Covering the walls for test #2,520?

(Readers, please pass this post on, an offering of hope to the stunned.)

I thought many people were underestimating Trump’s appeal, but I am surprised* that he won. Considering that he easily got the votes he needed, despite almost universally negative press coverage, I’d have to say that the electorate just screamed. My father regards Trump as our last, best hope, his version of an Earthly Jedi Knight who might start unravelling the mess around him, and now I guess we will see.

To my many teacher readers, I’d like to say, “Take a deep breath, go out with family or friends for a delicious dinner, and don’t let doomsayers pull you down.” I expect a lot of doomsayers to be wailing in the teacher’s lounges this week. I belong to a number of teacher’s groups and they have been — at least on the surface — strongly for Hillary and the democrats. In one group, I watch hostile teachers rudely and nastily push a woman out of the group for supporting Trump.

But before we decide some ax has fallen, let’s take a few moments to view the current situation.

Unions are being gutted across America. Job security for older teachers has become a thing of the past in many areas. I talked a few weeks ago with a woman in her sixties who had once been teacher of the year in her district, but who had been let go with everyone over fifty in a purge. She is in her third year in a new district that plans to close schools and she is scared. What if this job goes away?

Crime has gone up dramatically in some inner-city areas, with case closure rates falling. Unemployment for youth in some areas is running over 50%. While trying to nail down the exact numbers becomes another adventure in fuzzy, social science statistics, I can safely say that young black men suffer from lower graduation rates, higher unemployment, and higher incarceration rates than other racial, age or gender group in this country. They are angry. Unsurprisingly, they can be hell-on-wheels in the classroom.

In the meantime, teachers are losing countless hours to meetings and professional developments meant to instruct them in learning new standards, and government data demands. These teachers are trying to teach angry young African-American men and other students who somehow missed the bus to the well-supplied, wealthy zip code less than twenty miles away. No Child Left Behind data demands have done enormous damage to education across the nation, leaving glutted Departments of Education in all 50 states, departments that had to ramp up hiring to supervise NCLB, but never had to ramp down. Instead, we see the creation of new laws and standards that will ensure continuing employment in these Departments of Education.

Eduhonesty: Departments of Education are not teacher’s friends. Lately, they sometimes join in the witch hunts for those “underperforming” teachers who are virtually always found in poor, struggling districts. The best way to avoid being an underperforming teacher? Go to work in the zip code with money, support and, most importantly, college-bound kids from motivated families, families who started the college fund for little Anne-Marie before she was born.

So let me offer a possible olive-branch of hope: Those Departments of Education would never have gone away or possibly even seen lay-offs under Hillary. Those new laws and standards would have kept coming. More power would have been concentrated above, rather than in the hands of teachers. Hillary believed government should fix our problems. That view tends to translate into more and greater government intervention in the classroom.

But maybe government should get the hell out of the way instead and just let teachers teach.

We don’t know what’s coming but, to parrot what Trump said to African-Americans who cannot even safely let their children walk to school in many areas, what do we have to lose?

Will continuing the educational bureaucracy of 2016 be to teachers’ advantages? Ask yourself the next time you spend an afternoon learning how to do a new math that your children’s parents can’t do either, the next week you spend 10 hours in meetings that suck away all your planning time, the next Saturday when you can’t prepare lessons because you have to make data spreadsheets showing student benchmark test progress results for another meeting that will suck up half- or a full-day of professional development — a day which a decade ago might have been given to you as time to help get your report cards finished and room spruced up for the next season. Ask yourself, did we really need more of the same, a continuation of the big-government legacy and oversight that led us into this mess?

We don’t know where we are going right now. But suppose Trump starts peeling back the layers of bureaucracy that have been slowly strangling education. That’s possible. Try to hope.

*I am not shocked by the election results. I always thought the polls were wrong. They did not jive with my conversations and I was clear that many Trump supporters were avoiding expressing their support to duck fights.