You’re on a first date with Melinda at one of the remaining restaurants in Silver Spring. The server asks if either of you would like to start off with a drink. You ask for a glass of the house wine. Melinda asks for Chateau Ausone St. Emilion, 2016, from the north side of the vineyard.
“Ummm,” says the server, “I’ll check if we have that.”
A few minutes later the server returns. “Ma’am we don’t have that bottle, but I can offer a nice red from the Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard.”
“You’re lying,” snaps Melissa. “I know you have that St. Emilion in your wine refrigerator. Everyone on TikTok says you have it.”
If you’ve been hanging around Clean Slate MoCo for some time, you know that the bloggers here have precious little good to say about the MCPS administration or the MCEA (teachers’ union). Both have amply demonstrated that students and employees are secondary to each organization’s survival and engorgement. It’s affecting the teacher’s morale.
However, there is another element that is contributing to our teachers’ and principals’ demoralization: parental behavior. Not all parents are to blame, of course, but there are enough Melindas (and Michaels) out there to make an educator’s job miserable.
I bring this up because I recently wrote about a discussion I had with a school principal about public schools and diversity. Also part of that discussion was this particular principal’s frustration with some (certainly not all) parents’ behavior. When a principal says that the worst part of his job is the parents, we all need to listen.
Before engaging with a teacher or principal, try to remember a few things. First, they are working for a monopoly—a monopoly that runs this county like a mining magnate runs a remote 19th-century West Virginia coal town. That teacher may want to work somewhere else but can’t, because there is only one public school system and one union.
Second, the teachers and principals deserve the same respect that you do and that all of us do. The chances that any one of them is another Joel Beidleman are very low. (Although the chances that an MCPS or MCEA official is covering something up is very high.)
If you have a concern, get the facts, and present those facts as Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King did: forcefully, but with respect. If your concerns are indeed justified and you can get no relief, the growing homeschool movement is a solid alternative. Who knows, maybe that teacher you are engaging has had enough of the Melissas and the Beidelmans and the McKnights, and would welcome the opportunity to be your child’s tutor—and be rid of MCPS.
