Paddles, Principals, and Education

As with so many things, education is a hotly political topic. The question is never as simple as “How can we get the best education for kids?” It becomes a series of questions that on the surface have very little to do with kids at all.
“Are teachers’ unions harming schools? Are there too many school districts? Are there enough principals? Are there too many principals?”
As someone who was in high school pretty recently, these questions always felt far removed from anything happening at school. I went to a private high school, but through eighth grade, I attended five different public schools in nearly as many states.
I don’t have any answers to the education debates; education has varied wildly in every place I have ever lived. In a sweltering rural Louisiana fifth grade, I heard more vulgar conversations than I have ever heard since. Seriously, some of the stuff discussed among 10-year-old farmers’ sons in the locker room would have even the most jaded searching for his urban dictionary.
I remember my teacher in fifth grade flat out refused to teach Social Studies. I believe we took that class once a week at most. That was just ‘normal’ in rural Louisiana, or so I was told. Nobody was there to teach it well, so it did not get taught.
I was the weird kid from New Jersey, and I stood out like a sore thumb. Many of the kids came from farms in the middle of the woods; they all lived in a small Louisiana town of 400 people, so my coming from Wildwood meant I might as well have been a Martian.
Every morning at that Louisiana public school began with a prayer; the principal would pray over all the tired kids assembled in the gym at seven.
I vividly remember when bad kids would get called into the principal’s office. When someone came back from that office, there was a silent knowledge shared between all the kids that something serious had gone down between the massive wooden oar kept above the vice principal’s desk and the offending kid’s rear end.
When I moved to Watertown, N.Y., things were a lot different. Education felt a lot more institutional. No religion, no big wooden oars.
Instead of 30 kids in my grade, there were more than 300.
Rules were strictly enforced, and you couldn’t get away with as much. The food was a lot better; I remember freaking out because there was a hot pizza line, a deli line, and a hot lunch line.
I made great friends there and felt poured into by all of my teachers; there was a sense that most of the teachers were doing their best, and that their best was good.
When I moved back to Louisiana, this time to the city of Shreveport-Bossier, I felt like I had landed on Mars. The demographics of Shreveport-Bossier versus upstate New York are severely different, and it showed. Fights happened often, and there was just a sense that nobody was there to learn. I was a year or two ahead because I came from ‘fancy’ New York. Books I read in Louisiana in the eighth grade I had read in sixth or seventh grade in New York. But many kids were too worried about whether they would eat that night or if their father was going to go to jail to invest in their education.
Substitute teachers had it very rough; I remember a sub for my twin sister’s English class literally ran out of the classroom in tears from a combination of sexual comments aimed at her, things thrown at her desk and just general unrelenting brutishness from the kids.
Nobody was there to prepare her for the reality that she was not going to be treated with an ounce of respect.
Not to rag on Louisiana too much, but my math teacher sent me home with an extra credit worksheet one day in eighth grade. Kids were not doing great in that class; I was doing well enough but decided to do the extra credit anyway.
At the end of the term, I had a 125 average in math. Every question I got right on that sheet was added to my grade as one whole percentage point.
That was a really rough school, full of kids who had not been taught to love learning or each other and full of teachers who were too demoralized or ill-equipped to face the daunting challenges ahead of them.
It was hard for me to learn much there, despite my efforts. My Mom yanked me out of there and put me into Christian private education.
But so many families do not have that option. Education varies so dramatically across so many social, geographic and socioeconomic lines that I think national politicians will forever struggle to get a real read on our education system.  I have seen the staggering variety firsthand in dramatic fashion.
I have learned a lot in my school years, but not nearly all of it came from the classroom. It came from seeing people from all backgrounds in all walks of life. Learning to love and appreciate the poor farmlands and slums of Louisiana just as much as the shores of New Jersey have taught me a lot.
The real problems at ground zero, the ones in the physical classroom, seem to be glossed over; these are just my experiences, but fixing the problems of America’s education system might require tackling issues bigger than unions, payments, and districts.