We have all seen the video of the frustrated teacher crying for
his senior class on
Instagram and on X. The
New York Post filled in the details, teaching us more about this
depressed academic.
Here’s a key entry from the Post:
A Texas high school teacher was
reduced to tears and broke down in front of his class when he realized the
seniors he was teaching couldn’t complete a writing exercise.
Darius Williams, a teacher for
Houston Independent School District’s Wheatley High School, said he couldn’t
get through the first class of the second day of school before his students’
poor literacy skills were too much for him.
“I just finished a three-hour
class, and I literally broke down in the middle of class,” Williams said in
an Instagram video during his lunch break on Tuesday.
Mr. Williams should be furious. His kids have not been
learning, yet he’s expected to give them the last comprehensive review of
English literature. Students usually learn about American Lit their junior
year, and by the senior year, they’re taking English literature, from Beowulf
to the Bloomsbury Group.
These failures within Houston ISD have been festering for a
long time.
In
2015, Texas State Rep. Harold Dutton (D-Houston) pushed through a bill
allowing the Texas Education Agency to take over Houston ISD. In fact, Rep.
Dutton shared in his 2015 interview with The Defender Network that he
noticed Houston’s failures as far back as 2003.
Houston ISD was performing so poorly that a Democratic lawmaker
wanted Texas to take over the district. He knew he faced political backlash
from his own party for standing up to teachers’ unions and putting the needs of
children first, but he could not look away and ignore the chronic academic
failure of his home district.
Dutton’s bill passed over ten years ago. Eleven years later,
the teacher featured above, who teaches at Rep. Dutton’s alma mater no less, has
broken down and cried on camera in his classroom because the students can’t
write four words.
This failure is systemic and generational. This is
institutional collapse of the highest—or lowest—order, and all guilty parties should
not slide.
Who allowed these students to advance from grade to grade
without any competence? Don’t the standardized tests mean anything? Where were
the teachers beforehand? How far back does this culture of failure stretch? I
remember talking with fellow teachers in South Gate, CA, and we were all
working at a brand-new school on the west side of town. One English teacher
confided to me that he had sought out the transcripts of his current students
in his English classes. Throughout their middle school years, the students just
advanced, even if they were earning straight Fs. Where’s the accountability?
Where are the resources to hold students back who do not master basic skills or
content in order to face the next grade level?
And think about the students! They have to endure grade
after grade, falling further behind, even though the district pushes them
forward unearned. I remember teaching an eighth grader during my student
teaching. He literally looked at the book, the assignment, then me, and
admitted: I can’t do this.
Horrible!
Some school districts require students to retake courses
they failed, or they direct students to remedial or alternative education. Those
continuation schools pose different problems for the kids. The environment
becomes a malaise of students who refuse to work, who often go to class only
half the day, working on basic contracts outlining all the work they must do to
graduate. All of this does not ensure that kids will learn anything.
Will they recover their credits? Will they graduate? Many
school districts simply dump these failing kids into remedial education just to
maintain higher test scores for the regular schools. Unethical, to say the
least.
Regarding the standardized tests, sure, they matter. They provide
a broad indication of how well or badly things are progressing in the district.
And this time, time itself is another problem.
The reform efforts started more than twenty years ago, when a
politician recognized that the local school district was failing the students.
He introduced legislation over ten years later to fix the problem. More than a
decade after that, the school district is still failing the students.
This is beyond outrageous. The bureaucracy wins again.
Moving the ship of state is hard enough, but should children suffer the whole
time? More parents are fighting back, realizing that their children don’t have
ten or twenty years to make up for the lack of education in their public
schools.
And how many parents are taking the lead to do what is best
for their kids? Go to any school board meeting across the country. Aside from
the national outrage over mask mandates and obscenity in the libraries, most
parents have nonchalantly checked out of their children’s education. It took
COVID-19 and the massive lockdowns to force parents to pay attention!
How many generations get harmed by the institutional setback
of a bad education? How many families struggle because the children graduate
from high school with some expectation that they can start a job, grow a
career, build a family, and make a life for themselves … only to run into the
relentless reality that they possess no competence to accomplish anything?
This is too much to bear. No wonder teachers are so
overwhelmed.
I wanted to cry when listening to Darius Williams’ fraught
frustration.
Which invites another set of tough questions …
What has Mr. Williams done to turn the tide on this tragedy
of failed education? Or better yet, what can he do? One great teacher can’t
make all the difference on his own. Teaching English to seniors depends on the
effectiveness of all the teachers in freshman, sophomore, and junior years. You
might work your heart out, and the kids come out smarter than the students at
the local community college, but will the next teachers carry on your legacy of
success?
I don’t understand
why so many teachers remain in these failing schools, aside from a sense of
last-ditch hope that they can turn things around. If the system in the school
district is failing that much, the best thing that a teacher can do is to flee.
Lo
and behold, that’s precisely what is happening.
Good teachers need to get out of bad schools, because they
cannot turn them around, and they should not enable or take the blame for their
collapse. Look at the celebrated case of Jaime Escalante at Garfield High
School in South Los Angeles. He challenged the kids, trained up enough of them
to take the AP Calculus exam, and many of them passed. Despite the ETS
suspicions that they had cheated—due to the students making the same
mistakes—the students retook the exams and showed the world that students in a
failing school district could succeed.
The ridiculous union rules, the feckless demands of administration,
and the pushback from jealous faculty frustrated Escalante, and he eventually
found a more welcoming school. Mr. Williams should consider Escalante’s course.
He should either find a better district or just give up on public education
entirely.
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