Educators are the Entire Problem With Education
Education reform needs to start with asking how educators are failing to respect children, not the other way around
In January 2018, James Johnson punched a 13-year-old student in the face while teaching at Meany Middle School in Seattle, WA. The catalyst was an argument over a backpack policy during which, according to student witnesses, Johnson put his face against his 8th-grade student’s face, called him a “nigga” and, when the child defended himself by pushing Johnson away, punched the student in his face twice before slamming his head against a table and dragging him into the hallway. This assault was just one in a long line of documented disciplinary violations by Johnson against students, including calling students pet names (“honey”, “baby girl”, “sweetie”), racial epithets (“nigga”, “kung fu kid”), and inappropriate touching. Johnson was suspended for five days, while the student he assaulted was suspended for fifteen days, following which Johnson was transferred to nearby Washington Middle School, where he committed more instances of sexual harassment and physical assault of children, including hitting at least one student in the throat and pushing them.
Students continued to report his abuses, more than one witnessed by other teachers who did nothing, while administrators permitted Johnson back into classrooms with middle school students day after day. In fact, Johnson was allowed by both district and Washington Middle School administrators to continue teaching until a group of students came together and descended on the principal’s office, demanding his removal. The Meany assault was not even the first time Johnson was disciplined for putting his hands on students, yet educators colluded to protect him while the students they were entrusted to protect were forced to fight for themselves. This brings questions of what exactly educators think their role is in schools. Is it teaching? Control? Punishment? And where does the care and safety of children factor in?
I was eighteen when I got my first “real” teaching job. After two years as an intern assistant teacher in a small church daycare, I applied for an assistant teaching position at a now-closed early learning center in the Central District of Seattle. The center staff was all women (mostly Black and Latina), ranging in age from late 20s to 60, and served mostly low-income families of the same racial composition, many of whom recieved city/state subsidized childcare. The role went to another woman - “more teaching experience”, I was told - but the director, June, offered to hire me as an “on-call substitute”. June then scheduled me to work 9 AM to 6 PM Monday through Friday every week for a year, floating between classrooms as “relief” staff. Grateful for full-time work, I didn’t register my own exploitation as part of a long tradition of administrators staffing by circumventing responsibilities to provide adequate compensation, benefits, or a guarantee of ongoing work. New to the field, I was merely eager to learn and learn I did.
I learned that Black children as young as two-years-old were more likely to be isolated, yelled at, or put in time out for behavior teachers didn’t like or “not listening” than non-Black children; that the solution to 3-year-olds refusing to nap or lay down at nap time was to yell at them; that when teachers thought no one was looking or the staff in the room wouldn’t report them, they would grab preschoolers by their arms and get down low to snarl at them menacingly as “discipline”; and that when you’re an “on-call sub” and you report a teacher for abusing a child, you go from being scheduled forty hours per week for a year to there suddenly being “no work available” for you. This was what I learned firsthand at eighteen, and years later, similar abuses continue to make headlines across the country.
For 12 years, I worked in early childhood education, working my way up from an intern assistant teacher to lead primary teacher. I worked in four learning centers, two preschools, and two daycares - mostly in the Seattle area, with brief periods spent in Sacramento and later Portland - with age groups spanning infant to Pre-K. Some of the locations served mostly low-income families, some mostly higher-income families. Some were private pay, some almost entirely families with state-subsidized childcare. Sometimes we had predominantly Black and brown families and staff, and other times both were almost entirely white. No matter the demographics or location - across county, city, state, race, and cultural lines - what I found to be consistent was that children aged 4 weeks to 5-years-old were having their first contact with “teachers” in childcare environments where adults treated them with neither respect nor care.
Before many children could speak, they were drilled to sit still and follow orders and punished when they wouldn’t or couldn’t. Punishment looked like being isolated, forced to sit/lay down for long periods, snapped at, or charged at by angry adults five times their size getting in their face to yell at or grab them. Teachers entrusted with their care and instruction were more concerned with perceived authority than their enrichment and learning, and those at the top - center directors, owners, boards of directors - only cared about their own enrichment. It is true teachers are underpaid, undervalued, and exploited. It is also true no one is more undervalued and exploited than children used by everyone to their own advantage while being treated like a nuisance. Adults reap financial reward for “educating” children, yet do not operate in an obligation to make that experience rewarding, valuable, and safe. I won’t erase teachers I encountered with a genuine passion for teaching and care for children, but I also won’t pretend that was all or even most. And if you are a teacher who does care to try to improve the classroom environment for children, it’s an uphill battle against administrative collusion and cultures that resist shifting.
These attitudes, behaviors, cultures, and administrative barriers persisted during my final years as a teacher when I transitioned to elementary education. The most significant change was that the kids were a little bit older and considered “formal” students, which meant the expectations of “responsibility” rapidly increased - but only for them. Five, six, and seven-year-olds were expected to “know how to behave” in classrooms - sit at desks without moving, hands in their laps, no talking, do as they are told without asking too many questions or challenging adults, stay on task - and chastised when they behaved in ways they “should know better than.” Correction and reprimands came from teachers who forgot to print or copy worksheets, lost assignments, regularly were on their phone during class time, and used movies and games to placate children when they were too tired (or hungover) to teach. They came as part of education policy imposed by administrators who blew budgets, misappropriated funds, and overcrowded classrooms. Children, however, were not able to reprimand or chastise any adults in return for how actions they “should know better than” impacted them, and their complaints of bullying and cruelty from staff went largely ignored.
What adults consider “bad behavior” from children demands urgency. Correction. But, as we saw with James Johnson, what children report as bad behavior and abuse from teachers is dismissed and ignored, often viewed as baseless complaining from children who “hate discipline” and “don’t want to follow rules.” This attitude persists despite data and headlines showing widespread national abuse of children in schools, ranging from discrimination against and harassment of students who are Black, other minorities, LGBTQ+ and/or disabled; physical abuse; and sexual assault, grooming, and trafficking by people with power and authority over children. A society that seems to understand that where there is power, there will always lie a tendency to abuse it, abandons all understanding when it comes to children. And this is the fundamental contradiction and antagonism of the educator-student relationship, which is never addressed by claims of student behavior as a hardship in schools. What about the ways adults at every level are a hardship for students in schools?
There is a long history of the formation and goals of US schools being anti-child. We can trace this back to schools originally established as a way for adults to train future laborers, replacing colonial practices of sending youth out for servitude and apprenticeships for “skill building” purposes. Later iterations focused on emphasizing obedience, adherence to authority, and patriotism in the aftermath or anticipation of war. In every iteration, modern education in the US has operated as both a partnership and competition between parents and educators (the state) over who “owns” and controls children and which group should have ultimate say in how they are taught to later perform labor. Education has never been systemically shaped around the safety, agency, and enrichment of children despite requiring children participate. Compulsory education, while not mandated at the federal level, has been the law in every state since the 1930s. These laws require students to attend school, while truancy laws impose consequences of varying severity for them and/or their parents should they not, yet zero agency or inclusion is afforded children in determining what these experiences in school should be.
In decades of education organizing and reform, as education policy continues to be developed “on behalf of” students, students have almost no representation or voice in informing said policy. Moreover, adults who champion changes they feel are important - higher salaries, smaller class sizes, better benefits for teachers, shorter work days, “zero-tolerance” policies for student behavior - do not rally around issues that would impose more accountability and limitations on them. Educators are not organizing walkouts or striking to demand districts require teachers have degrees in education, only allow teachers with active state licenses to teach, enact “zero tolerance” policies resulting in the firing and decertification of any teacher engaged in any incident of aggression or disrespect toward any child, change aggressively punitive disciplinary policies for children, or remove curriculum that only teaches students to perform standardized testing.
Nor are administrators - at the school or district level - striking demanding teachers be provided with teaching coaches; or to have their own salaries, raises, and bonuses tied to student and teacher satisfaction with school performance; or that superintendent salaries be reduced to pay for better/more school resources. In fact, what we often hear is the opposite. That as education policy gets worse for students, as more teachers who were not trained in education or to teach and who are not certified are funneled into classrooms, as students say they feel less safe in schools, the primary issue is that the adults both responsible and benefiting “do not get paid enough.”
There is no greater evidence that US schools operate as a cash grab where adults are enriched via the exploitation of children for their unpaid labor than how schools are funded. Schools in higher-income areas get increased funding from tax dollars, leading to better resources, higher paid staff and better student performance on standardized tests, which, in turn, leads to more federal funding. Conversely, schools in lower-income (often Black/minority) communities are underfunded and underresourced, leading to poor academic performance and those students being punished with fewer resources. However, in talking with many educators, I don’t often find this discussed as these Black and minority students being neglected, exploited, and undereducated, but instead the students more or less “holding back” the teachers and schools from better through their “low effort.” “These kids are not even trying. They don’t care, and if they don’t care, why should I? They just come to play and for an easy A,” is what I was told by my daughter’s 3rd-grade ELA teacher (who did not have a degree in education or a teaching license) about eight-year-olds during a conference, when I expressed concerns about how she was approaching testing with students.
My daughter has attended a “Title I” elementary school in Memphis for the past five years. There has not been a single year that I have not received a letter at the start of the school year notifying me that at least one of the teachers of her four core subjects - ELA, math, and science/social studies, the last of which is always a hybrid class taught by one teacher - “does not meet the minimum state requirements for teaching.” The letter assures me that administrators are committed to monitoring the performance of these teachers and invite our partnership as parents to “ensure student progress”. But each year, as I raise concerns of educational neglect and inappropriate conduct of these teachers - from sending home “projects” with no instructions for completion, not sending home graded work or entering grades until the end of the quarter, giving tests with inaccurate answer keys/duplicate questions and answers, giving my daughter Fs and Cs that I’m told was a grading error and she actually earned an A when I ask to see the work, or commenting on my child’s body to name a few incidents - I am engaged as a problem for being critical of staff.
At the start of every school year, administrators and teachers hold parent orientations to inform parents of their expectations of our students and us. It seems reasonable, then, that parents should expect them to hold themselves to the same “no excuses” standard they demand of elementary school children. In my most recent conference, however, with my daughter’s principal, assistant principal, and a teacher about whom I’d raised several concerns of grading discrepancies and unprofessional engagement with both my daughter and me, the principal said to me about the teacher, “she’s young”. And that struck me because you know who is really young? My 11-year-old. It hit me that people in positions of authority over children - especially Black children and especially poor and Black children - largely do not see them as people with legitimate needs and grievances. They do not feel they owe them anything more than they see fit to give. They have already presupposed themselves as “right,” and the children as “wrong,” and since they deem they are “doing everything right”, the perspective and experience of the child is irrelevant in defining truth.
In classrooms across the country, from ages infant to 18-years-old, children are in the care of adults who are empowered to use control, fear, bullying, coercion, and punishments ranging from reprimands to yelling to timeouts to denial of privileges (participation in games, field trips, recess), to write ups, detentions, suspensions and expulsions to punish children for any behavior they deem offensive, while children have little to no recourse to defend themselves. Parents at my daughter’s school regularly talk about our kids coming home to tell us their classes had no recess for days on end as group punishment for behavior from 2-3 students that upset teachers, despite school and district policies mandating recess in response to data that shows students who are given daily recess perform better. All this without even getting into the long history of corporal punishment in schools, a practice still legal in 17 states and that many educators both engage in and support as a solution to “behavior problems” despite longstanding research on its harm.
The harms and denials of personhood that students suffer are cumulative. The 3-year-old yelled at for not napping becomes the 8-year-old whose reading struggles are dismissed as “not trying” becomes the 13-year-old watching their classmates be bullied or even assaulted by staff while administrators ignore their reports becomes the 15-year-old with “behavior problems.” As we talk about worker exploitation, toxic work environments, and resistance in the face of oppression, we have to create space for the experiences of students in schools and stop identifying a “problem” where we should see victims. It is imperative we remember that children are not responsible for the world we live in; we are responsible for the world we, as adults, create and impose on them, and it is our job to change conditions to build a better world for them.
That change won’t come through “representation” either; it must be ideological. Even in schools with Black leadership, like the one my daughter attends, Black children and their education continue to be understood and engaged as obstacles rather than objectives. Black male educators, who continue to have the least representation within education, tend to be more sympathetic to the reality that education policy fails to prioritize children and aim criticism toward “the system”. Black female educators, who comprise a larger demographic of educators, tend to identify with a system they feel represented and influential within and see criticism of “the system” as indicting them/their peers and diminishing their “hard work” rather than as necessary to contend with harm and function. In the conference I mentioned, I was told pointing out concerns of a teacher violating professional and ethical boundaries, came off “critical” when we are “both Black queens who should be lifting each other up.” I repeatedly had to emphasize that I would never engage “solidarity” at the expense of my child or support a higher standard of accountability for my 11-year-old than adults.
And this is where both “systems, not people” and “people, not systems” get it wrong. Systems are neither faceless entities for which “no one” is responsible, thereby absolving individuals of culpability in reproducing, defending, overlooking, and otherwise enabling violence to perpetuate. Nor are they merely the outputs of the individual efforts and contributions of single actors who deem themselves and their peers to be “good” while ignoring larger mechanisms of abuse and exploitation. They are the product of both individual actors and larger mechanisms such as resources, policy, culture, function, and where and how people organize and collude. Within a system that is entirely sustained by the subjugation, exploitation, and denial of agency to children who are then punished for voicing unmet needs and resistance to harmful environments and staff, any educator who would look at victims and identify them as “the problem” is proving how little concern they have for them.
Educators, by which I mean every role defining, practicing, and influencing the education of children, at every level, are the problem - not necessarily individually, but systemically.
Teachers owe better.
Administrators owe better.
Districts owe better.
Education owes better.