EMPORIA — Two large education bills, House Bill 2662 and House Bill 2119, were introduced into committee. They incorporate things such as test score bonuses and requirements to have lesson plans and materials turned in by June 30 for parental approval.
These bills will completely destroy what the education system has worked hard to build over the last decade, according to Hanna Anderson, Emporia State alumna and third grade teacher.
“It’s like they’re taking the humanity out of teaching,” Anderson said. “We’re just little robots reading the curriculum they want us to read. Getting students to pass the test so they don’t get retained and so educators get their bonuses. If that’s the mindset these college kids are going to be given because of these bills, that’s scary to what that will do to the education system. No one is going to want to be a teacher and it’s certainly not why I wanted to get into education.”
Good teachers and proper education requires flexibility and adaptation and without it, you’ll never be able to match or meet the needs of each individual student, according to Linda Aldridge, associate professor of school leadership and secondary education.
Aldridge said that in her 39 years of teaching she has seen this kind of thing multiple times; this isn’t new and there will always be parents who want to influence not just their children’s education, but everyone else’s.
“You’d have a lot of students be ‘book smart,’ but not ‘street smart’ or ‘world smart,’” said Xavier Cason, senior elementary education major. “Because they can learn things in a classroom but the world is so much bigger than being in the classroom. They could learn a lot about the world and life in the classroom and the fact that that would have to be taken out of (the) lesson, that to me would just be unrealistic.”
People naturally are desperate to grab hold of any sense of control they can and when there is a world of uncertainties it is easy to want to try and take control of something like your child’s education even if you don’t fully understand it, according to Anderson. This makes it very easy to stir fear in parents over things that aren’t even an issue, such as critical race theory.
Open houses are a time when parents can meet their children’s teachers and ask questions or raise concerns, according to Anderson.
During one of these open houses, a concerned parent asked Anderson if she taught ‘CRT.’ At first she was confused and asked what CRT meant; the parent was no longer concerned and assumed that Anderson wouldn’t be teaching it.
When Anderson realized that the parent meant critical race theory, she was shocked because she teaches third grade. Anderson believes that the fear of critical race theory has a chokehold on parents.
“If we really wanted those structures in a democratic society, to truly help all kids to learn, it would look different than it does,” Aldridge said. “Schooling structures instead exist the way they do to maintain the status quo. The way the school system is set up is to make sure the poor students stay poor and the rich kids stay rich and when educators try to disrupt that process, you’re flowing upstream against 300 years of history.”
Aldridge said she recommended that any educators and student teachers who don’t like this bill, or are worried for the future of education, should reach out and speak to Kansas legislators. If you never speak up you will never be heard and nothing will solve itself, according to Aldridge.
“Teachers in the state of Kansas are a force to be reckoned with,” Aldridge said. “Through unionization and through historical actions on the part of teachers, when a lot of teachers get together and say ‘this is not a good idea’, our legislators tend to listen.”
