Welcome to the official launch of the TeacherTuckshop blog. I’m JP, a special education and TESOL teacher in New York City.

This blog is, in part, a response to my being a less-than-disciplined tiktoker (@theteachertuckshop) and a reaction to what I’ve seen transpire in my profession in the last 14 years. I navigate this system as a run-of-the-mill classroom public school teacher and as a parent who has experienced, at one point or another, independent, public, catholic/religious, and charter schools. This to me, is the only kind of choice we need to be discussing, not just charter schools and vouchers that don’t cover tuition. I’ll probably revisit this topic, but on this, my maiden voyage into the education blogosphere, it seems fitting to talk about the road here. 

The t-shirts come on the heels of a conversation I’ve had, something I’ve read or a podcast I’ve recently listened to. These are the things I am thinking but wouldn’t say in person because, well, tact; or I do say it, outloud to my car radio.

Across the myriad of media I’ve consumed on this topic, a particular tactic has emerged as a clear winner for people who make it seem impossible to get public schools to work as promised, and people who seem to think it needs to be abandoned wholesale, and that strategy is gaslighting.

www.theteachertuckshop.com

It was clear that we had a severe problem that I could see but could not explain. Then the NYTimes wrapped the phenomenon and put a bow on it in 14 minutes. 

Eureka! There it was, in plain English, an explanation as to why I was in New York City and simultaneously in one of the country’s most segregated school systems. It didn’t make sense. 

It didn’t stop there but I have yet to find a meaningful inconsistency in their analysis. The dynamic keeps reappearing. So we have blatant ‘liberal hypocrisy’ on one hand and a free-market hunger games-style school “choice” movement on the other. Woe onto us all. 

The primary argument hinges on extolling all the ways public schools are not currently serving students, to frame it as a fight for the underserved. Except the argument hinges upon people accepting less. There’s been a litany of work about the way that charter schools aren’t doing a really great job and the risks associated with them. There is an ongoing battle in NY over raising the charter school cap as I type this. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to focus on one of the metrics that always come up, and that is charter schools students perform better on state tests. 

So MANY choices (not really)

The ‘choice’ movement has a favorite stat they like to share, “charter students perform better on state tests.” The challenge with that argument isn’t that they’re wrong; it’s that they’ve assumed this is the top priority and metric for evaluating schools. People in the favored fifth don’t care about state tests the way the choice movement would have us believe, because their children don’t have to take any of these pesky tests here in New York until they’re applying to college. 

Free marketeers think you’re supposed to care about test scores more than you care about music, sports, out-of-the-classroom experiences, or the myriad of things wealthy people use to navigate and evaluate their children’s education. What if your child has a savant-like ability in lacrosse or fencing? Shouldn’t they have an opportunity to explore that at school? 

(I’m only being moderately facetious. Children finding out what they’re good at and enjoy, outside of strict academics, is worthy of being taken seriously in the construction of education policy.)

It is a peculiar thing for people who say they want to improve education and give people choices yet use a metric that wealthy people don’t. Why not make independent schools the standard? Saying you’re doing better than the public school, beholden to a wide array of compliance and regulatory mechanisms you can opt in or out of, isn’t necessarily proof of a superior institution. Maybe the odds, and rules are just in your favor. 

If your ‘choice’ doesn’t get all children to have similar choices regardless of their parent’s wealth, you’re really offering second-class status with a side order of precarity. All the while weakening the already feeble system.

Reasonable people can accept that choices are not equal when speaking about cars, houses, or vacations but should find it objectionable when it’s used with regard to educating children. People of conscience should be on a mission to make the entire vein of thought culturally unacceptable. 

Gaslighting may be the tactic used on us but just policy is the thing that that  we must demand of them.

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