Bio

I came from what I now recognize was a relatively privileged background. I had an atomic family that valued education. A mainstay of my time as a elementary and middle school student was my mother–who was able to become a stay-at-home mom–learning the math I was struggling with while I was at school so she could supplement what I struggled to learn and help me with the math homework I had when I came home. My family and I were able to invest the time and money into a band program that helped grow me as a young man, and then into an education trade class that allowed me to network and grow as an aspiring educator. My parents, like my friends and their parents, expected success and made sure we were on track to pursue it after high school in the form of college degrees.

It was coming from this upbringing that made my first time teaching such a culture shock. My first job teaching was at a Title 1 school, distinct in my suburban district for essentially having the highest concentration of socioeconomically disadvantaged, English Second Language and new-to-the-U.S. students outside of our district’s Head Start campus. And to put it bluntly, it showed. Students were behind socially, intellectually and were lacking in academic basic skills that I expected them to have already learned. What I eventually realized during my first year teaching there, and the 2 after it, was that it wasn’t entirely the fault of my students. They were victims of a dual set of complementary systems.

At school they they faced a system that prioritized passing students and avoiding grade retention, even if it meant students were not getting advanced nor basic concepts and skills, and tiptoeing around disciplinary issues at the cost of student’s learning and character building. At home, they faced a system where they were in neighborhoods and households where success in school and success (in the sense that they had post secondary schooling, trade school or at least something productive waiting for them) after graduating was an outlier, not a goal and not even the norm. They had parents (or for a lot of kids, a single parent) that either didn’t care enough to push them to succeed, or even sadder, wanted to but couldn’t between the 2 jobs, odd-jobs or overtime they had to do to support their family.

Throw in the COVID-19 pandemic, a chronically online culture and the collapse of civic and socioeconomic values into this mix, and you have what big news outlets have just recently began writing and talking about: a crisis, if not collapse, in American education.