Tuberville on inner city teachers: ‘I don’t know whether they can read and write’

quote:

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“The COVID really brought it out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are, in the inner city. Most of them in the inner city, I don’t know how they got degrees,” Tuberville said. “I don’t know whether they can read and write. And they want a raise. They want less time to work, less time in school. It’s just, we’ve ruined work ethic in this country. We don’t work at it anymore. We push an easy life.”

Tuberville cited a published report that 23 Baltimore City schools had no students who tested proficient in math.

“If you can’t read and if you can’t write, you can’t live in a country like this and not have somebody help you make it through life, which is what a lot of this government wants,” Tuberville said.

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I brought this here instead of PT to (hopefully) shift the conversation from Tuberville’s political stance to the reality of many areas of public education. The Baltimore report is damning for student performance, but Tuberville’s questioning of the teachers brings up an often ignored aspect of schools.

There are teachers teaching who aren’t qualified to teach. Whether that’s due to staffing shortages or pathetically-easy qualification standards, the fact is, we will struggle to fix educational problems if the teachers teaching don’t know what they’re even doing. That’s not to say they’re too “political” in the classroom. Many will lean on progressivism infiltrating the classroom, but that’s not even half the issue. At least an English teacher with alternative pronouns knows what a pronoun is.

It reminds me of a few years ago when I attended a state professional development workshop in Alabama. Having taught in affluent suburbs of Birmingham, I never really understood the negative labels of Alabama’s education rankings. Seemed odd to me that we were dead last when teachers I knew were intelligent, hard working people who produced high quality students that went off to college to accomplish great things. But then I met teachers from around the state. Rural, poor areas of the state. There was a level of dumb associated with them that I wasn’t prepared for. I was flabbergasted that they were in a classroom. They didn’t understand basic aspects of their content, and yet they were in charge of teaching students.

Tuberville might be a political mouthpiece trying to rile up a base, but his seemingly-hyperbolic claim is probably closer to the truth than not.