Becoming a Voice, Paul Ruffin Adds His Voice

We were recently privileged to have our book reviewed in the Huntsville (Texas) Item by Paul Ruffin, Regents Distinguished Professor of English at Sam Houston State University. Professor Ruffin is also the editor of the Texas Review. Following is what he had to say in the first of his three columns about A Disgrace to the Profession.

A Disgrace to the Profession Hits It Right on the Head

For years now I have had former students drop by the office or phone or write or e-mail me about life in the trenches on the front line of our educational system, and the picture they have painted is not pretty. Almost every one of them by now has left the classroom: to become librarians, to move into administration, to work outside education altogether, to do anything but try to teach in an environment where they have to do everything but teach.

Now cometh a novel from a couple of former Iowa teachers that lays bare the evils and absurdities at work in public education. Fiction though A Disgrace to the Profession may be, this book is as RIGHT ON as a piece of top-notch investigative reporting.

Charles Newton and Gretchen Kauffman taught in the public schools in Des Moines, Iowa, for a collective 70 years, and during their tenures they watched the American public education system enter the death spiral that it is in now, with greedy, ambitious administrators emphasizing school image and the improvement of standardized test scores rather than quality education, for exemplary school reputations and improved test scores are the basis of promotion, incentive pay, and increased funding for the districts.

Newton and Kauffman’s novel is the outgrowth of their anonymous newsletter that described what they “saw wrong with the public education system”; the newsletter caught on swiftly, and before they knew it, they were receiving horror stories from teachers all over the country. What was going on in the Des Moines school system was apparently a microcosm of the rest of the U.S. Out of these stories came the novel.

This book is, they declare, fiction, but responses from teachers across the nation suggest that though the story line may be fiction, the circumstances in which the characters function are as real as it gets.

Newton and Kauffman waste no time setting the tone of the book. On the second page we are smacked right in the face by this line from a scene describing the central character’s last day of summer break: “Karen Merchant taught English at Martha Y. Bancroft Senior High. She didn’t want to go back.”

Naturally enough, we immediately begin to wonder WHY she does not want to go back.

Six pages later, when she considers the chiseled message above the entrance to the main building of Bancroft, THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YE FREE, and acknowledges that “Considering the state of public education, she sometimes felt ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’ might be more appropriate,” we KNOW why she does not want to go back. She has accepted the truth that so many of my bedraggled former students have lugged back to me: The American educational system is a chamber of horrors for those bright, dedicated young teachers who enter it with the notion that they just might make a difference, only to discover that they are helpless pawns in a hierarchy in which self-promotion is the order of the day for those in charge, administrators who care very little about the genuine education of students and order in the classroom. All they want is a sparkling reputation for their schools and improved standardized scores, for in that direction lie recognition and accolades and rewards from those even higher up.

It is in the arena of discipline that the skewed standards of today’s school system are so obvious: “Rules for conduct were lost in murky language that enabled boards and administrators to wiggle out when the crunch came. A threat from a wild-eyed parent with a lawsuit on his mind had forced public schools to abandon their standards. For 17 years she had watched the slide. Activist groups of every persuasion exacted their pound of flesh until policy decisions were predicated on fear—fear of lawsuits, fear of ethnic groups, fear of shadows.” Without discipline in the classroom, nothing can be taught. One or two persistently disruptive students, whom the principal either cannot or will not deal with, can completely derail the academic process in a class.

This is a book in which public school administrators catch the heat that they deserve, and no one better personifies that breed of official than Robert Aneyh, the principal at Bancroft: “He worshipped at the altar of public relations. The positive image of his school became his focus. No matter that the image was a facade papering over the cracks. He knew where the glory lay, what excited patrons. Like a cunning military commander, he concentrated his efforts on those sectors where he could win victories, notoriety, and, perhaps, advancement to the ivory tower downtown. He had refashioned Bancroft into a theater for the performing arts. He lionized coaches, music directors, debate and drama instructors, anyone who had a hand in putting students on display. He was just a good old boy, a cheerleader in a gray flannel suit, a ready smile on his face for a winning team, but little room in his mind for academics. To him they were just a bunch of classes on a master schedule.”

BAM! Right on the head! Ask teachers anywhere, and they will confirm the validity of this assessment of far too many administrators: professional educators with little or no experience in the classroom, totally detached from academic reality but with acres of ideas for making their schools look good on paper and in the papers for the big boys downtown.

Nick Staal, a teacher Bancroft and arguably the most powerful character in this book, puts it straight in an address to the school board during a session in which the board is considering whether to suspend a boy who shoved as assistant principal down a stairwell: “Over the years society has nibbled away at our authority. Oh, do we know that students have rights. We can’t tell them how to dress, we can’t control their language, we can’t make them show up. Sometimes you won’t even let us give failing grades for failing performance. You have made us settle for mediocrity. But surely you’ll help us stop them from breaking our bones.”

And a few breaths later: “Board members, you should stand in our shoes. For two decades critics have had their glory years. American teachers have been castigated, maligned, ridiculed, pilloried—Johnny can’t read, can’t write, can’t find Kentucky on a map. The time has come for teachers to scream from the rooftops. This has nothing to do with us. The teaching corps is not incompetent; the system is. This system won’t let teachers teach!”

If you want to get a truly accurate insight into our public school system, A Disgrace to the Profession is the place to begin.

We can’t thank Paul Ruffin enough for his support of our novel. Watch for our next posting, Becoming a Voice, What People Think We Said.