No big post this time. Just wanted to draw your attention to this:
I must correct you on a comment you made on your Dishcast interview with Amy Chua. You lamented that Critical Race Theory has become so widespread that it’s infected every cultural institution, including “the entire education establishment — high schools, elementary schools” and cited a cultural sensitivity course from the NEA, and the AFT’s invitation to Ibram X. Kendi to speak at one of their conferences, as somehow evidence of CRT's influence in American public education.
As an educator in the New York City public schools, I can assure you that CRT’s influence is very small indeed, and that most teachers in this country probably couldn’t even tell you what “NEA” or “AFT” are acronyms for, what their ideological positions are, or, more importantly, what those organizations actually do. Those organizations, while nominally representing millions of teachers, have no influence on what actually happens in classrooms and are regarded by most teachers as purveyors of the occasional junk mail or annoying robo-call.
I think most people who freak out about what happens in American classrooms have no real idea about what actually happens in American classrooms or how American classrooms actually work. It bears keeping in mind that there are 14,000 school districts, about 130,000 K-12 schools, over 3.3 million teachers and millions upon millions of individual classes taught each year. There’s simply no idea, or text, or policy that’s going to have much of an effect on what happens at 10:30 am on a Tuesday in an Algebra class in El Paso.
We have no national curriculum (or even national standards), like South Korea. Most teachers listen to the national conversation about school closings or curriculum with mild bemusement, looking up briefly from the stack of essays they’re grading before diving back into the real work of teaching, which is at once far more interesting and far more tedious and far less political than most non-educators realize.
This is from a letter I sent to ur-blogger and political commentator Andrew Sullivan, who writes a weekly newsletter called The Weekly Dish and hosts a weekly podcast called The Dishcast. Each week he runs letters from his readers and occasionally responds to them at length. (Though he didn’t respond to my letter, he ran it. I’ll take it.) Amy Chua, you might remember, gained notoriety a decade ago from her book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom which was a rebuke of sorts to namby-pamby American parenting practices. I remember a lot of people freaked out because she threw out her daughter’s dollhouse when she wasn’t practicing the piano enough or something like that.
Further background: the “NEA” stands for the National Education Association and the “AFT” stands for the American Federation of Teachers. They are the first and second largest teacher unions, respectively. Perhaps as further evidence of my point, I had to Google what the abbreviations exactly stood for.
I’m running this letter because it makes a point in a very succinct way that I’ve made again and again in my posts and which has, I suppose, become the cri de coeur of the newsletter itself: American public schools aren’t what they seem. They’re far more varied and messy and complex than much of the conversation about them would lead you to believe. Granted, there is a basic genetic structure to all American schools. But there’s a basic genetic structure to American weddings, too. And beyond the broad outlines — dress, vows, cake — there’s a bit of difference in the details, and those details make all the difference. Which is why even though all weddings feel basically the same, some are so boring that you hope the bride and groom annul their marriage before the cake is served just so you can go home early, and some are so outrageously fun that you feel like you’re in the final dance scene of Foot Loose.
So reader, beware. As we inch toward the beginning of what’s going to be a(nother) doozy of a school year, and as we, Americans, continue to quarrel about what this country should be, you’re going to read on social media and hear from your friends and see on the news about what’s going on in “school,” and what works in “school,” and what they’re teaching in “school,” and how kids are doing in “school,” but remember that there is no “school.” There are only schools.
All of them have cake, but none of it tastes the same.
Above photo: Nigel Henderson, Children in a classroom at Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, Norfolk, c.1949–c.1956. From the Tate Modern.