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Part 1

It has been said, “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism”, and it is. I just retired from education after thirty-plus years as a high school teacher. I brought tremendous creativity, energy, and a little irreverence to my teaching, and students would tell you mine was one of their most enjoyable classes. Now in my 60s, I just don’t have the same enthusiasm I once did. My optimism for what is trending in public education is also running on fumes. Like a skilled party guest, it’s important to know when to leave.

It is said that you only need a sip of wine to know if the bottle is any good. What about three decades of “sips” in many classrooms? My first public school teaching position was in an “urban” Nevada school that was so gang-infested that one vice principal wore a kevlar vest under his button down shirt. I once asked a Hispanic student in one of the gangs, “Why don’t you warring gang kids band together and become a united group? You have so many of the same struggles.” He said, “Because if we’re better than at least one other gang at least we’re better than somebody, Holmes.” Telling.

By and large I genuinely liked the Spanish-speaking kids mostly because they interacted with me (as a bilingual) differently than they did with other teachers who weren’t. For the most part I found them friendly enough so long as you gave them a fair shake and never ‘dissed’ them. Hispanics are one-on-one reciprocal in interpersonal assessment, something I liked about them. That said, once you get beyond a percentage tipping point, they’re just as “our race over yours” as blacks.

The impact of illegal aliens on America’s schools is tectonic. The tax dollars spent to serve illegals (and feed and provide them health care) in our schools is obscene. Federal costs alone come to nearly seven billion dollars. In my state of Tennessee there is about $383 million in education spending on undocumented students (2017 figures.) Certainly it’s more now. Educating/serving children in foreign languages is twice as much per person as native born children. What do we get for this cash hemorrhage? Staggering truancy, a spike in discipline issues, low test scores and a high school dropout rate three times the white rate and twice the black rate. They receive free education, free meals, often free day care, and free medical services in school, yet, as with blacks, they loudly demand more rights, privileges, and entitlements. Mainstreaming these students into the regular classroom doesn’t serve them very well and results in a lower common denominator that puts a drag chute on higher performing students. (Much more on this to follow.)

What’s the impact of non-English speaking illegal alien students in America’s schools? You will find no research on this vital question, absolutely none. A significant number of our urban schools are a Third World culture that does not value education, accepts their children becoming pregnant and dropping out, and adamantly refuses to assimilate. You’re paying for that.

The main reason for the present day mess is the 1982 Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court (5-4) decision. This judgment upheld that “A state cannot prevent children of undocumented immigrants from attending public school unless a substantial state interest is involved.” (It is undeniable that today, 45 years later, a very substantial state interest is involved when it comes to screening students for their legal citizenship status.) The court determined that to deny enrollment to such children violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Fast forward. We need a new assessment of “equal protection” in 2024 to factor in the protection of children born to American citizens who have the right to self-actualize, deserve freedom of association, and must be safe in the schools where their families’ taxes underwrite those schools with their tax dollars.

Here’s the immigrant net-net: nearly one out of four (23 percent) students in public schools come from immigrant-headed households, both legal and illegal (2021 statistic.) This is double the 11 percent in 1990 and more than triple the 7 percent in 1980. About 90 percent of all immigration inflow has been non-European since 1970, and the 3rd World/PoC floodgates are wide open. You do the math.

The black kids at the Nevada school weren’t “simpatico” with the Hispanics (typical), and showed open hostility towards them during any Hispanic heritage event while insisting on special recognition for anything, everything, black. Both groups shared a generally apathetic attitude towards bettering themselves through education, though the Hispanic kids were very hard working at their manual labor jobs outside of school. A notable point of difference was that the Hispanic kids still seemed to listen to and had a modicum of respect for their mothers. The family orientation for them was strong to the point of them being truant for the slightest family reason. The black kids showed mostly eye-rolling tolerance for their mothers despite the volume and bluster they generated. Black mothers did more shouting and hitting than any other race that I taught. Dad was mostly nowhere to be found.

My experience with both groups of students “of color” was the same in several other school systems across the country where I worked. The most dysfunctional school I taught in was in the inner city of a major Southern city that was overwhelmingly black. Ironically, it was the highest paycheck I’d ever earned as a teacher with the most massive budget of any school system I’d ever experienced, and the most spectacular waste of time and tax dollars I’d ever been party to.

My average day there was teaching mostly kids with no want, need, or use for education except as a place to go during the day to do anything but learn. Drug dealing was common, bullying was everywhere, fights happened nearly every day. The school had a day care for teenagers’ children, themselves babies, who had their own babies. My classes were stocked with few kids who were there to really apply themselves (though there were some, and I deeply respected their dedication.) Standards were low, and administration pressured teachers to not write up kids for “minor” things that disrupted the learning in the classroom (read: short of a full-on brawl in your classroom, don’t burden us with your problem). The subtle imperative there was: keep the kids in your room, out of the halls, don’t bother Admin with whatever they do short of needing crime tape. Some teachers rolled with it and allowed their rooms to become little more than loitering spaces with the unspoken understanding that students could do anything they wanted so long as they were relatively quiet about it. I wasn’t one of them.

Once I called out a student who was carrying on in the back of my room during a lesson. The student’s posse swarmed me with objection to my asserting control in my class. I telegraphed an I’m-not-having-it tone. My response to them was, “I seriously doubt she’s going to need psychological help over this situation that is, by the way, none of your business.” Thirty minutes later I was summoned to the principal’s office and told that four girls in my class stood as witnesses that I had told the fifth that “she had psychological problems.” I stood on what really happened. The principal urged me to “take one for the team” and sign an already drafted reprimand that would go in my personnel file. “Nobody sees these things, anyway,” he told me.

The principal wasn’t going to have my back, so I wasn’t going to remain there. Several months later, that spring, all five new hires in my department resigned. The department chair, a kindly older white woman, who was more mother to them than teacher, remained. Mrs. X was imbued with white savior complex to the point of having a washer and dryer in her classroom for students to use. The whole place was more of a health and human service mini mall than a school. A few years later President Obama visited the school and told students, “I’ve heard great things about this high school and all of you.”