TWO NOTES FROM THE OVERGROUND

Note One: Absenteeism and the Flight from Education

 

    According to a recent article in the New York Times, absenteeism in public schools has dramatically increased among all demographic groups since 2020.  The article explains that covid-induced disruptions broke the routines of attendance, academics, clubs, and athletics.  It also describes the many and varied failed efforts to significantly reduce absenteeism in the aftermath.  But covid is not the answer to this and every other problem in the country’s public-education system.

 

    When I arrived in Las Cruces in 2007, perhaps the biggest concern in Las Cruces as well as the state was the high drop-out rate, the ultimate in absenteeism.  Everyone had a solution; no one knows which one or ones worked, but the rate went down.  So, too, did academic standards, with New Mexico recently confirming its lowest-in-the-nation public-school ranking of all states and the District of Columbia.

 

    The articles which I have read for the past two decades suggest an array of solutions: merit pay (often confused with pay for performance), student-test-score-based teacher evaluation, Common Core State Standards, small schools, fewer students per classroom, charter schools,  early childhood education, and, of course, higher teacher salaries—to many for me to recall them all.  Missing from the list: reforms of schools of education, higher standards for teachers, independent testing of their subject-matter competence, higher academic standards for students (and alternative programs for those who fail to meet them), and open shop for teachers from other fields (e.g., journalists, engineers, environmentalists, veterans, etc.).

 

    I believe that much absenteeism and many discipline problems reflect boredom with teachers who do not care about them, do not know their subjects, or teach perfunctorily.  Long after the advent of women’s liberation, one unintended consequence has been the disappearance of the best and the brightest from teaching, especially in the elementary grades.  The worst and the dullest are left to introduce the major subjects—English, social studies/history, mathematics, and science—with the notable result that more than half of all students fail to achieve proficiency by fourth or by eighth grade—one reason for dropouts before ninth grade.  If students cannot learn to read before fifth grade, they are much less likely to read to learn in and after fifth grade.  Early childhood education, even if it succeeds, is not likely to have lasting effect as the mediocrity of elementary school teachers erodes much, if not all, of what it might have achieved.

 

    There is, of course, more to the flight from education than the majority of mediocre teachers and mediocre curriculums.  American parents do not want their children to study too hard.  More generally, American society has forever been an anti-intellectual society.  Although it recognizes those distinguished by their accomplishments in their disciplines, it also scorns experts as out-of-touch elitists.  Populist scorn of information and intelligence appears in the virtue imputed to “regular” Joes and Janes with up-from-poverty biographies of hardships overcome, as if such backgrounds are, in themselves, qualifications for dealing with increasingly complex, often highly technical issues.  Americans believe that “gut feelings” are a good guide, or at least a better one, to national well-being.  We may soon have a chance to see, if Donald Trump, notably uninformed, inconsistent, and impulsive, has a second chance to show what boorishness and barbarism can do for or to us.

 

Note Two: Ersatz Patriotism and Its Perilous

 

    Over twelve million people recently watched the rematch of last year’s women’s college finalists for the national basketball championship.  Louisiana State University, led by All-American Angel Sweet, and University of Iowa, led by All-American Caitlin Clark, both played their games.  Iowa and Clark had a far better night and a better outcome than LSU and Sweet.  I greatly admire both women, as players and as people.  Last year’s kerfuffle about Sweet’s trashing Clark at the end of the game was much ado about nothing except for race-based attacks on the LSU star.  Clark responded that Sweet did nothing more to her then she has done to Sweet because trash talk on the court is part of the game between highly competitive athletes.  She added, and Sweet later allowed, that off the court, they get along just fine.  Best friends, no; but friendly and respectful, yes.

 

    Such a good show in the game and such good sportsmanship before, during, and after, was sullied by the Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, who stated that players who were not present for the singing of the National Anthem should lose their scholarships.  Landry is a lawyer, so he probably has heard and possibly has read the Constitution of the United States, which just happens to protect free speech.  Supreme Courts, at least up to the Roberts’s Court, have applied the First Amendment to such acts as burning the flag, wearing it on the seat of one’s pants, or using other means to show disrespect for it.  Presumably, it would protect absence from the ritualistic singing of the National Anthem.

 

    Going farther, I wonder why it is sung at sporting events.  I know that the words written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 became the National Anthem in 1931.  Which means the American people lacked, but survived the lack of, a national anthem for over a century.  How did they do it?  We had sporting events before 1931.  Babe Ruth hit his then-record 60 home runs in the 1927 season without the benefit or such vocalizing.  I know that the National Anthem is played before sporting events and is taken so seriously that professional football players who kneel instead of stand for it can lose their jobs.  In that dishonorable tradition, Landry made his suggestion to punish those who were not present when it was sung.  He did not know or care that the LSU women’s basketball team in this year and previous years has spent the minutes before the game in their locker room for last-minute instruction and a prayer, not for a political statement at all.

 

    Landry’s suggestion assumes that punishing these student-athletes will promote red-blooded patriotism in all good Americans.  It reflects the common recourse of Republican officials to punish behavior which, despite Constitutional protection, they find offensive or deem unpatriotic.  We can expect more such suggestions—personhood at conception, for one—on a national scale if Republicans succeed in electing top-of-the-ticket and down-the-ticket candidates.  Count on them to use coercion—Trump wants U.S. troops to suppress U.S. citizens if they protest his re-election or policies—to advance their interests or enforce their positions—the truth, the law, and the Constitution be damned.