I Chose a Dangerous Profession

Okay, so before anyone jumps to conclusions, I'm not a spy or a soldier so if anyone thinks I am working somewhere that has me in constant danger this isn't the article for you.  I am a teacher, an educator if I want to sound fancy.  I live in a red state that is getting a blue governor and I have no idea what my future holds.

Now before you go crazy and wonder if this is going to be a personal post instead of a political post, let me answer by saying my profession and my area have everything to do with politics.


First and foremost I am a public school teacher (if you haven't figure that out by this point of the article this may not be for you) and everything from what I teach to what resources I have are entirely dependent (with some bending mind you) on what the state and federal government allots to myself, my school, and the rest of the state.  We have been struggling in my state with funding and we find ways to get by, but I am getting worried about the possibility of Betsy DeVos being the next Secretary of Education.

I have always had a hard time supporting people who have never been in my shoes per se.  When I worked at a grocery store I could never respect the "suits" that would walk around our store from time to time because they were never cashiers; the same goes with public education.  DeVos was always in a private school and has a private school bias which is clear in her push for private school vouchers and wanting to bring a more religious atmosphere to public schools (a clear violation of the Establishment Clause by the way).

I can not and will not teach according to her standards or have the public schools I work in be turned into or made to mimic a charter school.  A lot of charter schools are forced to teach according to what their donors want whereas there is actually leeway in what you teach in public schools.  People who tend to criticize Common Core tend to never read the documents from their state's education departments.  The Common Core is a set of guidelines, but it does not contain everything you need to teach, just that students should be able to master specific standards through the lessons you decide to give to your students.

Is the education system in our country broken?  Clearly, but it's because politics plays too much of a role in how things should be taught and presented.  My questions for DeVos if I ever had the chance to sit one-on-one with her would be this:

• Will you be increasing or reducing the amount of tests students have to take?
• Is there a chance that standardized testing with be non-existent?
• How can you make education valuable and competitive in order to promote learning?
• What can you do to change Common Core to make it beneficial for every state in the Union?
• How can you say charter schools work when less than half of them in Detroit outperformed their public counterparts?

There is a lot with education that has to change to bring the United States back into the forefront, but will DeVos be the radical to make those sweeping changes or will she put on the rose-tinted glasses and change liberal arts to conservative arts?  I'm looking more towards the latter.  If anything, funding will increase for charter schools and decrease for public schools all while increasing the ever more outrageous pressures students face today before they reach college.  Failure is not an option, we just replaced that word with success and pretend we're #1.