The Education racket is a big, wide open secret.
Today, the word educator hides two classes of professionals: teaching and non-teaching professionals. The non-teaching professionals consist of literacy facilitators, department chairs, consultants, principals and vice principals, social workers, guidance counselors and anybody else with a college degree hired to fact find, look into, observe, suggest, oversee, but not teach.
They will say in their defense that they are teachers, that they teach teachers, when in reality they think they are smarter than teachers for either getting out of teaching or, smarter yet, never having been a teacher.
I see a radically new way of teaching. It will evolve out of sheer necessity, out of a need to recapture the essence of teaching, or the real pursuits of the intellect. If you can envision city schools contracting with certified teachers directly, as in a practice as similar to a physician’s practice or a law practice, envision the 21st century teacher.
That is when the exposures come and the frauds either run for cover or try to carve out phony jobs for themselves that do not involve teaching, for they disdain teaching. Actually most that I’ve seen are terrible teachers, but still like to consider themselves “educators.” They have indeed disgraced the name of educator until, with me, it is a pejorative. So I am a teacher. They can not get pass that, nor understand my meaning when I curse them with their own bankrupt edu-constructions.
All of the central offices nationwide are big money draining systems. Here is the nexus of the education racket: the non-teaching professionals who have found a way to earn up to six figures in education calling themselves educators without seeing one child in their administrative careers. Indeed, they refuse to have anything to do with children, except, maybe, their own. They are only an asset to them, certainly not to the millions of public and mainly city school children who get short changed by them because so much money is spent on them, and the children get so very little wisdom from them in return. This isn’t illegal, but it is certainly immoral.
I would like to make it a requirement for all certified personnel in our public schools to have to be teachers, not the bogus “educator.” Teachers have classes. This means that from the superintendent on down, if he is certified personnel, he should have at least one class of students to teach and be responsible for daily. At some point in even a superintendent’s day, he or she should have to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t have a meeting with the mayor at that time—I have a class.” Think of the classroom size reducing to a manageable size, resembling those of functioning and private schools. School children will benefit only when teacher skills and abilities are the status in the public school systems.
This will immediately drive out the frauds who have little time for students and those “educators” who got out of the classrooms because they were not good in them. But also it keeps principals and superintendents honest. For everyone must do what is required of a teacher, for all certified personnel would be teachers. Central office would not exist, but small offices in schools, where department chairs, vice principals, and principals all work, handled administrative responsibilities as well as teach. All personnel not certified should make no more than clerk types- even less than secretaries and custodians, for secretaries and custodians serve legitimate functions in the school and are truly needed. I am speaking of personnel so esoteric that they can disappear for weeks, months, and years in personnel offices and no one even knows it. And indeed, this is the “educator’s” hope, their prime reason for getting a board or out of classroom job. This is the racket part of education that is a shame and a scandal, and that should immediately be abolished.
So envision, no more central offices. They are extinct, like dinosaurs. The superintendent is stationed at one of the schools. His deputy superintendents are scattered throughout the schools, depending upon the size of the school system. The department chairs are master teachers and of course, have classes. In fact, all of the certified staff has classes. The superintendents are master teachers and come through classes from time to time to show new or intermediate teachers the art of veteran and competent teaching. They show that it can be done, or it cannot be brought to teachers as new programs.
Ginger Whitaker