How to Fix the Problem of Rogue Teachers
When I began to teach high school English, one of the texts that I had to assign my freshmen classes was the short story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier. The story is set in the American South during the Depression and recounts a time when an adolescent girl overhears her father’s struggles at finding a job and eventually takes out her frustration on an old woman’s marigolds.
No one, including me, ever really cared for the story, but it was listed as a required text on the English I curriculum because someone somewhere thought it was a relevant, engaging text for 14-year-olds. Presumably, my students would read the story and master the concepts of setting, theme, and point of view. In reality, they would groan or go to sleep as we read through it aloud as a class.
So, after four years of faithfully following the curriculum and receiving this dismal response, I decided to go rogue and stop teaching “Marigolds.” Instead, I found some science fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov that were far more enjoyable. The students were more engaged and learned more about setting, theme, and point of view. If any of the district curriculum directors were to ask (which they never did) why I no longer taught “Marigolds,” I would explain that these texts worked much better for my students.
This type of thing happens all the time in education. The curriculum says one thing, teachers do something else, and most of the time this works out for the best. All classes are different, and every teacher has their own style, so the curriculum will usually function more as a guide than a script.
Of course, there are moments when teachers ditching the curriculum and following their own judgment can lead to disaster. As Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the America Enterprise Institute, recently argued in The Free Press, radical leftist teachers around the country have pushed their agenda onto unsuspecting students since no one is really checking if they are following the curriculum: “Teachers routinely create or cobble together their own lesson plans on the widely accepted theory that they know better than textbook publishers what books kids will enjoy reading and which topics might spark lively class discussions.”
Ignoring cases like mine where the teacher really does know better than an outdated textbook suited for a completely different kind of student, Pondiscio can only describe this pedagogical state of affairs as chaotic and dysfunctional: “This ungoverned mess is how the majority of high-profile curriculum controversies happen.”
To demonstrate this he brings up Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and various anti-racist texts recommended by BLM affiliate organizations. There are also a bevy of left-wing nonprofits generating instructional content for wayward teachers to use. This in turn has led to an outcry from parents who are shocked to find out what their children are learning at school: “The advocacy group Parents Defending Education has documented over a thousand incidents of schools teaching lessons on race, gender, or other hot-button issues that parents deemed inappropriate or upsetting.”
In light of all this, Pondiscio recommends that districts create “regulations specifically requiring teachers to post all lesson plans and materials online on a daily basis, including material they create or find on the internet.” That way, parents can check if their children are being asked to do privilege walks, read Gender Queer, or solve problems by using “equity-based math.”
While Pondiscio is right to bring up this discrepancy between the official curriculum and what teachers end up teaching, he tends to miss the forest for the trees by treating the very worst cases as representative of the whole and assuming a little more transparency will solve the issue—I sometimes call this the “Libs of TikTok” version of education reform.
As a person who has spent a decade and a half in public education, I can attest that most teachers are not leftist radicals. Yes, some are progressive in their politics, but their vocation is essentially conservative: they want to pass on knowledge and skills to the next generation of kids. They know that to do this effectively, they must be disciplined, consistent, and judicious. For that reason, if they deviate from the curriculum, they usually do it in the interest of their students.
Moreover, most teachers already post their calendars and lesson plans for parents to see, and grades are accessible online. Besides this, teachers are required to post their standards and activities each day as a matter of course. If one of them tries to surreptitiously use prohibited materials or introduce inappropriate lessons, this will come out almost immediately. Far from being an impenetrable ”black box,” most classrooms are utterly exposed and subject to constant scrutiny from outsiders.
None of this is to deny that bad teachers exist and instructional abuses happen. Rather, it’s to suggest that departures from the curriculum have more to do with the curriculum itself than with teachers. The typical curriculum document is often a thick packet filled to the brim with charts, lists, learning standards, recommended resources, required resources, accommodation strategies, and a host of other data. Most of them are designed by specialized curriculum coordinators whose main priority is complying with the myriad regulations imposed on public schools, not facilitating teachers’ lesson planning.
Therefore, the first area to address should be simplifying the curriculum and making it useful. As teacher and writer Lucy Crehan observes in her book Cleverlands, most high-performing education systems around the world devote enormous time and effort to this endeavor. The typical textbook and curriculum document in a Japanese or Finnish school is written with care and incredibly helpful. Teachers in those countries never think to use unapproved resources because what they’re given is so well designed—I doubt any of them are reading “Marigolds” with their freshmen.
That said, the U.S. is a large country with a diverse population, so reforming the curriculum will naturally look different in each state and district. And this is fine if it means that learning is happening. The goal should be to give teachers more tools and options so that they can do their jobs, not to put more on their plate while continuing to ignore the bigger problems facing today’s students.
