My sixth-grade son Leo hates school, though “hate” is not a strong enough word. Upon boarding the bus, he might as well be headed to the Gulag. Sagging beneath the wide straps of his backpack, he is an 11-year-old boy on a death march. School days in Wisconsin are not what they used to be.
I’ve counted the backlog of emails from Leo’s school address to my work account — 21 in just eight months. I hate being here. I hate this school so much. I just wanna come home. Please pick me up. Once he just wrote, “Help.” I panicked and called the main office. He was fine, but only kind-of.
Leo’s SOS signals tended to pop up when I was teaching English nearby at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I jotted back things like “Oh, Buddy. Do you want me to pick you up after school? I could take you for ice cream!”
But I also thought, maybe we did need a synonym for “hatred” because his eighth-grade sister Irie hated school too — passionately, zealously, in the present tense. She is an anti-school fanatic, and I’m genuinely baffled, not to mention concerned. Their flagrant attitudes are trickling down to my other children: a 4th-grader, 2nd-grader, and my youngest in Pre-K.
“Try to pinpoint what’s so bad,” I told Irie.
“You wouldn’t get it, Mom,” Irie says. “You were a goody-goody.” True, I was no Alice Cooper repurposing old schoolyard rhymes into angry manifestos. School’s out forever. I loved school; still do. I endeavor to carry this gleeful approach into my own college-level public classrooms.
“No offense, Mom, but that’s annoying,” Irie tells me. “Happy-at-school is not a thing anymore.”
For months, I thought the problem with school was entirely personal. I’d failed in raising education enthusiasts, or so I believed.
“Help me understand,” I said. “Make a top ten list of everything you dislike, so we can address the problems.” Neither Leo nor Irie could itemize their hatred. They gave me a mishmash of stock answers — strict teachers, pointless rules, smelly bathrooms, boring and tedious homework. But their hatred seemed lop-sided. Bathrooms had smelled since the beginning of time. What was different now?
“Don’t make us go back,” they wept on Sunday nights. “Please.” Neither struggled academically or socially, but their disdain for school ran as deep as a chronic disorder I helped them manage but could not cure.
Maybe, I realized, I wasn’t the only one failing them.
In February 2011, the year Leo started Kindergarten, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker dropped the bomb that would become Act 10, initiating historic cuts to public education that stripped teachers of their collective bargaining rights and slashed their salaries by reducing the state’s benefits contributions.
As protests in Madison swelled from 25,000 to 100,000 demonstrators, our Badger state erupted into the national spotlight. Leo was learning to read, but teachers were rattled. Wisconsin had stopped being what the Wisconsin Idea stipulates — schools as “the laboratory for democracy” — and had become instead Walker’s lab.
By 2015, when Leo was in third grade, Governor Walker was caught trying to cut the Wisconsin Idea from the University of Wisconsin System mission statement, a maneuver so devious Wisconsin made the New York Times. The Wisconsin Idea, a policy and a philosophy, is a covenant between state government and the UW System meant to guarantee educator-legislator collaboration for the well-being of our state.
Today as Leo trudges off to school, I can’t help but wonder if Act 10 — and all the attacks on public education — are partly to blame for my children’s attitudes. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, nobody wants to teach anymore. Enrollment in Wisconsin teacher licensing programs dropped by 30 percent between 2010 and 2015. Veteran teachers are fleeing the state or district-hopping, desperate for livable salaries.
Teacher strikes and walk-outs — many successful — as far-flung as Arizona, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky get me thinking. Deteriorating professionalism, resentment and fatigue are symptoms of low morale, evident in our kids as well as our teachers.
Maybe a better analogy is arsenic in the drinking water, and maybe the right synonym for “hatred” is “poison.” My kids don’t seem to value education, but if our leaders don’t value schools, why should they?
A whopping 36 states will hold gubernatorial elections this November. Charles Van Hise, who served as president of the University of Wisconsin from 1903 to 1918 — exactly a century ago, one might note — said of the Wisconsin Idea, “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family of the state.”
Something has reached us, all right, but it’s not beneficent.
I do have a good old-fashioned Wisconsin Idea for the entire nation to consider, though — replacing anti-education governors with governors who value and invest in public institutions. Seven years have passed since Governor Walker drafted Act 10. With a new governor in 2018, we might counteract the damage by 2025. Leo and Irie will be in college by then, but my youngest son will be in middle school.
If I pick him up for ice cream, I hope it’s to celebrate something.
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