The 3 R's

do not mean what you think they mean

I’m teaching a grad-level education course for UM this fall, one I myself took long ago. I inherited the class a few days before the semester began and so had no control over the assigned texts, and one of them is new to me: How the Other Half Learns, about charter schools. As I read along with the students, I have been thinking how we got into this mess with our public schools, and what a total clusterfuck it is to be a teacher these days.

What if you were Horace Mann and you had this great idea in the 1830s to educate all children, not just the ones from White, moneyed families? (Well, technically I don’t think he intended to educate children of color…that came later.) You trained and hired women to teach because of their God-given roles as mothers and upholders of morality and because they were much cheaper to pay than men. Pretty simple idea, really, once you’ve untangled the funding knots: unfurl a curriculum, show some women how to hook it up, and watch the boats of schoolchildren sail off into the future as literate and thoughtful people to perpetuate the Great American Experiment.

Fast-forward about 200 years, and I think Horace would be horrified at today’s American public school system. The ideals remain, to be sure: to teach all our children necessary skills so they can become happy, productive citizens. But questions swirl around what all those words mean, who has the right to teach them which things, and how they shall be indoctrinated. The 3 R’s used to stand for readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic¹ but now, I argue, they stand for rules, regulations, and requirements.

That’s right, I used premium content on Canva and screenshotted it. I’ll pay them later, after I get my allocation from the state of Montana to support my maverick charter school. I do what I want.

Before I launch into this, let me make clear that I am not arguing that we should or should not have any of these specific rules.² ³ My aim is to show how confusing, garbled, contradictory, and dysfunctional they all are, when you tie them together into a single school day or even a class period.

If you are a public school teacher in Montana, a collection of rules, regulations and requirements controls your every minute in the classroom (and outside of it).

First, you have your curriculum. But what if you teach something related to being a human animal? You have to provide 48-hour full notice to parents/guardians if you want to discuss anything related to human sexuality, including the reproductive system, gender questions….well, wait. Here’s the law, SB99 (2021) which spells it out:

For purposes of this section, “human sexuality instruction” means teaching or otherwise providing information about human sexuality, including intimate relationships, human sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, sexually transmitted infections, sexual acts, sexual orientation, gender identity, abstinence, contraception, or reproductive rights and responsibilities.

“Reproductive responsibilities” could mean almost anything. You could teach biology, human anatomy, health, psychology, early childhood education, or literature and this law would likely affect you. You cannot touch any of those topics without providing 48-hour notice to all parents of children involved in the instruction.

How about this whiplash? Since 1999 we have abided by 20-1-501, also known as Indian Education for All, which requires us to teach about Montana’s first people in culturally responsive ways. Schools receive funding based on their enrollment for appropriate implementation of IEFA. But in 2021 some political fearmongering bullshit brought this stupid debate over “Critical Race Theory” to Montana and teachers got scared. A friend who works in education at the state level said she was receiving phone calls from teachers asking, “If I continue to teach IEFA, am I going to lose my teaching license?”

Teachers must also adhere to Individual Education Plans or IEPs, and 504 plans, both of which offer students extra accommodations based on disabilities, temporary or otherwise. Every one of these plans is unique, and every one of them requires teachers to be intimately familiar with its nuances. So, teach your word problem lesson in math class, assign some practice work, but for this student make sure the practice only has 5 questions, and this student can have the full 10 questions but he may use only numbers (not words) to answer them, and for this student make sure she’s sitting in the front row when you give the assignment, then check in with her at least 2 more times to ensure she understands the instructions and then provide an extra 7 days to turn it in. Document all of that in a password-protected file in case the parent asks for it. The other 27 students in your room have the full, unchanged assignment. Teachers know these exceptions because they must attend IEP meetings with parents and other teachers during lunch, their prep period, or outside of school hours.

If a student brings a gun to school and the behavior that caused him to bring the gun to school is determined to relate to his disability, he cannot be expelled from school. There are good reasons for this kind of rule, but it certainly complicates things. The school cannot divulge a single detail about the incident to the public due to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. So people hear grapevine-style that “a student brought a gun to school yet wasn’t expelled” and mayhem ensues. Everyone gets interrogated and nobody except school administrators understand the rules.

In fact once when some administrator-level shenanigans occurred at my school, the press showed up in the parking lot and started trying to interview teachers, students, parents, anyone they could nail down. During another such incident, staff were instructed by administrators to say nice things about our district, as though bosses have control over teachers’ freedom of speech — and yet, they kind of do.

Make sure no kid is left alone anywhere, ever. The bathrooms are particularly fraught — I know my kid was deliberately slammed against the wall a time or two, and then in the older grades you’ve got vaping and whatever to worry about. All of this becomes the school’s liability.

Besides mandated curriculum, and confusing restrictions on the same curriculum, IEPs, 504s, directives from administrators to speak in certain ways, hallway and bathroom monitoring, and endless meetings above all of the above, teachers are expected to deploy first aid skills including using a defibrillator, navigate emergency procedures and fight back against active shooters, provide basic student counseling and enact suicide prevention strategies. They are also mandatory reporters which means if they see any sign of abuse, they are required by law to report it to the state. Also prepare for parents to come at you for any reason, at any time.⁴

It’s truly no wonder that some parents can sense the dysfunction, the ways that public school teachers are stretched so thin, and choose to send their kids anywhere else. And, if they smell blood, they’ll often attack. It’s like all the layers of regulations have ironically caused a lack of oversight, I suppose a situation in which school people cannot see the forest for the trees. That’s certainly how it feels to be inside the system.

Horace Mann might as well call the 1837 boats back to the harbor, debark the kids, and then sink the ships. Start all the way over. Meanwhile I’ll still vote for my public school levies and superintendents who can craft actual sentences⁵ even if I, personally, am mostly divested of the public school system and will probably die before we reap the fruits from these gardens of fools.

This next section is a whole other newsletter for a minute…

So now we have charter schools coming to Montana (maybe?) and I sat in on some of the hearings for those and WHEWDOGGIE what a shitshow. There appear to be two charter school bills? They seem to conflict? Nobody wants accountability to the state but we are going to publicly fund them? How is this the answer to anything above?

Rogue Academy. That’s what I’m calling my new charter school. I’m adopting the “we do what we want” approach. I’m going to advocate for IEFA and antiracist education, and maybe some kids will learn some math and science but basically I’m poaching my fave teachers who know what they’re doing and we’ll seminar it up, screw the standardized tests, and we’ll become a little flashing light of hope in the murky sea of darkness that is charters/public education in 2023.

1. a stupid aphorism (adage? abbreviation?) which has always made me grind my teeth

2. Except the argument about CRT. That’s a stupid ass argument and anyone who thinks racism isn’t part of this country’s foundation and current policies needs to start over, preferably by reading books that describe Indigenous people’s genocide, forced assimilation and land theft as well as some books about slave ships, Jim Crow, redlining, incarceration, and other horrific human rights abuses perpetuated and/or endorsed by this government. And that’s just in this country. Not to mention this jackass Chris Rufo whole-cloth invented the CRT conflict for kicks.

3. Also SB99 (2021) is fucked. I keep noting the year because the SB99 (2023) bill is even more fucked.

4. My most recent parent experience occurred in the Missoula Public Library in 2022, several years after I’d taught her students. This parent said nice things this time, but when she cornered me in Walmart a few years ago she demanded that I defend the Common Core.

5. It’s a low bar, I know, but that bar has been set by our current superintendent. One of my favorite news pieces ever is this one from early in her disastrous tenure. The transcript of her word jumble at the end is truly the brown-sugar-crusted goodness at the bottom of a pineapple upside-down cake. No, mine never make it out of the pan.