What Washington Gets Wrong About Education — According to 12 Teachers From Across the Country

Policymakers want numbers. They really, really want a concrete figure to be able to say: Is this school successful? Is the school not successful? Many of them come from a business background, and so those kinds of metrics are what they’re comfortable using to make decisions.

The truth is our students are not numbers. Our students are not metrics. They are real people, and public schools do not choose whom to serve. We support every student toward success on their own terms, not just the ones with favorable metrics.

I think this is uncomfortable for most policymakers who come from legal, economic or business decision-making backgrounds. Schools aren’t businesses. We’re not going to “fire” our sixth graders for not understanding a concept yet. Our metrics should be growth and support for every student, not whether they all reach a particular understanding at the same time.

Christina Andrade Melly is a middle school instructional coach in the Ritenour School District in Missouri.

When they’re juniors and seniors in high school, students should start to really have a voice in major decisions. We’re saying in a year or less they’re going to be ready to go into the world and be an adult. They’re going to be able to choose if they go into the armed forces and die for our country, or go and choose our president. If we’re saying that, then we need to have the students involved and be asking them their thoughts and opinions and ideas before we go and make decisions for them.

Sometimes, do they give you crazy answers? Yes. But a lot of times they want what’s best for themselves and for other kids, and can think about that critically. And if we did have student voices, I think it would show: Wow, those kids really are learning a lot of stuff.

Rebecca Fortgang teaches high school French and Francophone Studies at Pembroke Academy in Pembroke, New Hampshire.

The biggest frustration is the lack of respect for teaching as a profession. I have been teaching since 1988. Most of those years were in public schools, though the last seven have been at a private school.

We spend quite a bit of time in college to learn how to teach students, and some of us go on to masters and even doctorates. Our salaries don’t reflect it. You put people in positions of education leadership who have no business being in that leadership position, because they have either never been in the classroom or never studied education as an actual profession.

It’s no different than putting me as an educator at the head of an engineering firm and making policy about how we build bridges. I know nothing about it. I don’t understand what engineering is about. I don’t understand the theories and the mathematical concepts of engineering. I did not spend my time in college and my career in that field. So then, why are you having people that don’t understand education — the policies behind education, how students learn, the nuances of different learning styles and learning abilities — lead education?

Caryn Long teaches middle school technology at Montverde Academy in Florida.

If we’re not ensuring that we have highly qualified, passionate educators in our classrooms, if we’re not taking into account class size, if we’re not meeting the needs of the whole child, then we’re doomed to be a civilization that will be again illiterate, uneducated and not critical thinkers, which is what we need. We’d be creating a population of workers and not learners and thinkers and scholars and inventors. We should definitely be concerned about the trajectory that education is on.

Lakeisha Patterson teaches third and fourth grade English Language Arts at Deer Park Independent School District in Texas.

We’ve seen tremendous changes in the past decade in society. One of the contributing factors is changes to the family structure. In some cases, students are being raised by an aunt, an uncle, a grandparent, a trusted friend, or not even a trusted friend, just somebody the student had to find. I’m witnessing this here in Rochester, and these students are living it. In those situations, we need to rethink the way we’re crafting education.

Christopher Albrecht teaches environmental science and earth and space science at Padilla High School at the Franklin Campus in Rochester, New York.

I work at a Title I school, and without that initiative being fully funded, shortfalls have trickled down to the local level, where resources are little to none. We don’t have the human capital we need. Every school does not have a dedicated social worker, psychologist, school nurse, things of that nature. So we don’t have the wraparound services for our students.

Karen Moore teaches kindergarten through fifth grade at Maya Angelou Elementary School in Harvey, Illinois.

Many times when something sounds like a good idea, policymakers will rush it through. One that comes to mind is the cellphone ban here in Indiana, mandating that students are not allowed to use their phones in school from bell to bell — not during lunch, not during passing period.

In theory, it’s a great concept. But in my school we have 800 or 900 middle school students, and we have one principal and one assistant principal. So when you pass a law like this, who’s left implementing it? The teachers. It seems like every time they make a decision, there’s no money to implement the how.

Wafa’ Safi teaches seventh grade science in the Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Indiana.

Our schools are taking on more and more of the responsibility of not just educating our students, but caring for our families, making sure our kids are getting fed, making sure our kids have a safe place to live and to study and to learn, making sure students and families have access to resources. Washington makes decisions that impact our families in ways that on the surface may not be related to education.

Policymakers don’t realize that it impacts our schools when you take SNAP benefits away from families. Not only does it reduce the number of students eligible for free and reduced lunch, but also it’s our schools and many of our communities that are stepping in to fill the void created by those cuts from Washington. When you limit funding for health care for kids, guess what? It’s our school nurses and our school health clinics stepping up to fill that gap. Our schools are so instrumental to so many of our communities that it is difficult to find an aspect of Washington decision-making that doesn’t impact our schools in some way, shape or form.

Tyler Murphy teaches social studies at Boyle County High School in Kentucky.

The biggest thing Washington doesn’t understand about education is that it’s always worth the funding. It’s really weird that our country and particularly our politicians feel like no matter what, we fund the military. And we keep funding it, even if our military budget is so much larger than amounts spent by other countries. But we just don’t do that with education. I’m not understanding why Washington doesn’t see the critical nature of needing our students to have the best educational opportunities.

Kareem Neal teaches self-contained special education at Maryvale High School in Phoenix, Arizona.

Some of our curricula, along with others across the U.S., are not always inclusive, due to the fear of local districts having their funding dismantled, and that alone is going to take years to unwind — years.

And how many museum signs and labels and tags and programs have been eliminated because of the Trump administration’s opposition to DEI? We can say that this is not in-classroom education, but it’s the informal education that some of our rural students have access to. When I’m working with a rural school, and the only historic place that those students can visit within 50 miles has removed all of its equity content in the stories that are there, our kids don’t see the whole picture.

Michelle Pearson teaches eighth grade at Century Middle School in Thornton, Colorado. She is a member of the Preserve America Youth Summit, where she works to bring youth to public lands in an advocacy role.

Washington policymakers are all too willing to get rid of a large portion of their funding and the programmatic work they’ve done with schools. To be sure, some erosion over time probably was needed: Examining how we spend our dollars and how we deliver programs to the public is a really good idea. But it’s been, especially with the last two Trump administrations, just a decimation — cancellation without thought. I think that’s really unfortunate, because it doesn’t solve any problems; it just cancels the whole endeavor. It’s an easy fix for a problem that’s not really going away.

Cheryl Hughes was a ninth and tenth grade English teacher at Sentinel High School in Missoula, Montana. She is now a consultant for the Teaching with Primary Sources Great Plains Region Program, which is funded by the Library of Congress.

People in Washington think that they can take the teaching profession and turn it into something on paper, whether that be through policy or through judging of a test score or an attendance rate or a curriculum. I think it takes the humanity out of education, and I think that discounts a significant portion of the positive things that public educators do.

Brian Skinner teaches high school special education in Newton Unified School District 373 in Kansas.

— All entries are as told to Anusha Mathur, assistant editor for Washington Sun Perspectives.