We were overwhelmed by HUGE structural problems on the ground floor of our schools—specifically four biggies:

1. A HUGE illiteracy problem that NO ONE was talking about.

   We tried to bring this issue up, and were gaslight, and told that “there was no problem” or that the text book companies had “verified” curriculums, and that they knew better than us about how to teach reading.

2. An equally gargantuan problem—unmitigated sexual violence amongst the kids at all grade levels.

   When we dug into this issue, we learned that we were all supposed to be made aware of our responsibilities under a 50 year old federal law known as Title IX, which requires us to have prevention and response plans in place. This law REQUIRES all staff and students to know about this plan, and who their Title IX Coordinator is—and none of us had ever even heard of it.

3. A critical shortage of teachers nationwide, which none of our leaders were talking about.

   We noticed that the most marginalized students were impacted the most—students with disabilities, students from low socioeconomic areas—specifically in urban and rural settings—were disproportionately impacted by a lack of veteran teachers.

   What’s worse is that we noticed our leaders buying into the false narrative that they could mitigate away a lack of qualified teachers by buying ever denser canned curriculums with teaching scripts, instead of investing in fixing the structural problems which led to the teacher shortages in the first place.

   These same corporations who are seen as the saviors of the teacher shortage, are also responsible for our national illiteracy problem—because they are staffed by people who are no longer teaching, never taught/or taught for under 5 years, and who do not hold expert knowledge about grade and subject level content and pedagogy.

4. This deep investigation lead us to the source of it all—the utter lunacy that is “K-12 Governance” in America.

   While politicians who have never worked in a classroom fight over closing the U.S. Department of Education—the REAL source of this mess remains undiscussed in popular media. We are speaking of course about the piecemeal, convoluted, broken, systems which are relegated entirely to the local level, and are not held accountable. Why?

   Because the only people with the power to hold them accountable—local school boards—do not have the experience, knowledge, or access to the issues that they need to see it.

   In this bizarre world, we give the power to make ALL the BIG decisions in K-12 to politicians who have a horrible conflict of interest, and who benefit from covering it up instead of actually acknowledging it.

   What we discovered is that these huge problems were all stemming from the same structural flaw in our profession—teachers have to leave our profession to able to lead it.

   No other professional credentialed work force in America today is governed this way.

K-12 education in the United States started with the noble goal of a desire to provide free secular public schooling to ensure that our voting population could meaningfully engage in the democratic process.

Championed by Horace Mann in the 1830s, congress decided to intentionally and explicitly hire women at that time, because they reasoned they could pay them a third of the salary of men. 

The problem is that due to the sexist ideas that our culture held about women at that time, structural sexism was baked into our profession from the very beginning, and has created deeply paternalistic practices that undermine our very ability to effectively teach our nation’s children. 

Our podcast unpacks this on many levels and delves deeply into why this isn’t being discussed even within social justice-focused K-12 scholarship.

We cover the large thematic categories which intersect the core issues. Each category includes an introduction from a K-12 teacher scholar perspective, and follow up candid conversations with various current teachers. Topics include;  teacher pay and preparation requirements, teacher autonomy, special education, school climate and culture, reading instruction, teacher autonomy, canned curriculum and harmful influences of “big textbook.”

We provide practical if not radical solutions for educational reform, all of which require that teachers be allowed to lead the big decisions in our profession. We aim to gather teacher input from various states because of the highly varied and wildly disparate experiences we are having across the nation, in an attempt to be able to characterize the issues on a national level.

In order to put the experts in the driver seat, its going to take an act of congress—since they are the ones that established this bizarre system in the 1840s. We are not saying that we totally disband school boards and other non-experts from our governance—though it would be in keeping with the governance models in existence of the medical professionals, realtors, lawyers etc. We ARE saying is that we should at least have a seat at the table.

Our petition to the K-12 subcommittee asks congress to author legislation which places teachers side by side with school board members, and other, non-tenured school, district, county, and state leaders.

In short, it creates a national professional workforce, which allows us to accurately monitor the teacher shortage, standardizes pay with adjustments for costs of living for all teachers, advocates for authentic teacher preparation and development at no cost to teachers, and which allows teacher leaders with the requisite education, the release time to develop curriculum, evaluate other teachers, and the time and space to co-lead at the site, district, county, state, and federal level.

The central thesis of the podcast is that the lack of current veteran teachers in positions of leadership of our own profession, coupled with the convoluted and piecemeal governance of K-12 schooling in the United States, has created a lack of accountability and consistency which has allowed for deep structural problems in K-12 schooling.

These problems are so foundational that it is resulting in the U.S. being in the bottom quartile of the world for literacy rates, and is unraveling our democracy.

So why must teachers lead K-12 schooling in America? Because we hold esoteric expert knowledge—in short, we are the only ones who know how.

We also have tenure (in places where this is available) which grants us freedom of the conflict of interest inherent in our school leaders who are hired by local elected officials. Tenured teachers are very similar to the judicial branch of government in this way—in the checks and balances of our own federal government, we know the place that lifetime appointees play—they are free of the political pressures, and are more able to rule on moral principle.

This is what is missing entirely from K-12 governance today.

The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are unions who do AMAZING work to organize teachers to use their collective power to fight back against the oppressive practices of our leaders.

This is however, NOT the same thing as a governing body of professionals who are given the space to lead their own professional board of ethics, devise best practices, or decide what teacher preparation should look like.

Teachers are the ONLY credentialed professional body in America today without the ability to apply their expertise to shape and lead their own profession.

We are not demanding the dismantling of non-expert control entirely over our profession, but we ARE asking for at least a seat at the table!

You can sign and share our petition, listen to and share our podcast with people inside and outside of K-12 education, participate in surveys to help us gather more data, and join in our community discussions on the podcast.