers--true heroes who don’t even get VA mortgages--in the business is the irreducible satisfaction of working with “the kids.” After all, at its worst, the way you’re taught to do it, teaching is the distribution of a package of educational material to a procession of consumers: year after year, the same lesson plans, just new names on the seating chart. Either through wisdom or through ignorance (my way), some teachers insist on encountering and engaging those students where they are, working toward the curriculum together, as if for the first time--the way a good parent teaches.

Teaching--once the province of women too squeamish for nursing--has been “professionalized”: Teachers with 20 years’ service can now, in favored districts, earn almost as much as first-year paralegals.

But the process also has cast an aura of pseudoscience around a function that every human is built to perform--teaching something he knows to someone who doesn’t. Learning, which we come similarly equipped to do, has been pigeonholed as something you achieve only under the supervision of trained professionals, who in turn are supervised by more trained professionals. Teachers and learners have become practitioners and clients, and very little teaching or learning goes on anymore.

Compulsory public schooling hasn’t been around all that long. It’s been an experiment, and lately the rats are dying. Maybe it’s time to try something--anything--else. When I left the profession, the public schools were a worse argument for a monopoly than cable TV. They still are.

After all, if you watched the addresses at the end of “infomercials” while the announcer yelled them at you, you might eventually learn to read.