I’m a recovering teacher. It’s a disease. I'm working to kick it.
I taught for about eight years– a few stints in high schools, but mostly middle grades. These were public schools and public charters. At the end of 2020, I swore I would never teach again. I loved my work and detested the jobs.
Although I no longer teach, I still read the news. I’ve needed to reflect on my incessant media digging. As such, these scribblings are a roundup of dispatches from the weird world of Education.
There is so much out there, but I have to start with an opinion piece from The Washington Post on January twelfth that was written by Marc Thiessen. You’ll get the gist of the article just from the title, which is, “Don't negotiate with teachers who walk out over covid. Fire them.” He argues that teachers who express concerns or stay out of class for fear of covid should be fired without exceptions. I'm sure this includes some pretty highly-qualified people. Thousands and thousands of them. Theissen would agree with Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot who accused teachers of abandoning their posts, their students and families. Theissen goes further. “It is appalling,” he charged, “that nearly three-quarters of Chicago teacher union members voted to walk out, locking more than 300,000 students out of their schools.”
Theissen goes on to say that healthy kids can't die from covid– that the CDC doesn't even track the number of healthy kids who die from covid– however, the mental health of students is compromised when schools are closed. He cites a recent study showing that suicide attempts for girls aged 12 to 17 went up by 51%– certainly a shocking number– from 2019 to 2021. He talks about kids with abusive situations at home and how they suffer from a lack of support when they are away from school. He asserts that when schools are closed the teachers have abandoned these students.
Then, aside from mental health concerns, Theissen says the real issue is that students are suffering covid learning loss. They're falling months behind in maths and months behind in reading. He cites Michael Petrelli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who said that covid learning losses will result in a lifetime loss of earnings that averaged about $49,000 to around $61,000 for each student. I wonder if either of these people are aware of how far behind most American students really are, even pre-pandemic? Do they care? Are they interested in solving that problem or in blaming someone?
At this point, Thiessen flat out says, “School closures are child abuse.” Bam! He goes on to say that this isn't just a problem in Chicago, that nearly 5,400 public schools across the entire country stopped instruction at some point during the first week of January. End of paragraph. He doesn't say anything about the fact that so many schools closed, he doesn't try to explain it, he just points it out. So apparently, Marc Theissen thinks employees, parents, students, teachers, administrators, and staff at 5,400 schools are all either child abusers or idiots.
Theissen concludes by offering a solution: take the power away from “people who don't care about children.” Fortunately, such people always wear large badges for easy identification. Of course, teachers are walking out in large part because they are extremely concerned about their students. If teachers get sick or die from covid, then they can't teach. That's an “if-then statement,” just as a reminder to Mr. Thiessen. As in, “If Marc Theissen wrote this opinion-editorial safely inside his own home, then it’s a little disingenuous.”
From there, he taunts that would-be progressive unions are acting regressive by closing schools. He points out that some people aren't letting their kids be “held hostage” by teachers, like how the Governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, is offering $7,000 incentives to parents to move their kids to schools that aren't closing– basically leveraging the power of Average Daily Attendance compensations. The Republican Governor is, of course, giving away covid relief money that was given to the State by President Biden through Democratic covid relief initiatives that have been pushed through Congress recently, so that is certainly hilarious and confounding. What a charlatan, right?
If Theissen believes that students are safer when newer, under-qualified, untested scabs are brought in to replace easily-fired veteran master teachers, then I would disagree with his basic premise. Since mental health is such an important factor in student success, as Theissen pointed out, I'm surprised he so easily ignored the mental health impact that students experience through teacher turnover. These are bonds of trust and allyship that are built between teachers and students over months and years, and Theissen is suggesting that such emotional buoys are easily dismissed as mere troublemakers. These professionals can't be treated like candy wrappers and still retain their impact.
This op-ed is particularly tone-deaf considering, as I mentioned earlier, that thousands of students walked out of New York schools on Tuesday this week in direct protest to actions taken by Mayor Eric Adams. The day before Theissen wrote his piece, in fact. An article in The 74 by Asher Lehrer-Small points out that Mayor Adams effectively told the city that there would be no virtual instruction option until the end of the 2021-2022 academic school year, which rightfully caused thousands of students to walk out of class in protest of what they called unsafe conditions. They weren’t being listened to. In fact, Mayor Adams also received and ignored a letter signed by dozens of city and state legislators calling for a temporary remote learning shift.
It seems that Marc Theissen and Mayor Adams rely heavily on this mental health issue. Mind you, they don’t address mental health concerns in school itself, they just advise we throw kids back into schools that are overly dangerous mental health triggers with dwindling attendance and frequent teacher absences because it’s what normally happens. Lehrer-Small explains, “studies have generally shown that remote learning has led to academic, social and emotional harm compared to in-person instruction.” Yet this doesn’t acknowledge that American schools were already leaving students academically, socially, and emotionally underprepared and overwhelmed. It seems that in-person versus remote learning may have become a political tool no one actually wants to solve or explain or deal with. It is simply something to be used to beat your opponent over the head with or whenever it’s advantageous to blame others. Few with any power, however, seem to actually be addressing, reimagining, or solving this dilemma.
Jabari Brisport, one of the New York state senators who signed the letter to Mayor Adams, emphasized that a temporary remote option needs to be made available, saying, “I would support having an imperfect remote option now and then having [a] really well-thought-out one in six months.” And that's the problem right there: Brisport is highlighting that teachers, parents, and schools have never been allowed to develop such very good and well-thought-out plans for remote learning since the beginning of this pandemic. Even though we're two years into this, politicians, economists, and policy wonks curtail any real change by constantly pushing to get schools open and back to normal without providing schools, parents, and teachers resources to build an actual plan on how to do remote learning and in-person learning safely and effectively. They've just been saying get open and stay open. No matter what or how dire. As if just having students in a building is the issue.
Meanwhile, KCRA3 in the Sacramento area ran an article entitled, “California makes it easier to hire teachers amid shortages, Omicron spread." If you were to pair this concept with the advice of Marc Thiessen, then we can see a pretty dystopian flow-chart in the making, here, where admins are easily firing veteran master teachers on a whim and just as easily finding their under-qualified, under-paid replacements who are willing to jump on command. It’s already happened in colleges, why not also make primary and secondary teachers mostly adjunct and underpaid?
I’m reminded of a Buzzfeed listicle in which people shared signs of a toxic workplace. I was not surprised, unfortunately, to discover that many of these signs of toxicity were indeed present in most, if not all, of my former school sites. Indeed, the energy of Marc Theissen is already well-represented by school administrators, generally. To suggest that a valuable resource like a teacher is simply expendable in the middle of a pandemic tastes toxic to me. To suggest that adept community educators are simply replaceable smells toxic.
From this listicle, Number 1 is when “people aren't given introductory info.” I can't tell you how many times I saw new teachers at school thrown in without actually being told where anything is or how anything works or how they're to do certain things. At my first teaching job, I was hired the day before school started and I found a three-foot-tall pile of ant-covered garbage in the middle of my classroom. I was a brand new teacher trying to set up my Day One lessons (also without any guidance) and, instead, I wrangled old garbage for hours. I once had a co-worker who still didn't know how to set up their grade book 3 months into the semester because nobody had gone through it with them. That kind of stuff is very normal in schools.
Number 3 resonated a lot and had to do with “clocking out and then continuing to work more.” Yes, at every teaching job I was essentially required to work outside of hours and was expected to just be available to get everything done like grading, lesson-planning, finding support materials, communicating with other teachers, administrators, and parents, along with a dozen other daily and weekly tasks. Number 4 is when “work doesn’t match the job description.” It’s a cliché that teachers have to “wear a variety of hats” every day, that in fact teachers are constantly asked and expected to go beyond their job description. Refer to my story about the trash pile in my room for further evidence. “Exploiting people” is Number 7, and Marc Thiessen has already given you the justification and rationale for exploiting teachers. Again, Theissenism is not a rarity among school policymakers and leadership. Similarly, Number 10 is having “bad sanitation practices,” which, again, look to Theissen to explain why unsanitary practices are not, in fact, toxic– defying all laws of logic and common sense.
Number 11 in this listicle is “paying for training.” I would remind Marc Theissen that nearly every teacher at every school had to pay for their training. Government grants and funding for teachers are available, so there might be partial subsidies, here, but it is certainly toxic to ask teachers to spend their own money earning masters degrees, obtaining teaching credentials and supplements to teaching credentials, renewing their credentials, and attending conferences and trainings only to then blame them for wanting to feel safe at work. Yes, teaching is different than being a grocery clerk. The dynamics of transmission are severely different. I’ve seen the charts, and students are vectors. Ask any parent.
Number 12 is “illogical rules” and I would argue there are so many rules that teachers are subjected to that at any moment any of them become illogical. Number 14 is “banning CCs” and I know for a fact that school administrators do not like teachers talking to each other or cc'ing people on specific communications. Very Trumpian that way, most administrators are.
There's a lot more I could say about toxicity in the teaching workplace and school environments, but the initial point has already been made effectively, for now. Instead, I’ll point to an article in The Guardian two days ago whose headline reads, “Staff shortages, fear and confusion: Los Angeles schools grapple with covid chaos.” Again, my question is, ‘What covid chaos? Why is it really chaotic?’ I would argue that two years into the pandemic is no longer a time to call this scrambling for a plan “covid chaos.” It's time we start calling it what it is, which is gross negligence. Administrators, politicians, and policy wonks not actually doing their jobs while passing all of their responsibilities on to the next month and the next year and the next election cycle and the next scapegoat. I think it's irresponsible for The Guardian to have written this headline, and believe it should instead read something like, “LAUSD unprepared for Omicron spike having squandered two-year opportunity to develop a comprehensive plan.” The same, I'm sure, could be said of Chicago. Theissen, Lightfoot, and others like them don't actually want to solve this problem; they just want to blame teachers and not actually deal with reality. They’d like to manufacture reality, use it to score points for their base, and then leave someone else shamed and jobless.
Which brings me to a New Yorker commentary from January 7th by Jessica Winter which asks the question, “Who gets the blame when schools shut down?” Her conclusion, as you can guess thanks to people like Marc Theissen and so many countless other ghouls, is that “somehow, it is teachers… more than government failures and even COCID-19 itself…” who take the blame. Winter mentions Leana Wen, who was formerly a president of Planned Parenthood as well as the Baltimore health commissioner, who wrote, “Would it be ideal if all schools had daily [covid] tests and great ventilation? Sure, but that’s not reality… schools need to open.” Like Theissen, here Wen identifies an obvious problem and then bullies an offer of a solution, simply skipping over all of the hard, detailed work that actually needs to happen for schools to open safely for everyone. Thankfully, Winter included replies that Wen received to this tweet. One user asked why Wen didn't urge governments to close restaurants and other large venues and to pay business owners their lost revenues, instead? Another wondered why Wen wasn’t encouraging slowing down the spread and instead lobbied to blame teachers and place them in harm's way by hastily reopening schools? Winter highlights that Wen’s only retort is that it’s not the current ‘reality.’
That, I believe, is an indicator of the crossroads at which we now find ourselves in American education. What reality do we want? What reality are we willing to work for? What preconceptions are we willing to unlearn? How creative will we be? How brave? What are we going to value, and how will we reflect those values in our schools? How will we reimagine safer schools for everyone? Schools that prepare us and keep us all safe? Theissen and others are calling for war with no account for collateral contingencies, logistics, resupplies, morale, or even success viability. It’s immature. It’s irresponsible. Worse, it’s not creative at all. It’s boring, dead old ideas.
Ring, ring... The Gilded Age is on the horn... they want their fear and trembling back!
If we assume the premise that most teachers actually want to teach students, then we need to reflect that in our language around schools and the COVID-19 response. Beyond the pandemic, schools in America have long needed systemic redesigns and realignments, increasingly so. This contagion has torn the paper shell from the wireframe of achievement-based learning in America. It doesn’t foster mental health. It doesn’t value master practitioners. It doesn’t prepare students for a dynamic world. It doesn’t provide safe learning spaces. It doesn’t even reflect actual learning. American education as we know it, based on measurable, standardized indicators of performance, is a sham, a facade, and a lie. Marc Theissen is its biggest fan and proponent, apparently, and he does NOT want you to imagine school as anything other than a building where children are contained and detained for eight hours, five days a week, for roughly 180 days out of the year. That’s it. He can’t stand for it to be anything else other than that. School is a holding facility.
Or did I misread that? Did he really intend to talk about mental health? To talk about real learning? About students actually feeling safe? He didn’t do any of those things in his op-ed… he just railed against child-abusing teachers and their brainwashed sympathizers (not entirely unlike Pizzagaters or Q-acolytes)… but you’re welcome to try to convince yourself that Marc Theissen really cares about student mental health by forcing the same broken and toxic and abusive schools to open their doors despite unsafe conditions mid-Omicron-surge.
Your other option, however, is to admit that Theissen missed some very important realities and that he was only trying to manipulate distraction from a highly important dilemma. How do we safely get through this with as many people intact and cared for? I’m reminded of Dr. Anthony Fauci, while responding to misinformation from Senator Rand Paul, when he said, “It distracts from what we’re all trying to do here today, which is get our arms around the epidemic and the pandemic that we’re dealing with. Not something imaginary.” Theissen is pushing an imaginary narrative that ignores the realities of the moment and all of the recent lessons that we should have been learning as a nation. It is, as Winter calls it, an “erasure of teachers” at a critical moment when America needs to honor teachers more than ever before.
Indeed, Winter’s article says nearly the same thing that Theissen’s does– remote learning is not great and no surprises, there– only it is said by Winter in a much more comprehensive, realistic, even compassionate manner. Winter’s piece reveals exactly how far we’ll need to go if we want to address the concerns that Theissen raises, but Winter pushes the narrative beyond Theissen’s candy-colored simplicity. One paragraph from Winter’s piece, in particular, I feel should be transmitted as written:
The United States, in the twenty-first century, is not good at providing public services, or at acknowledging the diversity of the needs of its public. There are teachers and children whose loved ones endured awful, solitary deaths in the first covid waves, who are traumatized by those memories and who are not reassured by reports that Omicron is a mostly harmless variant. There are teachers and children who are immunocompromised, or who live with immunocompromised people, with similar misgivings. There are also children who rely on the free breakfast and lunch provided at school as their only guaranteed meals of the day. There are children who are legally entitled to special-education services through the public school system and who cannot meaningfully access those supports across a Zoom link, or who can’t access them at all because they don’t have a reliable home Wi-Fi connection. There are teachers who, if schools go remote, will somehow have to instruct their students and facilitate their children’s learning at the same time. There are students who suffered terribly due to the social isolation and learning loss induced by as much as a year and a half of remote learning. And there are teachers who have been pushed to their limits–mentally, emotionally, and physically–by the apparently intractable “reality” of school understaffing, which forces them to teach enormous groups of children, or outside their specialty areas, or all day without a break, as their colleagues recover from covid at home.
This is the kind of opinion-editorial we need right now, not some schlocky “landlord special” overcoat in a new color of paint. We need issue writing that speaks more deeply to real experiences and actual conditions. None of this is easy, none of this is simple. Yet Marc Theissen wants you to believe it is. He doesn’t want to plan, adjust, and find out more when teachers are afraid for their lives. He only wants swift, merciless retribution. Earlier in the article, Winter describes an elementary school principal forced to close her own school due to a massive absence of available teachers and lacking any clear guidance from the school district, and that is the reality that Theissen wants Americans to ignore right now. Schools already cannot find substitutes or replacement teachers, yet Theissen’s solution is to fire– without question– the few qualified teachers still on payroll the moment they voice a hesitation. School districts cannot replace teachers, but Theissen’s solution is to purge even deeper. What’s left after we fire the reticent teacher afraid for their life? For the lives of their loved ones?
To bend the meter even further toward compassion and honest discussion, I’d recommend taking a read through The Atlantic piece from July 2020 penned by none other than Dave Grohl in which he contends that “America’s educators deserve a plan, not a trap.” Again, Grohl paints with the colors of real life, not Theissen and Lightfoot and Wen’s candy-land confections.
When it comes to the daunting–and ever more politicized–question of reopening schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, the worry for our children’s well-being is paramount. Yet teachers are also confronted with a whole new set of dilemmas that most people would not consider. “There’s so much more to be addressed than just opening the doors and sending them back home,” my mother tells me over the phone. Now 82 and retired, she runs down a list of concerns based on her 35 years of [teaching] experience: “masks and distancing, temperature checks, crowded busing, crowded hallways, sports, air-conditioning systems, lunchrooms, public restrooms, janitorial staff.” Most schools already struggle from a lack of resources; how could they possibly afford the mountain of safety measures that will need to be in place?
Marc Theissen has no answers to any of these questions, which he doesn’t even bother to ask.
Of education reform in America, Donald Cohen likens some of the approaches to someone “using a hammer to cook an omelet. It’s just the wrong tool.” Indeed, we’re allowing the inept into the toolshed, it seems, and they keep trying to serve us crummy omelets every day. Schools should be plugged more into their communities rather than treated as holding pens for the duration of any given workday. Cohen says as much in a piece highlighted by Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post in which he advances supporting “the entirety of a student’s well-being to ensure they are healthy, safe and in a better position to learn. These benefits then extend to the surrounding community.” Someone needs to let Marc Theissen know that this includes the teachers, as well. In fact, Cohen’s article perhaps fails to mention that “community school” models, though popular now with certain progressive administrators, are only picking up on the work that highly-qualified and caring teachers have been independently implementing, as bridges between classrooms and communities, for decades.
Finally, I will point to the beautifully written words of Vicki Abeles whose perspective was recently highlighted in The Washington Post, again by Valerie Strauss. That WaPo published Cohen’s and Abeles’ ideas, as well as the vacuous nothing that was Marc Theissen’s op-ed, is certainly confusing to me. Where Theissen managed to say so little of import, significance, use, or substance, Cohen provides real possibilities while the writing of Vicki Abeles simply sings. Theissen’s no-holds-barred machismo withers in comparison.
Abeles reminds us that back in December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy released a public health advisory concerning youth mental health and called for immediate action. “This is a moment to demand change,” Murthy implored. Little more than a month later, we got Marc Theissen and his lackluster imagination demanding nothing new and offering no changes at all. I wish I could transcribe Abeles’ piece in its entirety since it speaks to the deeper wounds that exist in public education beyond the blustering of pandemic political talking heads. Unlike Theissen, Abeles urges us to not look away. “That means,” she says, “starting this new year by finally reckoning with the demands placed on our kids that are making them sick.” She describes how lives have been upended, and “instead of seizing this moment of profound uncertainty as a chance to reimagine schooling, we’ve pushed students right back into a broken educational system that prioritizes achievement over emotional resilience.” I believe that’s the reason Theissen brought up student mental health first before mentioning ‘covid learning loss.’ I believe Theissen used mental health as window dressing to point at his real concern which is that students aren’t performing at the levels they "should" be. He’s engaged in a pressure campaign to force teachers to take the blame for a crumbling public school system that disregards student wellbeing as a whole.
Where are all of the trauma counselors to manage student needs? Where are the incentives for teachers to put their lives on the line? Where is the actual mandate to provide social and emotional wellness to our students? Abeles again reminds us that “Long before COVID-19 exacerbated the current mental health crisis among children and teens, studies consistently found that a toxic culture of pressure and measurement in our schools is a key culprit contributing to student stress, anxiety, and depression. Accompanied by a relentless drumbeat for high grades, college admissions, and perfect test scores, our schools have long been competitive, disempowering environments for students.” Again, Theissen would prefer that you not think about this or even be made aware of such studies.
Abeles mentions how Stuart Slavin, a pediatrician and former professor of medicine, studied mental health among high school students and came away believing “that high school is more demanding than medical school– teens are working harder, are more stressed and are getting less sleep than med students.” Yikes! Combine the memories students have of the stress and toxicity of regular school with a full two years worth of individuated pandemic traumas and one begins to wonder why anyone would advise simply opening the school doors and throwing as many students as possible back inside such a nightmare factory. “If we are to meaningfully address the mental health crisis among our youths,” Abeles continues, “we need to systematically transform the environment that is exhausting and overstretching students, teachers, parents, and entire communities. An environment that does not value well-being as essential to learning.” At this point, we can safely assume that Marc Theissen has no meaningful response at all. Not to any of this.
Abeles encourages increasing SEL lessons as a focus within schools, something that I tried desperately to build in the face of pressures to increase performance indicators. People like Theissen are welcome to say that mental health is important, but we just need them to go further and discuss how we are going to reimagine and address mental health needs in schools. “This has to mean that the development of skills like self- and social-awareness and responsible decision-making are built into the entire school experience and not just siloed off with the occasional workshop, yoga class, or curricular add-on,” says Abeles. Indeed, never let anyone fool you into thinking it’s as simple as that. Being at school isn’t addressing student mental health needs, it’s just being in crisis at school. That’s all. If Theissen wants to go further and champion some real, meaningful education reforms, then let’s have at them. We’re all ears.
Abeles warns, urges, and compels us to be more creative, to imagine deeper, and to completely redesign the academic environments into which we are sending our school-aged children. “We must provide our children with learning experiences that prioritize connection and collaboration, and that deepen relationships between students, teachers, and the larger world. By turning the focus away from Individual achievement, we can empower young people to find meaning and purpose as caring members of their community, which bolsters good mental health in turn.” Since students spend so much of their time in these “human-made systems,” it’s our responsibility to ensure that schools have real “well-being at their core.”
School is more than just a few walls and some warm bodies, as Marc Theissen would like you to believe. David L Richards nails this point in his op-ed for The Hill. It's a human rights issue, Mr. Theissen. Get in line to help or get out of the way.
Perhaps, in a future installment of "The Recovering Teacher," we can discuss alternative lesson structures along the lines of what Vicki Abeles describes in her article about reimagining school around well-being, mental health, and community benefit. Until then, I hope you can see that things are not as simple as Marc Thiessen paints them to be in that foolishly slapped together Washington Post op-ed.
Thank you all very much for reading. Let’s trounce all the bullies in 2022. Be swift and stay safe.
