Beyond indoctrination
How bureaucracy killed education before Trump got the chance
The upcoming Trump administration is looking to be as unhinged as one might assume. With mass deportations, repeal of the ACA, purging ideological “enemies,” and ridding America of “wokeness” all on the docket, it is nearly impossible to rank these goals in order of bad to worse. However, somewhere between mass deportations and putting “Christ” back in Christmas lies his plan to abolish the Department of Education.
As a former teacher (we will get into why “former” later), I have mixed feelings about this move. On one hand, I am no proponent of top-down hierarchical models in education or most anywhere. Almost all endeavors to condition educational funding upon adoption of this or that federal policy has been… bad to put it mildly. So, if this was what was happening, the government was getting out of the business of grand “5 year plans,” I would be all for it.
Unsurprisingly, that is not at all what Trump hopes to accomplish. In one of his frequent visits to the Fox News studios, he made it plain that his “concept of a plan” was to shutter the Department of Education.
"Here's what bothers me about that," host Brian Kilmeade responded after Trump revealed his desire to close the department. "Let's say you have a liberal city, like Los Angeles or San Diego, and they just decide that 'we're going to get rid of that history. We have new history. This is America, built off the backs of slaves and on stolen land.' And that curriculum comes in."
"Then we don't send them money," Trump responded.
Trump went on to say states like California would have to be watched and "if they want to get cute, you don't send them the money."
That this was his response to a clear historical take like “This is America, built off the backs of slaves and on stolen land” leaves little doubt as to the lily-white historical negationism about to be taught nationwide. When combined with Trump’s plan to create a national school voucher program, America’s once proud public school system will be little more than husk, only allowed to exist to house and propagandize, but not educate or feed, the children of the poor, a state of existence not too different from the status quo for a couple decades already, but soon to be grotesquely ramped up.
Republicans have been fighting for the demise of the public school system ever since desegregation, kicking it into high gear after Nixon tasked the IRS with searching out and revoking tax exempt status of private “white flight” schools. While they will finally be getting what they have long sought, they will still be displeased.
I have had countless conversations with reactionaries over the years and aside from the “woke mind virus,” their chief complaint about schools is the “uselessness of overpaid administrators,” a point I agree with and have long lamented progressive Democrats unwillingness to address. Unfortunately, the political climate has been such that if a reasonable point is taken up by the MAGA crowd, respectable society must take the opposing stance or at the very least, pretend the issue at hand doesn’t truly exist. This approach to politics has manifested a reality where progressives are regularly pro-war, pro-FBI, pro-NSA, pro-CIA, pro-capitalism, and in this case, ambivalent to managerial class politics.
Unfortunately, instead of actually trying to solve the problem of administrative bloat in education, MAGA has instead tackled the problem in its usual hamfisted way. Incapable of recognizing capital’s role in cancerous bureaucracy and the managerial administrators who facilitate it, they can only point the finger at government as the root cause.
To be sure, the government ensures its fair share of useless administrators are spread throughout the system. For example, shortly after George W. Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act, the high school which I attended employed a “testing administrator” full time. Equipped with a PhD and a chip on her shoulder, she spent most of her time roaming the halls looking to expel students for dress code violations and harassing teachers for breaks with school policy like having a student retrieve printed materials from the printer room instead of doing it themselves in between classes. She only fulfilled her job description a couple weeks out of the year while standardized tests were being administered. (The necessity or benefit of these tests remain unsubstantiated themselves.) As a way of announcing her value to the school, and one can only assume to herself, she insisted everybody, student and faculty alike, address her by her honorific.
But the good doctor who roamed my former high school represents only one kind of useless administrator; there is a whole class of them whose propagation has little to do with government intervention at all, especially in private schools or the worst of both worlds, semi private charter schools.
Anyone who has ever worked a middle management corporate job can attest to the well-established fact that much of what they do, even their entire position, is often “bullshit.” The late David Graeber wrote an excellent book entitled Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which postulated that the widespread proliferation of “bullshit jobs” and much of its accompanying bureaucracy was fueled by the shift in capitalism from production to finance. As profit generation became increasingly abstracted, organizations prioritized roles that supported transactional, financial, and managerial operations rather than tangible production. This finance-driven focus has encouraged the growth of bureaucratic layers and non-essential jobs designed to manage metrics, compliance, and internal processes, largely disconnected from productive work. In this environment, managers justify their importance by creating subordinate roles, sustaining a system where work often serves more to reinforce hierarchies and maintain full employment than to create real value. This, combined with cultural beliefs that moralize work, has led to a society in which many people find themselves performing tasks they believe are fundamentally meaningless.
Education is in no way immune to “bullshitification.” Fully private schools are only accountable to their boards of trustees and to their “stakeholders,” aka parents of attending students. Both of these groups are generally from the corporate managerial class themselves and believe schools should be run like a corporation. To them, “traditional” top-down, vertical systems of decision making where power is concentrated at the top and decisions flow downward is the best way to cut bloat and streamline operations.
And why shouldn’t they think this? Where can they find examples of a horizontal governing structure in action? One where there’s no strict hierarchy, and equality, collaboration, and shared decision-making are prioritized?
Ironically and not so long ago, they could have looked to the very schools they despise. (hence the quotation marks around “traditional”) For much of their existence, both higher education and to a lesser extent, secondary education were run by the faculty with administrators there to assist in their efforts to educate children. Concurrent with the shift in the economy as a whole from manufacturing to finance, the once horizontal model of school organization has gone the way of the Titanic, standing dramatically on end before inevitably sinking.
True to form, Republicans did an excellent job spotting the sinking ship but have decided the best course of action is to open all the bulkhead doors and shoot a few holes in the hull for good measure.
As I mentioned above, I recently quit the teaching profession. I have been in education of one form or another since 2009. I taught in classrooms, zoos, outdoor experiential education programs, in group homes, high schools, middle schools, and an elementary. I taught internationally and domestically. I taught History, English, Science, even second grade Math, which is the extent of my mathematical capabilities. But less than a year ago, I left it behind. The impetus was a health issue, but I did not return to education because so much of it has become “bullshit.”
My last position was at a charter school in California. The faculty and many of the administrators were good people, however, even good people placed into a system as thoroughly warped as the charter school system is have little choice but to operate as expected. If your role is to ensure those below you complete nonsensical bureaucratic paperwork, and your supervisor’s role is to monitor your success at ensuring compliance with said nonsense, then you are either going to do it or quit. I was at the very bottom of that long line of monitoring; I was a teacher at a KIPP middle school.
KIPP, which stands for Knowledge is Power Program, or as many students refer to it, Kids in Prison Program operates around 275 schools nationwide educating about 120,000 students in total. The exact number of schools and students is in constant flux as charter schools are regularly subject to closures. KIPP has a very particular model that they squeeze both students and educators into. To best demonstrate said model lets take a look at the first 5 minutes of a standard KIPP class.
Before entering the room, students, who have been escorted by their outgoing teacher from one room to the next, are met by their incoming teacher who “welcomes” them with a reminder to enter the classroom quietly. On a projector at the front of the room are “First Five” instructions for the first five minutes of class. Accompanying the instructions is a timer counting down. The instructions demand they retrieve all necessary materials for the day and place them in the prescribed locations on their desks. The “First Five” instructions contain the SWBAT (Students Will Be Able To) goal for the day, a list of necessary materials, and a “Do Now” which is a question to answer or a specific task to be accomplished in silence.
Teachers are mandated to implement the first five and failing to do so enters them into a nightmare of badgering and mandatory after school reeducation classes from which they are unlikely to escape even if they do eventually comply.
The rest of the class is simply an extension of those first 5 minutes. Every task is timed and every instruction is both said verbally and projected onto the wall at the front of the room. Students are required to use half a dozen different hand gestures to communicate information to the teacher. Everything from asking for a tissue to indicating they are done with a task can be done without the student opening their mouths. Teachers are required to use monitoring and tracking software for computer usage and bathroom breaks that limit the use of the omnipresent laptops and the number of breaks a student can have in a day.
Teachers are treated only slightly better than students in this regard. At one point, I had my direct supervisor observing me as I taught a lesson, while her supervisor observed her, and two other supervisors lurked in the room doing something I’m still not clear on. All four showed up unannounced and stayed the entire period, watching me like so many nesting dolls of compliance.
All of this came atop the emails, endless email, Slack notifications, text threads, compiling student performance metrics, countless spreadsheets concerned with tracking data that ultimately was used for nothing. Spending hours and hours of time quantifying data that is difficult to quantify and even when done there is little to no direct benefit to the schools primary educational mission. Perhaps the hardest pill to swallow about any of it was how earnestly done it all was, how kind everyone, including administration, was while perpetrating what was to me the worst psychological torture of my life.
The sense of alienation and cognitive dissonance that comes with conforming to a system you know to be perverse is as commonplace and American as the stochastic terrorism it helps generate. However, I believe educators feel this dissonance more keenly than their fellow Americans in other lines of work. This is because we enter into the profession to teach kids that the love of learning will open the world to them, but instead we are charged with instilling in them that life is nothing more than joyless bureaucracy and that there is no Exiting the Vampire Castle. I hoped to write this entire article without saying the words “cog” or “machine” but with every class of students that I taught, I indeed added that many more cogs to the proverbial machine. It barely matters what I taught the kids, mostly how I have taught them. The conditioning they receive from 1st to 12th grade is as important, if not more than the actual curriculum. While the politics of 1619 vs. 1776 rages on, few take the time to consider that both are regularly administered with the same spirit-crushing methodology.
Every day I went into work at KIPP, I needed to reassure myself that I wouldn’t do it this way if I had a choice. But there was very little choice to be had. I could, and did buck the system. Refusing to implement the worst of the programming. But it didn’t matter. Administration was relentless, and most of my students had already had their natural curiosity sterilized by years of similar programming, conditioned to only respond to a specific set of stimuli that educators call “teacher moves.”
When I tried to operate outside of the prescribed system of Pavlovian barks and growls that make up approved “classroom management,” the students ran amok. They had no idea how to handle a classroom where not every second is accounted for and preordained, a room without timers and rigidly defined tasks becomes unmanageable and chaotic when that is all they have known from elementary onwards. Without the freedom to operate creatively and with spontaneity, the only thing I could do to restore order was to resort to the approved methods prescribed by the administration, no matter how distasteful I found those methods to be. From what I can gather, my experience is in no way unique.
So, what's to be done? As discussed, Trump’s approach to education can restore the McCarthyite indoctrination of yore, but it can’t resurrect the social and managerial framework that once defined public schools in the nostalgic hallucinations of reactionaries. Society no longer operates that way and those structures are long gone.
Traditional liberal thought immediately looks to better funding, but that doesn’t fare much better. If tomorrow all America’s teachers received a million dollar raise, it still would not fix the bullshit problem. That's not to say educators don’t deserve better pay, they do. However, it's akin to thinking that if we only paid prison guards more that it would repair our incarceration system. Likely, a drastic increase in pay would result in attracting the wrong sort of people to the profession, those who care more for the financial rewards and status than the well-being of those they are meant to serve. (A problem you may have encountered if you have ever seen a doctor in this country.)
Managing a classroom of unruly and disinterested students is the job of a teacher. And I’ve had far more rambunctious classrooms than the nightmare at KIPP. The worst of which was an 8th-grade English Language Arts class I taught in Hawaii. The key difference there was that the teachers’ union protected me from constant administrative interference and blocked some of the pointless data collection and surveillance that consumed so much of my time in California. This freedom allowed me to focus on organizing my class in a way that worked. My students actually ended up creating and partially administering much of the curriculum that year, which led to immediate buy-in and dramatic behavioral improvements. An anecdote, yes, but I think there might be something to this approach of consensus building and horizontal decision making.
Ultimately, the problem with American education won’t be solved by raising teacher pay and definitely not by simply privatizing the entire system and praying for the best. Pay bumps, while absolutely necessary, don’t touch the real issue, which is the dehumanizing, bureaucratic structure that schools have adopted, emulating corporations at their most soul-crushing. Instead, we need to loosen the reins enough for ingenuity to flow and place some trust back in our educators. Until we abandon the notion of schools as compliance factories and stop treating students and teachers as problems to be managed, the system will continue to churn out generations who, rather than loving to learn, have merely learned to obey.
My question is if he abolished the Dept of Edu will it also inadvertently abolish student loan debt 🤔 😆