Alliance for education Waukesha:
The School District of Waukesha is doing harm to the students, but it’s not as simple as the School Board blaming pride flags, or disaffected teachers blaming the Superintendent. The system itself is a cancer that has metastasized and crept into every classroom across this massive district, and we know it’s doing harm to students because they show us that it does. To begin to scratch the surface of these problems, we have to identify the goals of the elected school board members, who overwhelmingly support the agenda of the nationally infamous Moms for Liberty organization. Board policies reflect a drive to adopt a curriculum that whitewashes any discussion of discrimination, whether it’s related to race or gender identity. Their narrative has always been to equate the discussion of racism with “critical race theory;” or a student grappling with gender dysmorphia, confiding in their teacher with “grooming.” Material ways that we can observe how this narrative harms students, includes implementing StudySync and TCI into our English and Social Studies curriculum. These so-called “rich” and “complex” texts offer highly outdated and disengaging views of history and literature. TCI, which my class dealt with this year, is three miles wide, and a half-inch deep, so there is no chance to engage in deep inquiry, or time to create projects. Truthfully, the problem isn’t the curricular resource itself, rather the fervor with which it was implemented. At the beginning of the school year, all of the English and Social Studies teachers were gathered for a meeting where school board policies were laid out in front of us, saying that every supplemental resource outside of the aforementioned would have to be approved by our supervising administrator. Every article, video, political cartoon, activity, had to be vetted for indoctrination. What did this meeting tell us? Well, the Director of Secondary Learning told me personally, when I expressed how this would ultimately cause students to disengage, “Rusty, your days of autonomous teaching are behind you.”
So began a cycle: Enforcement of milquetoast curriculum gives way to teachers feeling mistrusted and undervalued, which gives way to subpar instruction, which results in classrooms of disengaged learners who see no incentive to rise to the task. Ultimately, it returns to the problem of curriculum and policy, where the many factors causing these problems are not considered valid in the eyes of many of our stakeholders. In a discussion I held with my classes during final exams, the students reported that they noticed that some of their teachers appear to be phoning it in. Some teachers are asking for work in an unreasonable amount of time; others are too exhausted to lead engaging lessons. Regardless of the way this burnout is expressed, it is not their fault. What we are seeing is neither the students’ fault, nor is it teachers’ fault, because many of Waukesha’s best educators are seeking asylum elsewhere. In some cases, teachers are shifting to different buildings, others to different districts, and some, sadly, are leaving the profession entirely. I am leaving for a school that bears no resemblance to SDW, and I am glad of it. Education is too important to lose learning over culture wars, and students know this. Conservative students and Liberal students at South understand better than any that they have to exist on the same plane, and so they do far more to bridge their differences than the adults, and ultimately they found themselves agreeing with one another in a class discussion that regardless of what their ideology is, they are the ones who are getting the raw deal.