The Trend Of Trendiness Is Destroying Public Education

American education has the destructive habit of involving itself in the most controversial trends and headlines of civil society. Not only is it inappropriate in most instances — it simply doesn’t work. And our children are paying the price. 

Last week the largest teacher union in the United States, the NEA, entertained a motion that would have replaced the term “mother” in teacher contracts to “birthing parent.”

To be fair, the resolution, NBI 63, wasn’t even brought to a vote, much less passed or implemented. In recent years, the NEA has waded into the controversial waters of reparations and systemic racism as well as hot topics in professional development such as implicit bias and restorative practices.

Whatever one thinks about issues of gender ideology or the veracity of broad indictments of America under the banners of institutional racism and systemic oppression, the most pernicious element of all this, and what is harming education in general, is the habit of ardently embracing the latest social fad or pedagogic idiosyncrasy in the misguided quest of being relevant.

Let me be utterly clear: I don’t want my schools to be “relevant” or avant-garde. I want them to teach my child how to read. I want them to make my child write and learn the rules of grammar. I want them to instill the ability to do math at a proficient level and have a deep reservoir of knowledge about science and history. I want them to reinforce what it means to work hard, have a deadline and get along with others as a part of a community. I don’t want my trustees worrying about looking good on Twitter or in ideological schools of education.

This is how we get a mad rush in places like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo to integrate pedagogy using material from the now-discredited 1619 Project. This is how you get math frameworks in Seattle tying math to Western practices of marginalization and oppression. This is why California has decided to de-emphasize calculus and reject any notion that some students are more gifted in math than others, which, as a student whose lowest grades were always in math, I can fully attest to with nary a scintilla of shame. It is why the zeal and zest to cancel gifted and talented education came in the wake of the summer of 2020.  

It is also, on a granular level, why the habit of asking schools to provide more and more non-education services never seems to subside. It is one thing to provide free meals and act as a backstop to poverty. It is something entirely different when we use the American classroom and its teachers as laboratories of experimentation. We are now frequently asked to stage “interventions” in class when students act out, play the role of “pseudo-therapists,” cultivate their social-emotional well-being, while also competently confronting the realities of crippling poverty and a student population whose attention span is quickly dwindling to almost nothing.

Never mind that in many instances it is absolutely inappropriate to ask teachers to become quasi-therapists, pseudo-best friends, ersatz parents, or aficionados of the latest teaching gizmos bought with the largesse of COVID education dollars. In a column last month, “The Mass Exodus of Teachers Isn’t What You Think It Is,” and in my book, “Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation,” I explained the folly of pedagogic trendiness and the tragedy of educational politicization. But the bottom line is very simple: it doesn’t work. The quality of American education does not improve when the custodians of individual and social enlightenment abandon their traditional roles in the lives of young people.     

Schools have an incorrigible habit of getting involved in issues that are wholly peripheral to the basic mission of American education. It is why families are flummoxed and parents are endlessly nonplussed by the politicization of American education. It is why Republicans are increasingly trusted regarding educational issues. It is why Glenn Youngkin got elected.    

Let me be clear: I come from a long line of teacher union activists. My mother was president of the local chapter of the CTA in the 1980s. I even attended a few state conferences with her and watched Jesse Jackson give the keynote. My sister-in-law works tirelessly for the union that represents our local high school district. There is an important place for teacher unions as the job of teaching gets more arduous, more dangerous, and yes, more thankless in the wake of COVID.    

But let’s face the reality that a Grand Canyon schism exists between the practical, everyday issues local unions work on and the progressive cultural agenda national unions often involve themselves in.

Jeremy S. Adams is the author of Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation. He has taught American civics for 24 years in Bakersfield, California and was the 2014 California Teacher of the

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