Consequences abound

Sep 21, 2022 | 8:00 pm ET

By Kate Queram

“Hang on, let me check that page to make sure it only includes photos of happy white people.” (Photo by Getty Images)

I’m in the middle of an entirely cosmetic bathroom renovation, a project that’s possible in part because our house had no glaring structural or electrical issues that had to be fixed first. You can’t really do the fun shiny work when the roof is falling in — or you could, I guess, but there’s no point in having a sparkling new bathroom (marble tile! Vaguely Golden Girls-y wallpaper!) if the ceiling’s going to collapse on it a day after it’s finished.

This is all very obvious, or at least it should be. You can spend a lot of time and money finding solutions for problems that don’t exist, but if you don’t address the persistent foundational flaws, the system is never going to stand on its own.

The Big Takeaway

In a normal year — defined for our purposes as “any time period before we’d heard the word COVID” — around 8% of teachers leave their jobs. But the exodus, like so many things, is much worse here in the post-normal. In January, 55% of teachers said they were more likely to quit or retire early because of the pandemic. By February, the number of people quitting education-related jobs had grown faster than in any other industry. In total, the U.S. has lost roughly 600,000 educators since January 2020.

The pandemic prompted many of those departures, but politics played a role, too. The culture-war crosshairs have been trained on schools for at least two years, blaming teachers and administrators for mask mandates and remote learning and turning classrooms into flashpoints for rhetoric-driven debates over transgender kids, “inappropriate” reading material and whether it’s OK to teach kids that slavery happened or was racist. (FYI: It did, and it was.)

It’s exhausting to recap the onslaught, never mind attempting to teach through it. Just ask Jake Gless, who left his job teaching art at a Michigan middle school after administrators accused him of retaliating against students by *checks notes* hanging an LGBTQ+ pride flag in his classroom. Gless, who’d been with the district for a little more than two years, bought the flag after students destroyed a younger child’s rainbow-themed art project, the Michigan Advance reported.

Gless said he’d intended the rainbow flag to serve as a symbol of inclusion. But just hours after he hung it, multiple students — some of them using homophobic slurs — reported the flag to the school’s principal. When she came to Gless’ classroom to discuss the issue, he asked if he needed to remove it.

“She just looked at me and said, ‘Whatever it takes,’” Gless said. “I felt like I couldn’t be there anymore, and I felt like it was a decision beyond my control. It felt like something that happened to me.”

Just throwing it out there that the people triggered by a rainbow flag are probably the same people using the word “snowflake” as a diss. (Photo by Getty Images)

His experience is a microcosm of the increasingly toxic relationship between schools and politics, which breeds an environment where anything — and everything — is subject to baseless criticism that spreads as fact. For example, educators and advocates who seek to improve LGBTQ+ representation are often labeled as “groomers'' by conservative politicians and parents’ groups. In Michigan, teachers have been frequent targets of the far-right group Moms for Liberty, which attacked educators in multiple now-deleted social media posts, including a TikTok video implying that a substitute who expressed support for LGBTQ+ students was a pedophile.

Surveys have found that teachers are more likely to quit if they’ve been harassed for politicized issues, an unsurprising correlation that should bother anyone who purports to prioritize education. But it doesn’t seem to be an issue for Tudor Dixon, a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Michigan whose support for schools seems limited to their capacity for ensuring the survival of capitalism.

“Education is the foundation. So if our students are thriving and our parents are involved in schools, then we have a good workforce going forward,” said Dixon, whose four children attend a private school. “I think it’s so important for mom and dad to know what’s going on with their kids.”

I, too, would like to know what’s going on. (Photo by pathdoc/Adobe Stock)

…It is important to have a handle on what’s happening, which raises the question of why so many allegedly pro-education politicians seem to know nothing about the same school systems they pretend to champion. As always, confusion brings us to Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to brag about his state’s public education system while nursing a chronic blind spot for its lowest-performing schools, per the Florida Phoenix.

Dozens of Florida’s schools are classified each year as “persistently low-performing,” a designation based on consistently poor graduation rates, test results and other performance metrics. (One hundred schools made the list for the 2021-22 school year.) DeSantis has never discussed those schools, their problems, or ways to improve them, preferring instead to leverage his platform for airtime to complain about masks, transgender student-athletes and “woke” ideology infiltrating classrooms.

Ironically, his vitriol could be contributing to the problem. Teachers are more likely to resign when their work gets politicized, and teacher turnover is a key driver of school performance, according to Darzell Warren, president of the Escambia Education Association.

“You have inexperienced teachers that are placed in these schools, so, you are not having the experience that is needed,” she said. “When there’s a possibility for some of these teachers to transfer out, they are.”

DeSantis could theoretically help the schools simply by highlighting their struggles, which would at least give incoming teachers a realistic idea of what to expect. But he won’t, officials said. It’s not even clear if he’s aware of the problem.

“I’ve never seen him go to these schools,” said state Sen. Tina Polsky, a Democrat. “If he doesn’t care, why should anyone else care?”

I really don’t care, do u?: (Idaho) Political payback? One wealthy donor may have influenced GOP primary defeats … (Louisiana) LGBTQ book restrictions get dog-eared in Livingston Parish … White House: Nearly 280,000 Mainers qualify for student loan forgiveness … Two former Minneapolis officials charged in child nutrition scandal … (Montana) District Court judge rules three laws, including trans-athlete ban, unconstitutional … (Ohio) House Republicans want schools to tell parents about ‘sexually explicit content’ … (Oregon) Fewer community groups got state funding for summer learning due to insurance requirement … Stones unturned: Before it closed, for-profit school drew attention of Vermont officials

State of Our Democracy

A Republican running for attorney general in Michigan said the morning-after pill should be outlawed and regulated like fentanyl, a plan he is totally qualified to recommend now that he knows that the morning-after pill exists!

That hadn’t happened a month ago, when a Democratic activist asked Matthew DePerno if he’d be in favor of banning the emergency contraceptive pill known as Plan B.

“What’s Plan B?” DePerno replied.

Once he learned the basics, though, DePerno was decisive (if still largely uninformed).

“You gotta figure out how to ban the pill from the state,” he said in a recording of the conversation, which took place at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas. “You have to stop it at the border. It would be no different than fentanyl. The state has to ban it, and it should be banned. But it’s just an issue of how do you enforce it; how do you make sure that it stops? That’s your problem.”

I mean, he’s sort of right, I guess — it would be hard to stop Plan B at the border, since it’s not trafficked into the country by drug cartels. (It is sold in pharmacies, though. Maybe start at CVS? There are a bunch of them in El Paso — right next to the border.)

I weep: Kansas poll: Gov. Laura Kelly holds narrow lead in gubernatorial race against Derek Schmidt … North Carolina Republican leaders want a three-judge panel for the next step in a voter ID case, not the judge who initially decided against them … Ohio Supreme Court goes against Secretary of State, allows election-denier on ballot … (Wisconsin) Republicans continue dispute over guardianship and voter rolls

From the Newsrooms

One Last Thing

Forever (seriously, FOR-EV-ER) NFL QB Tom Brady apologized for breaking a tablet on the sidelines during the second half of a close game on Sunday, just two days after reports that he’s living apart from his supermodel wife of 13 years who thought he’d retired for real this time. (The tablet was a Microsoft Surface, so probably no one cared or even noticed that it was gone.)