My opus about American education

I went to public schools all my life, and I would never dream of trading that education for some privately funded charter school education. I had some of the best teachers money could never buy and I am where I am today in part because of those teachers.

However, I also had a spectacular home life, in which my entire family never failed to encourage me to reach the highest attainment of educational achievement possible.

A lot of children today don't have that. A lot of children today are living in poverty so daunting they don’t get to eat supper some nights, and a lot kids today have drug-addicted parents who aren’t a part of their lives. A lot of kids have disabilities that prevent them from learning at the same pace or level as their classmates. A lot of kids go home to families that beat them and neglect them. And sometimes, kids just don’t have that support system that I had.

This is most of the reason why test scores are so low in most urban and rural schools, where most of those children live.

Public school teachers are saints most days. They can make children who feel like nothing when they are at home feel like they can become president of the United States from 8 to 3pm every week day from August to May, and they can give one hug to one neglected child one day and make that child feel loved for perhaps the first time in their life. Public school teachers can make sure that kids who don’t get fed at home, have two hot meals a day, five days a week, and they can make sure that these same kids aren’t made fun of because they have to wear clothes that are two sizes too small for them.

Public school teachers can do a lot for those kids that don’t have the same opportunities and the same support that I did simply because of my socio-economic standing.

But they can’t end poverty and they can’t stop drug abuse, and they certainly can’t be a child’s parent if that child is not their own.

When I was in school, I had art, music, library and gym class once every week. I would be lying if I said having these classes did not help me become well-rounded in my education.

Now, though, you’d be hard-pressed to find a school in Kentucky that still offers these classes. Hell, you’d be hard-pressed to find a school who still has an art or music teacher.

I don’t know where this idea that art and music are expendable aspects of public school education cam from, but where ever it came from was not a place of wanting to help public school children succeed.

It’s my belief that in order for a school to be run properly, the principal has to have a black belt in education before he or she takes the reigns of an entire school. They have to have first been in the classroom, teaching actual kids for a long time, because I think we can all agree it takes a lot of experience to be the best-qualified person for such a vital and important job. However, I’m finding that increasing under-qualified people – who have only been teaching for two years – are being given principal positions for political reasons. Something tells me that is not the best way to improve teacher morale or provide students with years-worth of educational guidance.

Teaching is hard – grueling even – and there are few among us who can take on this profession with the proper amount of gusto, heart, strength of mind and body and nerves of steel it requires to stand in front of a group of kids who are not your own and come to know them, love them and teach them how to be productive and well-rounded members of society five days a week, ten months a year for 20+ years. Teachers are not paid six-figures a year – they’re barely paid above the poverty line – and if they’re worth anything, they barely get a summer vacation because they are constantly attending professional development workshops and improving lesson plans and trying to determine how in the world they’re going to raise test scores so they don’t get fired in the next school year.

They don’t get bonuses, they don’t get awards like “employee of the month” – in fact, they get little positive incentive to remain a teacher. They have to love what they do with a love so indescribable with words they can’t even verbalize what it means to other teachers. They all just know they are teaching because they have a gift to help children learn, and my God, what can be more important than knowing you have the power to help a child reach their fullest potential?

So, don’t sit where ever you are on your perch of all-knowingness, whoever you are, and tell me that all we have to do to fix our educational system in America is get rid of all the “bad teachers,” and put all our kids in privately-funded for-profit charter schools, because that is absolutely not the answer.

Maybe if we taxpayers started demanding that our tax money be spent on education rather than $20 million dollars a year on air-conditioned tents for the military, our schools would be able to buy textbooks for every student they have.

Maybe if our best teachers were paid more than slave wages to do the most important job in America, they would actually want to remain a teacher.

Maybe if art and music were returned to schools, our students’ minds would be broadened and expanded so they could become well-rounded individuals instead of rote memorizers of mathematic formulas. 

Maybe if curriculum testing was banished to the farthest reaches of Hell and never ever mentioned again, teachers would be relieved of the unbelievable pressure to improve said scores, and be able to focus solely on teaching.

Maybe we as a society can start trying to understand drug addiction more so we can in turn start to help eradicate it.

And maybe, just maybe, in some fantastic show of humanitarianism, if our politicians actually started giving a damn and actually started doing the job they were elected to do, and put their heads together to figure out how to end poverty for rural and urban kids, maybe those kids would start to perform better because for the first time in their lives they won’t be saddled with having to think about going hungry once they get home and maybe they can start doing their homework as a result.

Our educational system needs a lot of work – that much us true. But, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than simply finding all the “bad teachers,” and firing them, mainly because bad teachers don’t exist, but mostly because there’s a lot more to it than just that.

We have to invest in education, on every level, from every angle, in order to improve our educational system. It has to start from the ground up, and it has to start with us. 

Sykes provides little benefit to eastern Kentucky

The news that Sykes is reducing its workforce by 157 people at its Perry County branch does not shock or disappoint me. It mostly just makes me shake my head in a "I saw this coming" sort of way.

When Sykes first came to the mountains, it was lauded by local officials as one of the best things to hit the region since cable TV. No one could even come up with a bad thing to say about it, and who could blame them, really. Sykes was providing much-needed jobs to a region constantly begging for work and it was providing those jobs by the hundreds. Almost every time one turned on WYMT, there was an upbeat story about how Sykes had just hired a new slew of eastern Kentuckians to answers calls from all over the country.

It was a great new era for eastern Kentucky and a coup for Hazard and Perry County officials (mostly just the former and late Hazard mayor, Bill Gorman, who was instrumental in convincing Sykes to locate in Perry County), who were forever praising the Tampa, Fla.-based company for helping us poor, downtrodden mountain folk by kindly showering us with jobs we seemingly and inexplicably could not make for ourselves.

And then, this era abruptly ended. Sykes closed its doors and sent all its call-center jobs from the Perry County location overseas to reduce costs. And so, their philanthropy was revealed simply as trying to find the cheapest place to located in order to save money. What... a shock.

Only, not really. It's really not a surprise to me that this happened. I wasn't even surprised when a few years after Sykes closed, another company located on the former MTR site that had been "transformed" into the Coal Fields Industrial Park, Trus Joist, closed its doors as well. Now, yet another groups of hundreds of eastern Kentuckians were suddenly without work.

I wasn't surprised because this is what I have come to expect from life in the mountains: the ebb and flow of jobs. Companies come in and bring their positive spin about how they are our saviors with them. They give their jobs and provide security in those jobs for as long as they deem necessary, then they leave. They pack up their telephones and ship out the last of their wood supply, they transfer their higher-ups to other, more "successful" branches in St. Louis or where ever, then they shuttered the doors, leaving those who used to work there to find jobs somewhere else - jobs that are oftentimes none-existent.

I'm not the only one who has come to expect this, either. It's like a way of life in the hills, to always be waiting for the pink slips to be handed out. People can't get settled into a good job for any amount of time longer than about five years before the company they work for starts downsizing in preparation to leave. They toy with us, these companies, to the point where we can't ever begin to think the jobs will stay. And so, we are left in a constant state of flux, never knowing whether or not we can unpack the boxes in our heads that contain confidence in keeping our jobs.

That is, unless you work in the mines or in a job that supports mining. Those jobs are secure, but only because the coal maggots who run the out-of-state companies have a monopoly on the area. "Can't keep your job at Sykes because they keep leaving? Come and work for us because we never leave." At least, that's the message that's portrayed. And why not? It's really a pretty convincing message when you're force-feeding it to people who want to stay in the region, but who either don't have a degree or don't want to work in the medical field, and to people who are just plain desperate for work. This is part of the reason the coal industry thrives in eastern Kentucky.

However, those jobs are not necessarily secure, either. Jobs tied to coal are only secure as long as the coal lasts, and considering the fact that there are only about 30 years - at the absolute most - of coal reserves left in the mountains, the security of these jobs is increasingly brought into question.

So, what are we mountain-folk to do? Keep waiting for "benevolent" CEO's to locate their failing companies here and provide us with 800 jobs for five years? Keep blasting our heritage away for a dirty black rock until we run our own selves out of work with no where to turn when it's all gone?

We have to start thinking outside the box and we have to start creating a sustainable future for the people who live in eastern Kentucky. We need sustainable jobs that will last longer than the whims of absentee company owners and longer than the end of fossil fuel dependance. We need to create a future of job security that brings us out of the doldrums of ebbing and flowing job security. We need local officials who will start calling a spade a spade and end their constant praise of companies who insult us and our work ethic by locating here, paying workers less than what they pay workers at locations outside the mountains, then leaving when they don't make the kind of money they hoped to make here. We need local officials who will look beyond the short-term and envision a long-term way of life for the future of the mountains, and we need them to work with us instead of fighting progress.

Yes, it's hard for many companies to locate to the mountains when King Coal is holding all the cards, and yes it's hard economically when things get tough to keep the doors open, but that's not excuse to keep dragging us mountain folk along while you wait out the time between just laying off 157 people and closing shop for good.

Maybe it's time for us to take the lead here and refuse to allow absentee millionaires decide our fate as a region. We can make those sustainable jobs for ourselves and we can build a brighter future for the mountains ourselves. We just need to stop relying so much on others to help us when they have no real interest in doing so. That much is clear when they continuously keep us bobbing up and down on a jobs roller coaster that is so hard to exit.