Are Public School Teachers Qualified to Teach Gender Fluidity?
The path forward is with more education, not less
I was a public school teacher during most of the 90s. Music. Seventh and Eighth grade. Hell, I wrote a book about it entitled Strippers, Guns, and The Holocaust Museum: OR: How I Survived My Time as a Chicago Public School Music Teacher. Based solely on the title, one can guess at the experience.
A few decades later, I jumped back in as a substitute teacher for Chicago high schoolers.
It ain’t pretty, gang.
In 2018, the kids were in trouble. Decades of having demonstrated that a diploma does not get you into a good college, a solid job, or almost anything else pragmatic from the twelve year grind. Decades being told that teachers have almost no disciplinary authority. The slow decay of the quality of teachers as the lack of money, support, or authority weeded out the best and brightest with legacy educators counting the days til retirement. The fucking presence of smartphones in every hand of every student creating an attention vacuum that even the most dynamic lessons were deficient competition to YouTube and TikTok.
I found some random notes I took during one of those days substitute teaching. Reading them makes me unbelievably relieved to have abandoned the profession:
Some classes are like being assaulted.
Disregard so concrete that the students completely ignore my presence.
Interestingly, raising my voice has almost no effect whatsoever. If anything, the louder I get, the more attitude is thrown at me. I'm rarely called by my name (which is fine.)
However, most of the kids call me "Bro." Mostly my response is "That's MR. Bro, please and thank you."
The question is how do I do this without simply ignoring them as well?
Ultimately, the most important thing I can do is keep my sense of humor. I’m not here to teach but to keep order with no tools or authority whatsoever.
I’m assigned a high school on the Southside. “Good morning, everyone. Everyone have a seat, please.”
Thirty sophomores continue to talk and play with their phones and basically ignore me.
“Everyone have a seat, please.”
I know if I raise my voice even slightly I will have at least one loudly indignant child divert things by arguing about me raising my voice. So I keep it steady.
“Everyone have a seat, please.”
“Everyone have a seat, please.”
“Everyone have a seat, please.”Most of them have managed to avoid the frequency of my voice as if I am a dog whistle and they are impervious.
“Everyone have a seat, please.”
I detach for a moment and decide that, as an experiment, I will continue to stand there and say this phrase until they sit down or the hour is over. I say it 12 times before a smallish girl screams "CAN'T YOU HEAR HIM? SIT DOWN!"
And they sit. I look at her and smile. "You wanna be my sidekick today? That was amazing."
She grins from ear to ear.
***
“You gonna call the police? Why? BECAUSE I’M BLACK?!”
“Because I’ve asked you to take a seat until someone can come from the office to walk you to where you’re supposed to be,” I answer, gripping the door handle frame to prevent the student’s exit.
“BLACK LIVES MATTER!” he screams as if I’ve violated his rights.
“YOU’RE RIGHT, THEY DO!” I bellow thinking my volume might dissuade him from further pulling at me, a boy almost twice my size, wrestling me to get out and away.
I’m wrong. He continues to push and wrestle, almost lifting me off my feet to get out of the room. I can’t quite reach the button to call the office so we are at an impasse.
Three girls, at least ten minutes late for the class (or perhaps they ditched another class when they heard there was a sub in Room 211) force the door open from the other side and he charges like a linebacker, knocking me aside, and runs down the hallway.
And I realize that the only way to get through this day—a day when eleven teachers called in sick on a Friday with only eight subs in the building to cover resulting in a low-grade, incredibly loud chaos—is to simply not care.
Earlier, I saw one of the eight subs leave in tears. Another just up and split after second period. At least I care enough to stick it out.
I know people who would think that calling the police and having the kid arrested for assaulting a substitute was the right call. Not me. These kids have enough horseshit to deal with and I’m just not that kind of asshole. I'm an asshole, just not that kind.
So I sit for the next 45 minutes. The kids in the room go from quiet because of the altercation to less concerned to not giving a shit.
One girl calls across the room. “Hey, SUB!”
I get up, walk over to her, “Yeah, STUDENT?”
She laughs. “You must get paid a lot to teach at THIS school,” she says.
“Nope. Not a lot.” I reply.
In 2022, following a two year disruption from COVID and bizarre protocols that may have seemed reasonable at the time but yielded some truly deleterious results unforeseen, the kids are in even more turmoil than perhaps any other time in the history of public education. Depression is now unnaturally common. Teen suicide is at an all-time high. Body dysphoria is now at least visible if not wholly accepted. Parents who were traditionally charged with teaching their children about religion, sexuality, and basic socially contracted behaviors are finding no time to do so, the influence of the online universe overtaking them, and educators effectively blocking them from participating in their children’s education.
Add to that the prioritization of anything and everything except teaching fundamentals like reading, writing, mathematics, and science and we see an ongoing litigation of cultural issues while nationwide, on average, 79% of U.S. adults are literate in 2022. 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022. 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level.
It isn’t clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year. The shortage is so dire that New Mexico has resorted to encouraging members of the National Guard to volunteer as substitute teachers.
Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled. Families are deserting the public system out of frustration with unending closures and quarantines, stubborn teachers’ unions, inadequate resources, and the low standards exposed by remote learning. It’s not just rich families, either, David Steiner, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, told me. “COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools.” In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
Of course, with all of this swirling around the education toilet bowl, the biggest two concerns are obviously the teaching (or not) of Critical Race Theory and the increase in kids claiming to be transgender. Of course. These boutique issues are in the news far more than the failing literacy rate or the mass exodus of teachers and students. Laws about teaching CRT are already on the books as well as other books being pulled from libraries and classrooms. But the issues of race are mostly social, not medical. A white kid not being told she’s the cause of all inequity in the world might make her ideological blind but it has very little life-threatening medical danger.
The transgender movement, however, is empowering teachers and administrators to make medical judgements and offer medical advice to troubled students. Given that most teachers aren’t professionally equipped to handle kids with severe learning disabilities or the chewing of gum, it’s unlikely that this will result in anything positive in the long run.
With all of this staring us right in the face it seems that Florida Governor DeSantis and Texas Governor Abbot are behaving like strident culture war dickheads. On the other side, the rabid transactivists are acting just as dickheaded. The teachers, parents, and students are left without recourse.
I can guarantee you that the vast majority of those teachers left are in no way qualified to gauge the mental health of their students. An expert evaluation between standard childhood angst, legitimate chemical depression, diagnosable anxiety disorders, and body dysphoria is not taught in the colleges that train teachers. At least not to classroom teachers.
The question being fought today is whether teachers should teach children about the existence of transgender people in the world, whether teachers should encourage the sort of sexual and gender exploration that results in some cases a life-saving gesture to kids living in the wrong biological sex and in other cases the indoctrination of children mentally incapable of knowing why they're miserable.
The action needed before we entertain this question is to ask if teachers are capable of this train of instruction. They most definitely are not qualified. More substantive education is required for teachers before we bother with the issue of should. Further, given the wholesale failure to educate children to simply function in a society that demands literacy, I'd argue that saddling students with the half-assed understanding of transgender issues from completely unqualified teachers is a bigger problem to address.
More education and less media-driven quasi-religious dogma is essential if we expect teachers to carry the transactivist flag in classrooms.