A few days ago my youngest was regaling us with yet another tale from her childhood memories where her father lost his temper and I swear listening to my children makes me want to apologize to my parents. As she took a breath I interjected to ask what every memory of “Angry Dad” had in common and to leave anything dealing with sports out.  She didn’t even hesitate.  “When you were scared for us.”  And she’s exactly right. Nothing makes me flip my lid like when I’m worried about my kids and unfortunately I don’t just have my two biological children to worry about. I have had hundreds and Lord willing I will have hundreds more.  So as my 18th year in the classroom draws to a close I feel like it is an appropriate time to give a status update on the state of education in North Carolina. Simply put, we are in trouble and to make matters worse it seems that most people don’t care.  And that makes me mad as hell.  So I’m going to tell you some problems that I see and offer you a challenge which I pray that you will accept.  

The first problem with public education is teacher pay.  This has always been an uncomfortable subject for me because I was afraid folks would think I was being greedy but I don’t care about that anymore so check the facts.  Depending on which sources you use NC is somewhere between 38th and 41st in teacher pay and trending backwards but the General Assembly doesn’t have the normal legislative excuse of tight budgets.  As a matter of fact the current estimate for the budget surplus for this year and next is $1 billion and I shouldn’t have to remind you that it is our money.  Simply put, they don’t care about teachers and when you hear one of them brag about raising teacher pay, understand that when you adjust for inflation starting teachers are making $4,000 less than in 2008 and educators with 15 years experience are making over $6,000 less.  And if they don’t understand inflation maybe they should come sit in one of our excellent Economics and Personal Finance classes.  You can’t attract and retain new teachers without competitive pay and teachers are some of the lowest paid workers who hold four year degrees.  And what do you think happens when teachers realize they can make more money with less stress in other fields?  They do.

North Carolina saw its highest teacher turnover in decades last year when approximately 1 in 9 teachers decided to leave the profession and if that statistic doesn’t increase this year I will buy you the pack of crackers of your choice.  And as federal pandemic funding runs out local districts will be faced with the potential need to freeze hiring or God forbid cut positions.  This will unfortunately lead to several negative consequences but I want to highlight two in particular.  The first will be an increase in class sizes.  Rarely in life do dozens of gold ribbon studies and common sense arrive at the same conclusion but smaller class sizes lead to more positive education outcomes.  It’s almost as if teachers having more time to spend with fewer students makes test scores automatically go up. Crazy right?  Regrettably the inverse is also true. Larger classes lead to less learning with an increased workload and more classroom management issues which negatively impacts the mental and physical health of educators.  And when they have to be out there simply aren’t enough substitutes because they are already in the classes without teachers meaning that any planning and brain break time is now spent sprinting to cover a class that isn’t yours.  And that stack of papers now has to be graded at home which might have an unexpected positive effect.  You won’t be able to watch the evening news.

Because if teachers do happen to watch the evening news they will be shocked to learn that their daily reality doesn’t seem to match the description offered by many politicians.  I never realized that I worked in a “socialism center” or “indoctrination center” where people shouldn’t send their kids since our mission from day one “has been to kind of control the thinking of young people.” To the best of my knowledge I haven’t done it but evidently some of my colleagues have been “feeding your children a steady diet of communism and pornography.” I am able to put these tidbits in quotations because they are the actual quotes from people seeking to take charge of education in our state.  These same folks will tell teachers that they work in failing schools even though the courts ruled all the way back in 1994 that the public schools in our state are chronically underfunded.  Unconstitutionally so.  Fortunately, the General Assembly was able to ignore that part of the state constitution while they pointed at the part that said they alone were responsible for funding public education.  They were more concerned about the “constitutional crisis” that would be brought on by the judicial branch forcing them to do their job than actually doing their job.  Their escape plan for failing schools has turned into the biggest educational scam in state history as they seek to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools and into private schools.  

So for these three major reasons and a couple dozen others I regretfully report that public education is under full attack from some corners and apathetically ignored from others.  So what can we do?  It’s time for that challenge and I’m going to do something that I almost never do in the classroom; assign homework.  Find out who your state legislators are and send them a message asking what they see wrong with public education and what their plan is to remedy the issues I mentioned.  If they try to rest on their “accomplishments” share the statistics above and any others that you can easily Google.  And if you don’t like their answers then hold them accountable at the ballot box.  I can hardly think of anything more important to the future of this great state than our children and now that your eyes have been opened I hope you won’t ignore them.  You’ve been warned.