Since grad school I’ve had the privilege of serving as a substitute teacher in the American public-school system in the State of Oregon.  When I tell someone for the first time that I am a sub, their first reaction was generally one of pity: “I’m sorry you couldn’t get hired as a full-time teacher,” “hang in there!” etc.  I always have to cut them off and explain how incredible the job actually is.  “Look, I get to teach a new subject to new kids in a place and time of my choosing.”  This is a fantastic freelance-style teaching position for a person whom spends a lot of time working on other projects but still wants to interface with real students.  

In the old days, substitutes had to be on-call and wait for the morning roundups by the district at 5 o’clock each morning.  Nowadays, there are several third-party apps that interface with each district’s absence management portal directly.  You simply wait for a job to appear that sounds interesting and schedule it.  I actually get paid twice what I made for my time doing my Ph.D. research at Columbia.  And the fact of the matter is that I have absolutely no interest in being a full-time classroom educator, so please don’t pity me!

There has been a truly illuminating side-effect of surveying hundreds of classrooms over the past year or two: and that concerns coming to terms with the nuts and bolts of the public education crisis.  Being a substitute really affords you the opportunity to view public education from the frontlines of so many different battlefields that will inevitably get a sense of what is systematically broken and what is simply a situational breakdown.  Let me give you some examples.

Very quickly I became able to walk into a classroom and get an extremely accurate sense of what the day would be like.   Is the teacher organized?  Inspiring?  Are there piles of detritus and papers everywhere?  Did the teacher temper the terrible fluorescent lighting with some lamps?  If it’s a reading class, did the teacher provide some comfortable couches and reading space?  Generally, if the teacher appears conscientious and careful the day was going to be great.  The kids would be respectful, and we would have a mutually enjoyable class exploring whatever topic was laid out for us that day.  If the teacher was towing chaos, then the day would be equivalently maddening.  I would be stuck mediating conflicts between students, quieting discord, and generally busy playing policeman instead of teacher.  This sort of classroom is what I would call a situational breakdown, where a teacher lost the flame and typical fallout proceeded directly from that failure of leadership.

On the other hand, I began to notice that certain classes, irrespective of the apparent care of the resident teacher, always produced anarchic workplaces.  These classes always struck me as the most tragic because the failure of those classrooms seemed to come down to systemic design.  And without exception, the only classes that continually fail to produce workable environments are remedial level courses.  The subject is unimportant; whether math, English, or science, remedial courses are always the most disturbing situations for a teacher to stumble into.

To be frank, the level of pandemonium present in many, if not most, of the remedial classrooms I’ve had the misfortune of commanding, borders on pathological.  I’m talking about One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest levels of mayhem.  Typically, there are only 10-20% of the students in these classes that are even remotely interested in comprehending the subject matter.  I’m guessing that these students wound up in the remedial class simply because they were not performing well enough to place into the advanced section.  More likely, however, they did not have the strong parental advocate necessary to achieve that placement.  The other 80-90% of the students almost certainly have little to no parental support and are downright indignant and resentful at being retained against their will.  These are the students shredding paper, throwing scissors, passing out on the table, and playing games on their phones.  My question has become:  what service is being provided to this under-parented population by corralling them into a dimly-lit box and providing them with responsibility-free years of wifi and gadgets to forestall their eventual entry into the reality of adult life?

The overwhelming majority of remedial students are not going to dig into mathematics because I or any other teacher extols its utilities in later life.  These are students in need of serious disciplinary programming and yet the only recourse presently offered is removal of the student from the classroom for various lengths of time:  from temporary detention to permanent expulsion.  Ironically, this is exactly what the students wanted in the first place!  This is not discipline, this is losing the battle. 

I propose that remedial education be banished to the dustpan of history immediately, on the grounds that it is breeding a human rights nightmare.  It is truly no hyperbole to insist that the present system of sequestering unsocialized children under the auspices of educating them intellectually, is dishonest and disingenuous to all parties involved.  Taxpayers are already realizing this as the public education budgets wither across the country.  Many wise parents are relocating their children to private systems, where they can guarantee a safe and effective education.  But sadly, no amount of waiver-credit from the state will coax a private institution into accepting the anti-social students that constitute the majority of these remedial classrooms.  Sadly, the end of that street is a bankrupt public education system, destined to be dismantled like the hellish psychiatric institutions of the 1980s.  This, of course, would result in an onslaught of unsocialized adolescents, unable to participate in private education, flooding the daytime streets.  Obviously, that is a potential crisis that could easily overwhelm the present milieu.  

Instead of the separate but equally attended advanced and remedial tracks, I propose we fortify standardized courses in mathematics, science, and English that are open to all but guaranteed to none.  The only requirement for entry into the course would be the willingness to participate wholeheartedly.  Individuals can be placed into studies according to performance, not according to degree of social or anti-social behavior.  This will allow the minor 20% of the present-day remedial students access to a functional classroom.  It will also guarantee that the remaining 80% are not held for years to wane under their own destructive power.  And with what will we occupy those students, uninterested in intellectual matter, if not coursework?  We can’t simply turn them out onto the daytime society.

How about a work relief program for intellectually disengaged students, reminiscent of the Civilian Conservation Corps that operated publicly under FDR’s New Deal from 1933 to 1942?  The CCC provided manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local government.  Such a program would secure a kinetic, disciplined alternative to the present remedial system while teaching its participants how to physically care for their community.  It would remove the troublemakers from an environment that they perceive as uninteresting and unnecessary and protect the students that are genuinely interested in intellectual growth.  I can almost guarantee converts from the former crowd to the latter after having tasted disciplinary action that did not actually reward them for malfeasance with the sort of aimless, detached freedom that classroom-removal necessitates.

To wrap things up here, I should restate that my time as a substitute has been as edifying and fascinating as it has been challenging.  I have encountered the human spirit to accel as often as the spirit of failure.  And the spirit of failure has arrived both in miscarriages of leadership but also systemically in the form of remedial education. Remedial education breeds frenzied environments reminiscent of the penitentiary system or the failed public psychiatric institutions of the 20th century.  Remedial students are not served by this mode of detention and are actually harmed by being removed from actual responsibility until they are delivered to reality’s doorsteps upon their 18th birthday, where rent and prosperity care little for how much the work interests one.  Instead, lets abolish remedial ed and resurrect a civilian conservation core to protect both the classroom and the civic society.