Until last week, Donald Trump had been the first president in modern history not to have an education policy. But no longer are America’s public schools a blank slate in the White House’s policy shop. The Donald has a plan, and he’s mighty pumped about it. He wants to give teachers guns and train them to shoot. Welcome to the 2018 edition of education reform: No Glock Left Behind.
As a nation mourned the shooting deaths of 17 students and faculty at a Florida high school, our self-absorbed reality star president maneuvered himself into the spotlight. Survivors of the massacre, along with some of the victim’s family members, were summoned to the White House for a “listening session”. There, with the cameras rolling, Trump clung to a note card reminding him to offer an empathetic “I hear you” after his guests laid bare their raw emotions of profound loss.
And when it was all over, our leader of the free world had been majestically infused with the wisdom that would forever stop school shootings: a well-armed faculty. He had not sounded so bubbly and manic since he described his mating rituals on that “Access Hollywood” tape. “We have to harden these schools, not soften them,” Trump said. He then constructed a truly original simile: “A gun-free zone to a killer. . . that’s like going for the ice cream. These people are cowards. They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns – it may be 10 percent or may be 40 percent. And what I’d recommend doing is the people that carry, we give them a bonus. We give them a little bit of a bonus.”
There you have it: Trumpian education policy. At long last, underpaid and under-appreciated public school teachers would no longer have to worry about teaching to the test in order to capture merit pay. They just have to pack heat and pick up their loaded gun bonus.
Many astute political observers have dismissed this call to arms for teachers as just another crazy flight of fancy from a president totally void of serious policy chops. Others have gone so far as to suggest it’s an intentional diversion designed to deflect a renewed push for gun control, to buy time until the anti-gun fervor cools. Maybe. Yet, it’s not hard to see the arming of educators as the absurd-but-understandable result of a decades’ long practice of expecting our public schools to somehow magically solve every societal ill. It’s an American obsession that has never worked, and has, in fact, repeatedly impaired the delivery of quality education.
Take race, for example. The tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s eventually, through judicial and congressional actions, created a more just society, at least on paper. Yet, the rigidity of segregation was not about to go quietly into that good night. So we moved kids from one neighborhood school to another. Public schools became the national laboratory for the dismantling of segregation and the racism that created it. Black students were bused into white neighborhood schools, and vice versa, albeit more vice than versa. Learning was trumped by transportation. The result? The enormous achievement gap between black and white students of the 1960s has narrowed only slightly over 50 years. It was wrong, noted the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1973, to turn the attention of communities “from the paramount goal of quality education to a perennially divisive debate over who is to be transported where.” A North Carolina NAACP official at the time put it even more succinctly: “My daughter does not need to sit beside a white person to learn.”
Unfortunately, we didn’t learn our lesson back then. There has not been a major social problem that we haven’t schlepped to the front door of the public school house. Take poverty for example. More than half of public school students come from low-income families. Here’s what a New Mexico Kindergarten teacher told the Washington Post her day was like: “When they come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean?” She cleans them up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes. At her own expense, she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. She is the face of anti-poverty policy to those children, but is left with precious little time to teach.
Once upon a very long time ago, teachers had control over their teaching. They used their skills and experience to map out a learning strategy for their students. Not anymore. As Stanford University Education Professor Larry Cuban noted, “policy elites” at the local, state and federal level have taken over by mandating schools to solve an array of social, economic and political problems. Policy makers, Cuban says, have not hesitated to foist upon classroom teachers such issues as: alcoholism and drug addiction, tobacco use, teenage pregnancy, AIDS prevention, automobile accident reduction, environmental protection and test-driven accountability for producing graduates who can help companies make even more money in the global market place.
A recent study of 30,000 classroom teachers reported that 89 percent said they were “strongly enthusiastic” when they began teaching, but just 15 percent felt the same way today. No wonder many areas of the country are experiencing a teacher shortage. There has been a huge exodus from the profession in recent years. With all the mandates and expectations thrust upon them, teachers have precious little time to do that one thing that drew them into this line of work: teach.
And now the president of the United States wants to turn them into gunslingers. It’s a fitting parody on this society’s long degrading march to dismantle the essence of what it means to be a teacher. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no satirist. To borrow his phrasing, he’s a “sicko” with “demented” thoughts.