NEERAJA DESHPANDE: The Teaching Profession’s Death Spiral

In America today, back to school means back to chaos in far too many districts.

This week, a middle school teacher in Virginia’s Alexandria County Public Schools district came under fire for giving her students a back-to-school survey that enables them to socially transition at school behind their parents’ backs. Meanwhile, the Department of Education announced an investigation into Burlington, Massachusetts’ Public Schools for allegedly violating parental rights, by giving students an explicit survey without parental knowledge.

Stories like these are a travesty first and foremost for students, who are deprived of their right to learn by teachers and administrators who have abdicated their duty to educate. These stories are also much of why trust and enrollment in public schools have fallen off a cliff.

But there are hidden victims of this public-school status quo who are rarely acknowledged: good teachers.

By “good teachers,” I mean those who go into the profession for the right reasons—because they want to impart knowledge to the next generation. These are men and women disinterested in indoctrination and who want to maintain high standards for themselves and their students alike. Retaining them has become difficult to impossible for a system that seeks to turn them into propagandists who are not allowed to hold students to academic or behavioral standards.

A recent documentary by IW Features highlights this. In it, a former public-school teacher from Michigan, Michelle Mangiapane, tells her story of how she became disillusioned with public schools to the point of leaving for private schools. A mom of four and an immigrant from Canada, she came to the U.S. in 1996 to teach math—a subject which is almost always in high demand, since few are qualified to teach it—and fell in love with the country and with her profession.

But around 2008, the political environment began to shift—and with it, so did the schools.

Serving as a credit recovery instructor after school, in addition to her regular teaching role, she saw how low the bar was for her students. At one point, she had a student who, under the assistant principal’s supervision, allegedly used the internet to complete all her assignments and tests, allowing her to finish the course within seven hours and with an A she did not actually earn. Mangiapane, understandably, was horrified that she was expected to give credit to this student anyway. “I can’t be the teacher of record. How can you want me to be the teacher of record?” she recalls telling her assistant principal. “I mean, that’s an official legal document.”

Indeed, good teachers like Mangiapane feel that grade inflation is not only a blow to their students’ integrity, but to their own. Still, they are forced either to comply with it or go against official policies, seeing that grade inflation has been made essentially mandatory in districts around the country. As I found in my report, “Give Teachers a Break: Cutting Red Tape and Unleashing the Potential of America’s Great Teachers,” policies like equitable grading, which establishes floors for grades, and policies that circumvent or abolish standardized testing have made it difficult for teachers to hold students to any standard at all.

This is part and parcel with equity ideology in general. Mangiapane recalls the humiliation of a DEI training in which she was penalized for giving consequences such as detentions and tardies to misbehaving students and was allegedly explicitly told “to decrease the number of detentions that were issued for a certain race that showed up late, because culturally it’s acceptable for them,” she said. “And that just boggled my brain. So I should not teach them what professionalism is––showing up on time?”

Unfortunately, Mangiapane is not alone. Deteriorating student behavior is the number one reason teachers are burning out from the profession, and much of why teacher retention has been in freefall. For years, tolerating poor behavior was a matter of federal policy, thanks to the Obama Department of Education’s ill-advised guidance that threatened schools with loss of federal funding if they gave more punishments to students of some races but not others—no consideration was given to the obvious truth that there is no racism if, say, two black students and one white student are all given a detention for the same offense, even if more black students were punished on paper than white students.

While that guidance was revoked during the first Trump administration, the damage was done: students, teachers, and administrators had gotten used to the Obama status quo, and states had already enacted their own ill-advised policies, doubling down on disorder in the name of “equity.” President Trump’s recent executive order that restores order in the classroom is a step in the right direction but must be bolstered and upheld on the state and local level for it to be effective.

There are certainly ideologues in education—activists who have decided to become teachers—but there are more teachers like Mangiapane, who are disgusted with the low standards and propaganda that they are not only expected to tolerate, but to affirm with smiles on their faces. Frustrated with the system, these teachers often leave the teaching profession altogether or go to private schools—as Mangiapane eventually did last year—where they often (although not always) have more autonomy and freedom from bureaucracy.

Mangiapane is just one teacher, but there are so many others like her out there who have made the same choice she did. In aggregate, their choices—all understandable and even commendable—mean that our public schools are even more bereft of sane adults who can actually be trusted with educating American children.

If public schools are to have any hope of escaping this death spiral, policymakers must explicitly protect teachers as well as students from propaganda, low standards, and chaos. The future of our country depends on it.

Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women (iwf.org)

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)