This One’s For Everyone Freaking Out About Public Education And Betsy DeVos…

Maybe it’s because I’ve endured one-too-many of my Facebook friends having an almighty meltdown over the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education and the End Of Public Education In America As We Know It.

This is probably going to come as a shock and a not-at-all-politically-correct-thing to say, but after watching everyone singing the praises of public education in this country (nauseatingly so), I have to say it –

I am who I am despite the public education system. Not because of it.

Yes, I know. Tar and feather me. Call me a heretic. How DARE I insult the hallowed and glorious institution of public education in this country! Maybe I should go boil a litter of newborn puppies while I’m at it.

Here’s the thing: Public education in America has nothing to do with educating kids anymore. If it ever did to begin with. Public education is about power. Power for teachers’ unions, who – contrary to rumors – are NOT teachers, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something that you don’t want to buy. Power for the education lobbyists. Power for politicians. All these Big Education entities don’t give a flying leap about kids and how well they succeed in life. And year after year, parents are forced to entrust their children’s futures to people who couldn’t train a fly to land on horse manure.

I often go back to Chris Christie’s keynote speech at the 2012 GOP convention when he mentioned the difference between the left’s priorities and the right’s priorities in education –

They believe the educational savages will only put themselves ahead of children, that self-interest will always trump common sense, they believe in pitting unions against
teachers, educators against parents, lobbyists against children.
They believe in teachers’ unions . We believe in teachers.

If ever there was a time that teachers’ unions did NOT represent actual teachers and actual students, that time is now.

The public education system in America is broken. Anyone who’s been paying attention for any amount of time could tell you that. Shoot, I understood that when I was in elementary school (oh, the irony). I was one of those kids who took to learning like a fish takes to water. I cannot remember a time when I could not read. In fact, my parents swear I learned to read before I learned to talk (at age three, I was reading books aloud that I’d never heard before to my then-one-year-old sister). I don’t say this to brag – I say this to set the stage of how I figured out that the public education system was utter crap.

Most of what I learned is self-taught. I even remember going to school for the first time – being all excited because I “knew” that I was going to learn new things. And… nope. Everything that was being taught, I’d already learned on my own. I was basically light-years ahead of my peers. I don’t think I was ever bored, per se. But I finished my work far before my classmates did and my teachers often got after me for it, probably thinking I hadn’t done the work properly. Then they checked my work and found out that I totally knew what I was doing. So, I was propped up as a model student. The teacher’s pet, if you will. I made the schools look good, I guess.

That was my life throughout public school. I never really knew any different. Teachers gave you work, you did the work, you got to have free time when you were done (which for me, meant free reading time. Which I LIVED for). And when I got home, I had my own books and materials that I could read and study at my leisure (my aunt was a teacher in a big school in a bigger city and she often sent us the old textbooks and things that they were getting rid of that were still in good shape. She’s since passed on and I don’t know think I’ll ever know exactly why she did that, but I’m grateful that she did).

For me, school wasn’t necessarily a place to learn. It was a system to game. And I gamed the system quite well.

Years later, my baby sister (ten years younger than me) started school. Where I was light-years ahead of my classmates, she was light-years behind. Where I took to learning like a fish takes to water, she took to it like a fish takes to a bicycle. Not because she was stupid or anything, but because her learning style didn’t fit with the traditional public school way of doing things. And the school in the small town we lived in was just not equipped to help her. They just wanted to shove her in special ed and be done with it. Now, while special education does fantastic things for lots of different kids, that was only going to make things worse for my sister. I can’t quite explain why – professionals have analyzed my sister and they don’t even have concrete answers of why she is the way she is. But the one-size-fits-all system that I learned to work to my benefit consistently failed her.

She was always behind in terms of her age and grade level. Well into middle school, she HATED reading. To the point that the sight of my mother picking up whatever book my sister had been assigned to read turned a once-happy-go-lucky girl into a sobbing mess. You’d have thought my mom was threatening her with bodily harm every time she suggested they read together for twenty minutes. I’m not even exaggerating. It was the worst. And don’t even get me STARTED on the standardized testing. That was the ninth circle of hell for this poor child.

At that point, my parents decided that my sister needed outside help that she wasn’t getting at school or at home – that she couldn’t get at school or at home. They took her to her doctor, who then recommended a private specialist who helped special cases like my sister. And she isn’t special needs or autistic or even dyslexic. It turned out that her brain is just wired differently for learning. The traditional learning methods that worked for me were utter crap for her. So, Mom and Dad paid for an education specialist from a private business to get her some extra help.

This – I must note – on top of the INSANE amounts of property taxes they were already paying that go to fund public schools (running a ranching business means you own a lot more land than most normal families. Consequently, my folks pay a ton of property tax). But my parents would be the first to say that the extra money was MORE than worth helping their daughter learn in a way that actually benefited her.

She got the help that she needed and after just a few months of working with this specialist, it was like night and day. Where before she recoiled at the thought of reading a book on her own, she now couldn’t wait to read. Her social skills even improved, now that she wasn’t the “stupid one” at school (kids can be the cruelest little monsters, I swear). She had more confidence in herself.

What’s more, my parents decided to move her to a completely different school in a completely different school district. A school that didn’t look at my sister like she was growing an octopus out of her head when she had trouble with basic skills the system said she should have already mastered. That particular school district bent over backwards to comply with the recommendations from the specialist and I cannot praise them enough for what they did for my sister.

(So before you all go saying that I hate all public schools – there are many fantastic schools and teachers that will go out of their way to actually teach students. Those are the schools that need to be promoted and supported, not the crappy schools that just serve as glorified daycares.)

All my sister ended up needing was an aide to read test questions to her (not give her the answers, mind you – simply read the questions to her out loud and make sure she understood what she was being asked) and an extra study hall period to do her homework. That’s it. She could do the rest on her own. And now, so many years later, she’s finishing up her four-year degree, where even just ten years ago, we’d never dreamed she’d even go to college.

Why do I share this? Because public schools failed my sister. BIG TIME. They failed me too, but to a different degree. All I was doing was clocking in time until I could go home every day. It was mostly busywork for me. I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know. But I was already hard-wired to learn things on my own and educate myself. I couldn’t begin to tell you how my classmates managed – or if indeed they did manage at all.

And this was in Utah. One of the better-run states as far as education goes. For as little money as we spend per student, we actually have some of the best-run school districts in the country and some of the very best teachers (I’m actually related to some of them). That’s not to say that we don’t have crappy ones – I could name PLENTY of those. But I would say that, in the grand scheme of things, we have a handful of rockstar teachers, a majority of mediocre ones, and an embarrassing amount of teachers who have no business being in the profession.

Something needs to be done to change education in America. I think most people can agree on that. But what exactly needs to be done, that’s where people get hung up. And a lot of it comes down to the federal Department of Education. The bottom line is that the federal government has about as much business running education as a rattlesnake has being in charge of a henhouse. It’s all just a protection racket for politicians and lobbyists and it ultimately has nothing to do with preparing kids for adult life.

I’ll give you an example: Every teacher I’ve ever talked to HATES standardized testing. Every student hates it too. Teachers hate having to teach for a test, rather than actually educating kids. And students hate having to sit through them. But once the federal government comes around, waving that tax money in front of school districts in exchange for good test scores, you bet that teachers hop to it and make sure they pull their students through the test. Not because they want to, but because it’s forced upon them.

And where does that money go? Back into classrooms? Back to help teachers furnish classrooms and supplies for eager young learners? HA! If you believe that, I have beachfront property on Jupiter I want to sell you. More likely that money goes back to the unions and to elect politicians who’ll keep the unions in power. Or they go to benefit corrupt school boards and leave the students in the dust. One school district I’m well-acquainted with took federal grant money and paid for a brand new district office building, complete with a cushy corner office for the superintendent. This while the actual school buildings in the district were badly in need of renovation and repair (some needed to be outright replaced) and the students had to make-do with crumbling and outdated equipment.

Oh yeah – THAT move was totally “FUR TEH CHILDRENZ!” Lemme tell ya…

I have next-to-no faith in the public education system as it stands now – and that’s even knowing and speaking to teachers about it. That’s even from me coming thisclose to becoming a teacher myself. I had grand ideas of being one of those awesome teachers who inspires kids to do amazing things with their lives. But after a semester of discussing standardized testing and behavioral issues, not to mention the leftist propaganda BS that I would be required to teach under the federal-government-inspired one-size-fits-all curriculum (oh yeah, I haven’t even TOUCHED that pile of cow dung yet), I peaced-out of there so hard. I couldn’t do it. I would NOT do it. I determined right there and then that if it was a choice between sending my own kids to public schools who taught that garbage or teaching them myself, I’d figure out how to homeschool.

And that brings me to my next beef with public education. I’ve mentioned over and over how I’ve known teachers in my life – friends and family who are teachers. Good, honorable, kind, well-intentioned people who do wonderful things for the students they teach. I know that they do because I’ve seen them do it (again, despite the broken system that they’ve been burdened with). But every time the subject of homeschooling comes up, they recoil like vampires doused with holy water. I cannot for the life of me figure out why. As long as kids are learning in a loving environment, who cares how they learn?

It goes back to those poisonous teachers’ unions. I hate to draw the parallel, but it’s so blatantly obvious that I can’t avoid it – it’s like Planned Parenthood freaking out when a woman chooses to keep her baby, rather than have an abortion. To them, it’s a loss of a quota. A loss of a statistic. A loss of power they can exert over someone else’s life. Sort of the same thing with teachers’ unions – if there’s even one child that’s not forced to be under their insidious influence, that is unacceptable.

That’s why they attack school choice and school vouchers. It represents the proverbial “little guys” standing up for their individual rights. In this case, parents taking decisions about their children out of the hands of the system and taking the power of those choices back for themselves. Most Americans actually support school choice, contrary to the temper tantrums on social media.

And the so-called “experts” can’t stand that. They have to paint these parents as stupid and not having their children’s best interests at heart (which is ironic). They have to tell these parents that they aren’t qualified to teach their own children, or to select who they would want teaching their kids, or even what their kids learn (rather than leave it up to some nameless, faceless entity who chooses for them). That’s ultimately why there was such an overwhelming outcry against Betsy DeVos – a woman who dared to challenge the system and the status quo. A woman who will most likely shake things up and make changes that can only improve things from here on out (it certainly can’t get much worse).

I know I’ve been harsh on public schools here. Please know that I am speaking in a general sense. I know that there are local districts and schools that do great work for kids (I praised one of them just a few paragraphs up). And I want those schools and teachers to be rewarded. Not through federal grants and good test scores. But through parents choosing to send their kids to those schools and teachers. Let the free market do its thing. For myself, homeschooling is definitely an option that I’m leaving open for my family. But I am also open to driving my children for miles across town to get them to a good school, if none are in our immediate area (I’ve heard not-great-things about the schools near where I live now and that’s worrisome). I mean, I drove for MILES to get to school in the little rural community where I’m from. I can handle getting my kids over into the next school’s boundaries if necessary.

I’m lucky. Many Utah school districts have open-enrollment programs where parents can choose to send their kids to a different school if they aren’t happy with the ones in their neighborhood. I don’t imagine a lot of states have that, particularly Democrat-stronghold states. As much as I’ve pointed out the negative in my experiences, I recognize that I’ve had it pretty good, compared to families in other states that are forced by law to send their kids to failing schools.

But things need to change. And keeping the federal government’s chokehold on education is NOT the answer. It hasn’t been for decades, even though the teachers’ unions insist that it is. If putting in someone like Betsy DeVos – someone who is a proponent of school choice – breaks the federal government’s monopoly on education, then I say bring it on!

It certainly can’t make things worse.