A Teacher’s Odyssey through the Incompetence of American Public Education

This work is an exposé of the failure of American public education and a plan for its regeneration. Informed Americans clearly recognize that their nation’s educational system has failed. They do not understand the extent or the depth of this failure, nor do they understand its precise causes . . . Highly publicized, but generally ill-conceived, government corrective programs have produced little positive effect. Some schools may have improved, but neither the nation as a whole, nor any state or major city has succeeded in reversing the spiral of failure

The reason why no curatives have worked is that their proponents have misidentified the etiology of the disease. The medicine is aimed always at healing the wrong ailments . . .The precise cause for America’s educational failure is the ingrained systemic incompetence of its administrative leadership on almost all levels and the counterproductive, destructive, regulations under which teachers are required to work. In education, leadership is everything, just as it is in business and in war. Successfully change the management of education and success will follow. Unless one has spent three or more decades as a classroom teacher, as I have, and has witnessed the insidious and inexorable reductions in academic and behavioral standards required of our students by our educational leaders (while the latter propagandized that they were accomplishing exactly the opposite results), one cannot truly understand the problem . . .

The current management of education . . . is absolutely incapable of reforming itself. To depend for a miraculous regeneration on the part of the very institutions and people responsible for creating over decades the disastrous state of American education is a vain hope indeed . . .

A number of editors of this manuscript, people outside of education, asked in astonishment, especially after reading its later chapters, “Can things like you describe really be happening in schools?” Some of these people had children attending the very schools I had portrayed, yet they had no idea how administrators and school boards had betrayed their children. All the events I recount herein are true . . .

. . . I will provide solutions that are simple, that are achievable, and that, best of all, require not a single dollar of increased taxation. This plan sounds like a panacea and, in fact, it is. It will work. The only requirements Americans need to turn their educational system into the best in the world (instead of merely the most expensive) are, first, to understand the causes of their country’s past failure and, second, to have the will to execute some simple changes.

One day, at the end of June, 2005, after some thirty-five years in the classroom, on my last day of teaching prior to retirement, I walked down a high school hallway to say goodbye to those teachers who still remained in the building. To my astonishment, I found one of those teachers sobbing at her desk . . .

In reply to my question concerning the cause of her distress, this French language teacher, who was adored by many of her students, told me that she had been ordered by the school administration to teach Spanish in addition to French as part of her schedule during the next academic year, despite the fact that she did not know how to speak Spanish. Some forty years earlier, a few minutes after I arrived at my first teaching post . . . the principal there had assigned to me four classes of French and one of Spanish. I informed her that I did not speak Spanish. She replied: “Well, you’re a language teacher, aren’t you?” She clearly implied that if you could teach one language you could teach another, whether you knew that language or not. I recognized immediately that this principal suffered from a defect; whether it was mental or moral, or both, remained unclear . . .

Coming full circle, what had happened to me on my first day of teaching now affected a colleague on my last day of teaching, some forty years later. Nothing had changed . . . I was not aware at that time that the New York City Board of Education suffered from endemic corruption and was connected in some instances with organized crime. Whether our principal had a protector in the Board of Education, as other incompetent administrators certainly did have, I do not know. I do know that school boards across America generally demonstrate uselessness, at best. The current state of our educational system proves it. I am certain that effective school boards do exist and the plan I suggest to them for revolutionary tax-free school district regeneration may be found in Chapter 19 and in Appendix B . . .

The new co-principal . . . truly was a “piece of work.” She was tall, busty, and had a wild, sultry sexiness to her. She wore skirts so short that they violated flagrantly the dress code for female students. The inimitable description by my colleague, McFunny, approached perfection: “She looks like she could make smoke come out your ears!” I must say that I liked looking at her (from a safe distance) and was sorry that my adherence to professionalism caused her such distress that she went berserk, assaulted me, sexually harassed me, and made herself an object of derision. . ..

. . . Everyone knew that the administration rarely enforced the rules it created . . . It was all smoke and hot air. The one happy result was to give the teachers in the faculty lounge another answer to the daily question: “What did the administration do that was stupid today?” One faculty member, “Sully,” would look up, shake his head, and say: “If you didn’t see what goes on here, you wouldn’t believe it!”