Educators Irrational Fears are Harming Kids

I just completed a decades long look at the history of one of our largest school districts locally by accessing an online archive of the local paper’s articles about the district. Very interesting but sad too. The current “urgent goals” have been brought up over and over in the past but no real change in performance has occurred, at least not the “step function” improvement needed if our kids are to be served as they deserve. The clear message from the history lesson is that educators who are not expert at the foundational aspects of teaching our kids well are very expert in maintaining the status quo. E.D. Hirsch, Rita Kramer and many others have pointed out the catechism style brainwashing in education theories by the education schools that don’t stand scientific scrutiny.

Slow response and delay tactics are at the core of this change prevention strategy. If a problem gets enough attention to begin to gain some traction with outside stakeholders [board, parents, business interests, etc] the response is to acknowledge the problem to lull the complainer into a false belief something will be done to fix the problem. If the complainer maintains pressure long enough the educators appoint committees including educators and community members [carefully selected to be prone to agree with the ed party line] to study the situation. This puts a big delay into the educator response which is exactly what they are counting on. Very few complainers have the staying power to maintain pressure for long enough to get past this phase. If they do maintain pressure, the next tactic is to hire outside consultants to do an audit. These outside consultants are only outside the district but are full members of the brainwashed educator cadre. They can be counted on to bless the current operating mode as the best practice available even though they do usually mention some “throw away” things that the district should do to make things better. These bandaids never address the underlying cause, so the real problem is never solved. The board may be invoked by the complainer but since the history shows a very consistent record of the board being rubber stamp robots for the administration, esp. the superintendent, they can’t be relied on to force productive change.

The question we have to ask is “why are educators so afraid of change?” Are they afraid that they don’t have the ability to learn to do things differently? Are they afraid of the unknown? Do they care about the kids or is their own comfort a higher priority? Is their real self-esteem so low that they can’t process any input that points to poor performance on their parts? Or is the brainwashing they received from their ed school training and reinforced by all of their in service and professional activities just too hard to overcome voluntarily? I believe they do care about the kids but do not connect the dots or even question their own beliefs as the reason the kids are being harmed.

Confrontation is the only thing that can break through brainwashed mentalities. Here too, the education environment has built in defensive mechanisms. The ubiquitous use of political correctness and GroupThink prevent the sort of intellectual honesty and robust dialog required to be able to face and fix real problems. Thus, anyone pointing out the truth of the poor performance in education is by definition, “not nice” and out of line. This prevents many from complaining even though kids are being harmed badly on an ongoing basis. This also prevents the board members from expressing concerns with enough force to get through the defenses. Now, if the board members were living up to their responsibilities they would be forceful and demand real fixes to real problems. But the history I read did not indicate any examples of a majority of board members having the moxie to do the right things. Oh, there is a record of firing superintendents a few times when pressure built high enough. However, the replacements were always selected from the pool of brainwashed educators so no change was forthcoming in the future either. Thus, the status quo continues. The kids become less and less competitive in the global marketplace. The country’s economy becomes less competitive as well with the attendant unemployment problems, too much debt, etc.

Finally, the educators would say that hurting the feelings of educators is never justified. I say hurting their feelings is well justified if it is required to cause service to kids to be raised to an adequate level. That is, kids futures trump educator feelings every time.