ProfessorKatt

Hello, I’m ProfessorKatt, here to offer insights on how and why 47% of American high school graduates cannot read or write on grade level, what drastic fundamental changes can be made to fix this–all from inside my high school English classroom view. Having earned an MA and PhD in English and then worked as an English Professor for the past 25 years and then worked as a high school English teacher for the past 5 years, I offer a rare, honest glimpse of how the last 30 years of “dumbiing down American Education” has virtually destroyed rigor and esteem of American education from pre-K up to colleges and universities and back again.

Each post on this site offers a day-in-the-life insight, based on my experience, into pressing issues handicappiing your child in public education. I warn you that anyone with polyanna, sunshine views of “children,” or skeptical views of teachers creaated by mainstream medias only negative reporting of teachers in schools, or anyoner else must be mature enough to read between the lines of some irony and cynucusm designed to protect me on the frontlines of another current major American crisis.

As we as a nation face crises in every pillar of our international identity–border control, economy, and more–our greatest threat to democracy currently lies not in Donald Trump but in our failures to stand up against politicians’ kickbacks from standardized test companies enacting standards and allowing those to inform district and campus funding, failures to stand up against disempowering teachers, allowing the last bastions of bullying repriamnds to go unchecked.

The good news is that to improve any of these failures in American education, we do not need more money, nor do we need to hire more staff–rather we need to view our national education as a business, meaning get rid of all irrelevant staffing positions to focus on the three most important parts of the education equation: principals, teachers, and students.

We also need to dismiss notions that our nation’s schools function as babysitters, behavioral rehabilitation centers, or reading or learning disability rehabilitation centers. We need to be willing to stand in our schoolhouse doors against Politicians legislating what they don’t understand. We also need to exclude parents and students from implementing a knowledge-based curriculum back into American education.