I was going to start this project with the very beginning: with the meaning of the word “education.” Trying to decide what it even means to educate, to be a teacher, to have a school, and students.

But after the day I had last Monday, I think I should actually start with the ending. Because over the last year, I have seen some of what that ending will look like: and keeping that in mind is, honestly, even more important than fully understanding every aspect of what we are trying to do in education. Because if we don’t remember what we have to do to keep this going, there won’t be any education to understand, at least no public education, no teachers, no students, no school.

I do still plan to go all the way back and try to understand where education comes from and what it really means. I have large plans for this project; writing about education is a thing I have been meaning to do for a long time, a thing that I have done in small pieces for essentially as long as I have been teaching. I want to collect all of those thoughts, and try to make some real sense of them: and end up with something worth doing to try to improve the world where I have worked for better than two decades.

It wasn’t just Monday. Monday honestly wasn’t even that bad; of my six classes, one didn’t meet, leaving me with two prep periods (And maybe that’s the first general prescription for improving education in general: teachers who have heavy loads of writing instruction, specifically — certainly English; much of social studies; advanced language teachers and so on — should have twice the prep time while still being considered full time. For students to learn the intricacies of good writing, teachers need sufficient time to prepare, and especially to offer feedback on student work.); my AP classes were (mostly) good; my Fantasy/Science Fiction elective was great, as usual. It was my regular Sophomore English classes that gave me trouble.

But it was more than how my classes behaved Monday, and that’s the point, and the reason why that day helped me to see the end. I was talking with my good friend, fellow teacher, and carpooling partner about where we think this is going, and this is my opinion: either we’re going to change things to make education work again, and better; or it’s going to collapse. I believe that we can make the changes we need to make to fix this situation; but I also believe that the collapse is more likely.

You can already see elements of it. My school has always had trouble keeping teachers, both because the pay is too low in this state, so even though my school is one of the higher-paying schools in the area, people keep leaving teaching altogether, mostly to go into tech jobs (Which is kind of hilarious because I work at a STEM school, which means we can’t keep teachers teaching STEM to students because the teachers would rather just work in STEM — and so goes the nation), and also because our former principal was a terrible, terrible administrator, who drove people away both intentionally and with bad management. But lately this problem has grown so severe that now we can’t fill positions: last year we lost a social studies teacher, and it took three months to find a replacement, who then quit at the end of the year; we also lost a math teacher after the first semester, who was then replaced for the second semester, but then we lost the replacement math teacher after three months, and there was no replacement, just a long term sub. This year the school hired a math teacher from outside the US (One of the great things about my school is that the community is widely diverse, both staff and students), who unfortunately has not been able to get through the US Immigration rigamarole, despite having a job waiting for them. The long-term sub who took the math position at the end of last year, after the second teacher quit, has been hired permanently to replace the social studies teacher who left; and the school has been unable to find a long-term sub for the currently missing math teacher — so the math department has been covering the classes, filling in on their prep periods. This unfair imposition (which really approaches exploitation) was ended after four weeks of school: only for the math department to be replaced by all the other teachers, being forced to cover classes on our prep periods. So now I’m teaching Algebra 1 every Wednesday morning, instead of preparing for my own ELA classes.

It’s not just my school, of course. This article has many lovely little gems in it. Here are the highlights:

“According to one school administrator, many districts started panicking earlier in the year. While Arizona has suffered a teacher shortage for a while now, districts appear to be facing even more teacher vacancies at the start of the school year in 2022 than in years past.”

Isn’t it strange that when you have a problem and you do nothing to address it, the problem gets worse? The fact that the statewide response has been Do nothing, then panic, explains everything about how Arizona has dealt with this issue. And, of course, how America is dealing and will continue to deal with this issue. Or at least the half of America that hasn’t dealt with the issue.

“In May, a lot of my HR colleagues throughout Arizona were contacting me that they have zero applicants for their teacher jobs,” said Justin Wing with the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association. “They’re worried. Whatever is worse than severe is going to be happening this year.”

“Whatever is worse than severe?” Sir. There are a million words in the English language. Several of them describe a situation that is worse than severe: Dire. Abominable. Deplorable (Oop — not that one…). Abysmal. Execrable. A shitshow.

Or how about “predictable and intentional?”

Why do I say “intentional?” Because here is the crux:

Arizona has one of the highest teacher-to-student ratios in the country, and despite recent raises, Arizona still has one of the lowest average teacher pay, at around $52,000.

The national average for teacher pay is just over $64,000

“When teachers received that 20% in three years, we went from 49th in teacher pay, to 49th in teacher pay,” said Wing. “I do think the main root cause of the teacher shortage is pay.”

This state is loath to pay teachers. Even when they raise the rate, they don’t raise it relative to other states, or to the actual cost of living. The fact that Arizona could raise the teacher pay rate 20% and still not move in the rankings shows just how bad it was before the current governor, Doug Ducey, added the raise to the state budget. (Let’s also note that he cut corporate and top-bracket personal income taxes in the same budget, so. We’ll see how that will all work out. We’ll further note that Governor Ducey is leaving office at the end of this year due to term limits, so the budgetary mess he’s leaving behind? Not his problem.)

Last one from the first article:

In a recent statewide survey of school administrators, two-thirds agree that there are more teacher vacancies this year than ever before. As of June of this year, schools reported more than 2,200 teacher openings, mostly for K-6.

“It’s very concerning,” said Wing. “We can’t leave kids alone in the classroom teaching themselves. Districts have to move administrators or coaches back into the classroom, which means other things are not being supported.”

So here we are: teacher vacancies that can’t be filled, because the root cause of the problem has not been addressed; and the stopgap measure is to put the wrong people in front of the classroom. They would raise class sizes and drop teacher positions entirely, but they already did that. Now they are making those of us who remain work even harder to handle the load. And the state’s newest strategy? Bring in young, inexperienced, underqualified teachers to fill the jobs. But this will, of course, only worsen the problem in the long term, as the state is asking future teachers to become full-time employees before they are ready, before they are fully trained and prepared; and their task will be made even harder by the fact that they will be required to do extra work to cover all the other teachers who have already left. Right now these degree-less teachers have to be in their last year of college, and must be “supervised” by a licensed teacher — verbiage that is supposed to make us think that the licensed teacher is in the room, but of course that’s not what supervision usually looks like with new teachers; usually it means something more like mentoring, with maybe a single weekly meeting and some random check-ins to see how it’s going. When they run through these future teachers, they will expand it to students two years before they earn their degree, and then three years; eventually last year’s high school graduates will be asked to step up and cover a couple of classes. After all, they learned the material, right? They can handle a class or two. (And they’re so much cheaper than fully trained and qualified professionals!)

Or of course we could follow Florida’s lead and believe that, somehow, being a military veteran qualifies you to teach.

This is the path we are on. And it ends when there simply aren’t enough adults to supervise classes, and the students get thrown together into huge masses in gyms and cafeterias, and told essentially to teach themselves. The step after that is when the school just shuts down.

It’s fine: kids can go online, right?

I have no doubt that this is the end goal for those, mainly but not exclusively on the right, who want to end public education and promote stratified private education, which will allow the upper classes to maintain their current stranglehold on economic power and mobility. Education is the great leveler, and the great lifter of those born into poverty; and thus it is the great enemy of the ones on top who want to stay there, and don’t want to share with those below them. And so they yell and scream about indoctrination, and grooming, and thus create livid hatred and distrust of public school teachers: adding social pressure to all of the current pressure.

And at some point, we will collapse under the weight.

But that’s not the really insidious part. You want to know the really insidious part?

It is that public education is locally funded and locally controlled. Which means that, in the most liberal and progressive states, teacher salaries are — well, reasonable, if not fantastic. And education is well-funded and successful.

Which means that people in those states can ignore the problem in the other, redder states. And so they do: because what can people in Massachusetts and Hawaii do about laws and budgets in Mississippi or North Dakota? Their own children are cared for as well as they can be; and that’s the limit of their responsibility. I understand that entirely: I make sure that my students know as much as I can help them learn about English, and I not only don’t care how much math they know, but I actively mock math as a subject. And PE, too, but that’s as it should be.

So I understand NIMBYism.

But consider how that has affected all of the nations in Central and South America, which we have actively exploited and ruined, and then left to their own devices. The problems we created and ignored have returned to us, arriving in our own backyards. As with climate change. And our imperial interventionist tendencies around the world, particularly in oil-rich regions.

And so it will be if we allow education in this country to remain uneven and unequitable from state to state. If we do not all deal with the whole problem, we will all face the consequences.

The two biggest issues facing education today are a lack of funding, combined with ever-increasing workloads as school employees are required to fill in for all of the missing personnel and programs; and the disparate, unequal, and frankly insane system of local funding and local control of schools.

If we fix those now, we can turn this around, still. And it’s one fix: a single, federal source of all funding, of all oversight, of all control. That’s the answer. I know. It’s socialism. Take a deep breath and swallow the medicine: local control of schools is insane and stupid. A nation that has one people — which is, after all, the whole fucking idea of a nation — needs one system of education for everyone, with specific measures to accommodate individual local needs and difficulties. Otherwise it isn’t one nation of one people. Because it isn’t the topic for today, but what is education? The creation and maintenance of a culture. And what is a culture? It is what sets one people apart, what makes them into one people. So if you want this country to be a country, then it needs to have a single, universal, fair, equitable, effective system of education. If we can achieve that, we will have a chance.

If we can’t, then we’re doomed.