I never had much use for the State Department of Education in Charleston.
We teachers labored under the yoke of Schools to Work curriculum for a decade before we found out it was all a fake.
We were told it was a new program guaranteed to raise test scores while preparing students for jobs once they graduated.
We found out later that Schools to Work was really nothing more than a salvaged and reclaimed educational strategy from the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s.
The shrewd top bananas in the scholastic establishment didn’t have any new ideas, so they reinvented an earlier one, called “Cooperative Education,” which allowed juniors and seniors to take the last two classes off in the afternoon to go to work and still get credit.
I used to find jobs for dropouts during that time as a windfall from throwing taxpayer dollars to the retreads that came back to vocational classes after they had quit school.
I wondered why students kept coming back for more classes after I had already found them employment. I learned the answer was they got free money in the form of a stipend while they were in class.
But enough of that.
Let’s get back to Schools to Work. Teachers, me included, were duped into thinking that we were embarking on a new set of ideas, not suspecting that we were following the same old “gold carrot on a stick” that had been used a little more than a decade earlier.
Eventually, I put two and two together, when a representative from the State Department pretended to allow county teachers around the state to design a new curriculum. Only every time that a teacher suggested something novel that wasn’t included in the rep’s pre-arranged program of study, he would counter with something like, “well if you do that, then how will you justify this?”
In truth, the curriculum was already designed by the higher ups in the system.
I caught on after the curriculum rep turned out to be a former drafting teacher at the old Hurricane High School. As it turned out the man knew less than nothing about curriculum. He was just a phony.
Apparently, though, he did know something about graceful cuisine. His first scheduled workweek to come to Beckley was cancelled because he discovered the Char was closed that week.
As the imposter, I don’t know what else to call him, told me to relax my energies in my Advanced Placement English program. Our student scores occasionally were higher than the national average, and twice the average West Virginia scores.
He looked directly at me and said, “Johnnie, do you know why your students are successful in your AP program? It’s because of your high expectations.”
I could only reply, “No Duh?”
He went on to explain (quoting here): “We (the state department) only get $6,000 a year for your affluent students at Shady Spring High School. But we get $18,000 a year for ‘at risk’ students. The parents of your affluent students will see they get where they want to go to college. We are going after the students who literally are ‘falling through the cracks’ in our schools.”
Of course, I was dumbfounded, embarrassed for the man’s ignorance, predisposition, and bigotry.
“Does that mean, sir, that a student who lives at home with both parents who have jobs, forfeits his/her right for a quality education guaranteed by our Constitution when he walks in the front door?” I asked.
“No, but you’re missing the point here altogether,” he said. “We thought you were one of us. But we reckon not, apparently.”
“Not if you’re going to butcher my curriculum, including the electives that I have taught for 10 years, which are among the most popular classes at our school. So that you people can pass off your core curriculum that has already been ordained, months ago, for our students.”
I was allowed to briefly continue until the meeting was adjourned.
“Do your realize, sir, that you just killed my mythology class, taught on the collegiate level with a college level text written by a world-class author, Edith Hamilton? So that you can offer a mini course that teaches students how to make change for a dollar, even though they have cash registers and computers that count the dimes and nickels for them?”
“You’re oversimplifying it, John. We have kids falling through the cracks of our schools, why can’t you see it? I think we’ve heard enough for today. Shall we reconvene tomorrow?”
Needless to say, I wasn’t invited back the next day. But that was OK with me. I had a tennis tournament to look after anyway.
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Top o’ the morning!