Uncle. I give up. I concede.
I'm afraid I underestimated the time and energy it takes to keep up a blog while I'm teaching every day. Somehow I forgot how foolish it is to try to keep up with anything else during the school year. Teaching really does take that much out of you. I'm not saying this in order to elicit any boo-hoo-poor-you's--really, I'm giving this as a reason, as my wife has suggested more than once, that it's so easy for the suits and politicians to get away with all of their teacher-scapegoating and teacher-unions-will-destroy-the-planet crap: they know that teachers are simply too busy to put up an effective rebuttal. At the end of the day, what teacher has the energy to mount any sort of effective campaign to refute the CNN and Fox News and daily newspaper reports, along with incredibly narrow-focus movies like Looking for Superman, all of them prefaced by hysterical statements like, "One thing upon which we all agree is that U.S. Public Education is irretrievably broken. What we can't seem to agree on is what to do about it," etc., etc., etc.
Given that my most basic premise is that our education system is absolutely not failing, I simply don't see any real purpose in continuing with this argument. My voice is simply too small to be heard or acknowledged amid all the screaming hysteria, all based on the presupposition that we are "irretrievably broken."
So I give up. And I thank those of you who gave me a listen from time to time. And finally, I must get in one last jab, just so I can go on record with an I-told-you-so when it's too late. I am certain--absolutely certain--that once they have succeeded in destroying this remarkable system, it will be a very short time before a horrified nation begins clamoring for a return to what we used to have. But it will be too late. The system will have been destroyed by a group of special interest Chicken Little's who, focusing on a tiny population of areas where public education really is failing, will decide that the sky is falling everywhere else, too, so we better just blow up the whole thing--even where it's working really well--and start over. And when we start realizing that, hey, I guess it really wasn't as bad as all that, it will be too late. My guess is that no one will find it worthwhile to become a teacher anymore, given the fact that we're all being told now that we're the reason that education is failing--teachers and the unions who back them (what a joke that is for the vast majority of school districts in this country).
So I leave you with this final thought, a reiteration, really. Be careful what you destroy, because soon you'll wind up having to live with whatever you've replaced it with.
