Progressive Politics

The goal is deprofessionalization.

The model for public schools will be online, self directed courses. The multiple choice questions will have answers that are trivial to pull up online and free response answers will be graded by AI.

The goal is to replace qualified teachers with barely qualified babysitters; there are teachers in classrooms right now with nothing more than a high school diploma. They want the job to be as “deskilled” as working a fast food job, so that the pay can match.

Imagine gymnasiums full of children on chromebooks, monitored by a handful of “teachers” just there to make sure the students don’t kill each other.

Because one aspect of the shortage isn’t just that there aren’t enough qualified teachers - it’s that teachers who are educated about their own rights, join unions, or advocate for policies that benefit students but don’t align with the rigidness of standardized testing are unwelcome and unwanted.

I can’t get a teaching job, but survive tutoring, filling in the gaps. Schools want the teachers that will upload worksheets and accept copy-pasted versions of the first Google results. They want students to be passively pushed through to the next grade, whether they understand the material or not (one district I worked in required parental permission to fail a student). The ones with wealthier families can hire someone like me when those standardized test scores come in and it turns out that they cannot solve a basic algebra equation.

The “powers that be” (administrators, government officials, parents, school board members) want teachers to be interchangeable pieces, cogs like a McDonald’s worker. They want them to use whatever canned curriculum slop the district signs a contract for, regardless of whether it works or not (see abandoning phonics for “whole literacy” - teachers knew it wasn’t working)

The system is barreling towards collapse.