This Is Not How It Should Work

This is my politics rant. I promise-- once it's out of my system, I'll move on. 

It is great that Democrats swept the table this week. It's delightful that places like Texas now have Democratic leaders who actually support public education and might roll back some of the crap that Greg Abbott forced on Texans. It is beyond special that a Democratic Congress might care enough to undo the federal voucher program. And I welcome a batch of Democrats who don't try to make education the solution to every economic ill in the country (thereby giving themselves an excuse to do not-a-damn-thing). 

But damn-- this is not how it is supposed to work.

"Education is not a political issue" has been the motto of a couple decades worth of politicians trying to make it a political issue. From using political maneuvers to force states to impose a Big Standardized Test, to political maneuvers to twist school district arms with an unreachable deadline ("Everyone above average by 2014") to the use of that political leverage to force Common Core and RttT into schools to every state legislature that said, "Never mind what the public wants-- we are going to slide vouchers into law by whatever political trick we can get away with."

Education has been a political orphan for a long time, but that doesn't mean it can't be used as a political football, and while I'm happy that some Good Politicians have come to rescue education, I am also deeply pissed that Good Politicians have come to rescue education, because it just underlines our political football status, and the trouble with being a football is that you just get kicked back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

Libertarian comedy writer P. J. O'Rourke describes politics as "the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit." That's particularly apropos with education, which is repeatedly besieged by amateurs who consider themselves experts when they don't even have enough actual knowledge to tip a Dunning-Kruger scale. And yet, they are sure just what teachers ought to be forced to do, and for the past few decades, they have infiltrated legislatures across the country.

The infuriating examples of unearned political power are everywhere. Marcus Luther picked out a quote from Emily Hanford's newest podcast case for Make Teachers Do This:

I thought about being a teacher in my early 20s and I had a friend who was teaching in New Orleans, and a bunch of her third graders couldn't read, and she was supposed to design all of her own lessons. And I thought to myself, where would you even start? It was such a stressful job. It was basically impossible, and she eventually quit teaching, as a lot of people do, because we make this job too hard. 

The friend was of course a Teach For America product, so I might suggest part of what made the job hard was that she only received five weeks of training, from other TFA people who also had no formal training for teaching. But twenty-something Hanford could look at this and confidently determine that the job was just too hard and has carried that forward to her campaign to fix teaching by getting legislatures to mandate proper techniques (just like she did with reading). 

There are going to be a gazillion thought pieces on the general theme of "What education can expect from Democrats" and I dream of a day when the answer is "Leave schools alone and let teachers do their jobs." Should there be guardrails, accountability and transparency? Absolutely (and for all schools getting taxpayer money). But I wish the age of micromanagement would end. 

You can tell me that it's privilege and naive to want education not to be in the thrall of politics, but I'm old enough to remember life before Americans became convinced that every damned thing should be subject to politics, that politics should carry more weight than humanity or just letting people live their lives (and so, politicians should get to carry deciding votes about everything).

Schools do not operate in a vacuum, and the schoolhouse will always be set up downhill from society. But school personnel should not have to wait to see the outcome of each election in order to find out how they're going to do their job. I'm glad this election went our way, but I am sorry that schools have to care so much about it.