Confessions Of A Substitute Teacher

Detroit teachers stage “sickout” over horrible conditions, force schools to close

Conservative: That’s lazy. Get a job.

Poor Person: Fine. I got a job, but it doesn’t pay enough. The minimum wage needs to be raised.

Conservative: Still lazy. Go to college so you can get a better job.

Poor Person: Fine. But I’ll need financial assistance to afford college.

Conservative: Still lazy.

Poor Person: Fine. I went to college, put myself in debt, and got a degree. But the only jobs I can get without experience are unpaid internships. Businesses should be required to pay their interns.

Conservative: …

Conservative: Still lazy.

Poor Person: How the hell do you expect me to get out of debt?

Conservative: It’s your own fault. You choose to go to college even though you couldn’t afford it.

Poor Person: But you’re the one who keeps telling poor people to go to college. Are you saying that I’m lazy if I don’t go to college, and lazy if I do?

Conservative: Yes.

Poor Person: Then what the hell should I do?

The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools.

Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white county leaders’ strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt: “We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program,” he wrote. “Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with ‘em.”

Meanwhile, in less blatant attempts to avoid desegregation, states and localities also enacted “freedom of choice” plans that typically allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools, but forced black students to clear numerous administrative hurdles and, not infrequently, withstand harassment from teachers and students if they entered formerly all-white schools. When some segregationists began to acknowledge that separate black and white schools were no longer viable legally, they sought other means to eliminate “undesirables.”

Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on school strategy, reasoned, “Negroes could be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches.”