Jakey Lebwohl, Emma Park, and Zach Rausch on the Substack* After Babel published a meticulous documentation of an education system that is failing too many students. All students had been improving in pretty much every area, and then about 2010, that improvement mostly stopped. The drop in skills such as reading and math is particularly noteworthy among the lowest-performing students—the kids already disadvantaged in school. This is pretty much equally true for all races, genders, and socioeconomic groups.

I was a student in excellent public schools (ranked second in the state of Washington at that time) from 1957 until my high school graduation in 1970, and then an excellent public university (University of Washington) for six years when I graduated with 3 degrees, cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. One distinct advantage I had throughout my education was teachers who were highly qualified, even over-qualified for the work. Memorable teachers were women with limited opportunities (secretarial, teaching, and nursing) and men from working class backgrounds (industry, farming, service) who were the first in their families to have the opportunity to earn [safer] white-collar jobs as a result of the GI Bill. Teaching never paid well but had the advantage of offering most people a reliable income and summer weeks to take a second job. Many teachers had the advantage of being treated as professionals. The unpaid or partially-pay sabbatical year every six years of teaching encouraged teachers to behave as true academics who pursued further degrees and research projects. Travel was understood to be educational for teachers and was tax deductible. [I owe everything I know about flying buttresses to that tax deduction!] Those genuinely educational perks are gone, and in my state tenure for public school teachers was eliminated in 1997.

In every way, and especially now under an administration that wants to cut all federal funding, public school teachers are treated as factory workers. No offense to factory workers, but I could have done that job straight out of high school.

In fact, my brother earned a 2-year community college degree that prepared him for a factory job. There, he earned more in his first year than he would ever earn later as a teacher in the mathematics and science departments of the public school where we both taught.

The counselors where I taught would never have urged the future I was steered toward by my school counselors. My math and spacial reasoning scores were right near and at the top [I test well], but I was a girl so it was fine whatever I chose so long as it suited my future as wife and mother. Mom wanted me to prepare for the future as a secretary, the counselor told me my goals of architecture or interior design were ridiculous, my counselor flirted with me, and I chose the School of Art.

Beginning in 1976, I taught Art in a girls’ prep school for 3 years, subbed, and then taught English and Art and English-related electives in a rural public school on the Oregon coast, and college Lit and Writing for the next forty. All this to say, I’ve been watching the evolution of public education for my entire life.

I taught with few teachers as capable as myself, several who treated teaching as an easy job (it’s not easy if you are doing it well), and many who did not last as teachers but left for better-paying work in a cocktail lounge or industry.

Another issue was the over-emphasis on college as a necessary step in every single child’s future. That view took hold by the 2000s. Where does that leave the teen without interest or capacity for college?

But the other major factor affecting student learning that I witnessed was Common Core. Standards were based purely on multiple choice test data. “Teaching to the test” replaced innovation and adaptation to student interests with dull routine test-prep. I was discouraged from teaching anything but nonfiction. I was required to explain how each lesson prepared students for testing.

Further, though I taught the use of computers in all my classes, I never allowed cell phones in my classroom, and the shift to on-screen learning has proved to be a disaster for human beings. I was in an early cadre of teachers approached and asked to participate in training for on-line education. It was horrendous in the way it valued rote response and failed to address either student needs or creative thinking. I used to tell my yearbook students: “There is nothing that can be done on computer that cannot be done by hand with a lot more time.” That’s true of page design, but people are not yearbook pages. Yearbook pages must first be imagined by people. [Even using AI would require someone to initiate the project.]

People invent themselves and require human responses to guide them forward in a way useful and meaningful to them. That requires attention, skill, and compassion. It requires money.

CHEAPER is CHEAP. But “cheap” is not what human beings aspire to be.

The current powers that be only want education to be cheap and simple. People’s lives should not become cheap, and they are never simple.

The people who have pushed and are pushing education in this disastrous direction over the past fifteen or twenty years have a couple of things in common: They are not teachers and they don’t care much about what happens to other people’s children.

Rich people will spend a lot of money to convince the public that we [they] shouldn’t be taxed so much for public education. They will “prove” that we are wasting money and spending too much. At the same time, they send their own children to private schools with tuition costing four or six times as much [or more] as is spent on public school children. “Separate but equal” was always a myth of the caste system, and now they want vouchers and tax rebates for their exclusive and elite schools. They want to pretend they are handing over control to states. they want to pretend that Alabama will ensure its children receive an education comparable to Massachusetts’. They want to pretend that if Alabaman children are poorly educated, it’s their own fault.

People without experience in public schools insist they know how to make them better.

Pardon me while I detail improvements in cardiovascular surgery.

Pay them less, require more yearly online multiple choice tests (I was taking seventeen), and more surgeries with less time off.

There we go! It’s so simple! A child could do it.

I rarely draw, and this pencil sketch might be 30 minutes of work. (In person, the penciled eyes glint.) I work primarily as a three-dimensional artist, a preference I identified when I was 12, after I designed the school spring program cover for silkscreen printing, and printed it.

• I have been clear that I hate Substack, but at the same time, I do read a few with some regularity. If I were still teaching, especially since I integrated math and science and history with literature, I would require students to read Heather Cox Richardson for the way she threads ideas through America’s past.
• Several years ago, if I were still teaching, I would also have taken The Heritage Foundation off my recommended right-wing reading list. That resource was once balanced by The Nation thirty and even less than twenty years ago. [I doubt my student fully appreciated how hard it was to keep an ideological balance of persuasive sources. I was never able to include FOX as a credible text source because the only credible texts were straight news I could find anywhere—the semi-credible and genuinely wacko right-wing “opinions” were only spoken.] There was a time when I read Heritage regularly. I didn’t often agree, but I could assure students their site didn’t lie. That’s no longer true.