The Impending Collapse Of K-12 Education
The 9th-grade science teacher across the hall saw me at the doorway of my classroom, where I was wiping off a gang symbol someone had penciled on the door frame. She beckoned me over. Inside my own classroom, my students were completing yet another shiny, expensive online reading test from yet another corporation that promised to “bring rigor” based on “the research.” I asked the paraprofessional to watch the kids for a minute as they stared into their computer screens, and stepped into the science teacher’s class.
“Have you ever seen this?” the teacher said. About 20 teens were attempting to blow up balloons, their faces contorting with effort. The biggest balloon was the size of a gum bubble. They were supposed to pop the balloons for an experiment, she said, and added in a whisper, “They’ve been trying to blow up balloons for 5 minutes!”
We stared at the kids. Here was yet another basic skill students didn’t have anymore. In the spirit of camaraderie, I told her I’d decided to make my students tell me the time on the wall clock before they were allowed to leave class, because none of them could tell time.
A few days earlier, I’d finally gotten fed up when we were reading an excerpt of some formulaic writing (it’s always excerpts, never the whole work, in the corporate curriculum) that said the character put his hands on the wheel “at 10 and 2.” The students had no idea what that meant, and no curiosity to find out.
We kept running up against this lack of what’s called “background knowledge,” the information people are expected to have as a baseline.
Any novel and every poem. Fairy tales. Negative numbers. When we went to the moon. That we went to the moon. The Roman Empire. The Garden of Eden. Fractions. What state is to the north or to the south. Where the north and the south were. They did know slavery in America happened, but had no grasp of the context, and would ask teachers if they were slaves “back in the day,” or would choose “Abraham Lincoln” as our first president and the president during the Civil War, which was the same thing as World War II or any war for that matter.
Anything before last year that didn’t involve their phones was a blurry blank. There are no longer consequences for their ignorance: our culture doesn’t regard it as embarrassing, and it’s almost impossible to fail now - we cannot give any grade lower than 50%, which started during COVID and has now been codified. It’s also almost impossible to be expelled (students can punch a teacher and are simply suspended for a couple of days), and they can be absent 60 days and still be promoted.
I’m an award-winning high school teacher at a high-poverty urban school and have been teaching for over fifteen years. This shift has happened while I’ve been in the same district, which was less well-funded when I started than it is now. The cause isn’t our favorite catch-all, poverty and racism. Indeed, in conversations with other teachers, at conferences, or online, not to mention in recent data on declining reading and math skills and student mental health across the country, in every community—everywhere, the alarms are startlingly similar.
As with a colossal, bloated, many-headed hydra, it takes a lot more than chopping off 1 head to fix this. This is why univariate solutions like “abolish the union” “more school choice” “change the curriculum” “abolish the ideology” “add more ideology” “fire teachers” or “hire more teachers” are all pointless. Removing a single hydra head doesn’t make the monster any less powerful, and besides, the head grows back.
The problem is the monster itself. Its many heads include the state aligned with corporations; our bureaucratic hierarchy with its “experts” and “investors”; social media and screens; influx of migrants especially in impoverished communities; dissolution of family and structure, play, imagination, boredom, outdoors; fractured warring communities; drugs; a collapsing economy; a culture that devalues learning and values empty narcissism, incoherent rage, fear, animalistic sex; ideologies that devalue individualism and curiosity; Covid response; lack of consequences, agency, and academic standards. And more.
The result has been catastrophic, especially in the last few years post-Covid, when everything has collapsed into a singularity of chaos. Our most recent corporate book (every few years, they change to great fanfare and highly paid consultants ushered in by a revolving door of administrators) has an excerpt of Night, and, before starting, I asked students what they knew about the Holocaust. Nothing. I said, “Wait, who was Hitler?” Blank looks. “Some guy,” a boy muttered. He went back to scroll on his phone. No consequences are allowed for phones, either.
No, this isn’t everyone. I have 1 student - it’s always 1 or 2 - who can recite historical facts even I don’t know. And at the other extreme, there’ve always been disengaged students. I’m talking percentages. The scope of ignorance and apathy is new and staggering, and the gap between the top 5% driven students and the remaining 95% is increasingly becoming a chasm.
Soon it will be uncrossable. Teachers simply cannot teach, say, Algebra, when most students don’t understand and don’t want to understand fractions. Other things are far more important for them, like Drake’s porn video or the best technique for applying lipstick, or their feelings, or videos of people crashing through walls while being chased by cops. The purpose of education is no longer to help forge autonomous, educated, and engaged individuals in our democracy. No, the purpose of education is to get more money: “But how will I need this in my job?” I hear this every day.
You might think that they don’t have basic background knowledge because the teachers haven’t taught them. I used to think this too. But you’d be wrong. We do teach them. The problem is that like a macabre Groundhog’s Day within their brains, the students “reset” the next day, sometimes the next minute. But they do know every weapon in Fortnight, the story of Gypsy Rose (Dahmer is already fading). It’s not about their ability to understand.
After reading, say, a sea of page-long run-ons, I re-teach them capitalization, and they practice and do well. The test comes. They do well. The very next day, they’re writing page-long run-ons with no capitalization. When I say, “But we just learned this!” they say, “That was yesterday.”
This isn’t a sneering mockery of an entire generation, nor any individual teacher, school, or academic. It’s certainly not a commentary of only “urban” kids, who, vulnerable and traumatized (100% of my former middle schoolers knew someone who was shot and killed), often function more as the canaries in the coal mine than as unique cases. No, this is an indictment of the rising catastrophe that is looming straight ahead for us all as we barrel right into it. I don’t know what will become of our children, but it’s nothing good. Unless we radically change course right now.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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Intelligent, competent, educated people are much harder to tyrannize over and lie to, than distracted dunderheads. So maybe this is all by design. A few idealistic teachers can’t buck a huge, society-wide trend, especially if that trend reaches all the way to the president of Harvard.
This is surely the saddest post I have read in a long time. But heartening in that there is at least one teacher who sees clearly and is not pretending.
I don't have have kids, so I've long said this is not my fight, but this matters for all of us. These kids are supposed to be our Social Security.