In the old days since teaching was not a manly endeavor and taking care of children on any level and at any age was the purview of women, confusing education with parenting, an attitude that persists, teachers were usually women,  or men of questionable sexual orientation as was first presented in one the first literary works considered American, not British literature, Legend of Sleepy hollow perpetuating the less than many character of male teachers. Obviously young women were favored as they were more docile and would simply do as directed.

The pre-Teachers Union rules for teachers were not necessarily universally required in every state, but each shared certain requirements that bespoke the low regard in which these spinster teachers were held by those in power.

• Teachers are expected to live in the community in which they are employed and to take residence with local citizens for room and board.
• Teachers will be required to spend weekends in the community unless permission is granted by the Chairman of the Board. 
• It is understood that teachers will attend church each Sunday and take an active part, particularly in choir and Sunday School work. 
• Dancing, card playing and the theatre are works of the Devil that lead to gambling, immoral climate, and influence and will not be tolerated. 
• Community plays are given annually. Teachers are expected to participate. (in one requirement teachers were to avoid yet another requires participation}.
• When laundering petticoats and unmentionables it is best to dry them in a flour sack or pillow case. (So no one sees them hanging on the line to dry).
• Any teacher who smokes cigarettes, uses liquor in any form, frequents a pool or public hall, or (for men) gets shaved in a barber shop, (or for women) bobbs (cuts) her hair, has dyed hair, wears short skirts (could not be any shorter than 2 inches above the ankles) and has undue use of cosmetics will not be tolerated under any circumstances. 
• Teachers will not marry or keep company with a man friend during the week except as an escort to church services. 
• Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly. 
• Loitering in ice cream parlors, drug stores, etc., is prohibited.
• After 10 hours in school, the teacher should spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books. 
• Women teachers who marry or engage in other unseemly conduct will be dismissed. The teacher who performs his labors faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of 25 cents a week in his pay providing the Board of Education approves. 
• Teachers will fill the lamps and clean the chimney each day
• Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s sessions.
• Teachers must make pens carefully, whittling nibs to the individual tastes of the pupils.
• Every teacher should lay aside from each day’s pay a goodly sum of his earnings. He should use his savings during his retirement years so that he will not become a burden on society.
  
  

Up to the 1950s when I started school, it was common to say good-bye to a teacher when she let the students known she was getting married and would then be gone. In some more liberal places, female teachers could get married but at the first sign of pregnancy, which would traumatize the children when they realized the teacher had engaged in “unseemly conduct”.

These foolish and demeaning requirements lost out as teachers became more educated themselves and were more than brides-in-waiting.

The loss of the power over teachers by those who looked down on the non-manly profession of teaching, saw no value in a better education than just the three Rs while teachers saw the world and what is was beginning to require knowledge in, and who loved the revolving door of young women wanting a job, any job,  because they could be hired for cheap and fired on a whim, were threatened by the rise of Unions and saw it as an attack on their power.  

When individual teachers speak up for what their students need, they are too often ignored and with them the students’ educational needs with the reception of the proper idea subject to the whims of administrators or local norms that could be more limiting than properly educational. United there is a better chance to get the right things done as many voices speaking as one is more effective many times than one voice speaking as one.

yet when politicians want to demonize teachers they claim it is the teachers who are harming kids, not the politicians ignoring both the reality of teachers and that of real students.

Teachers are not betraying students, the politicians are and, since they cannot speak in specifics just as with claims about Blacks, Jews, old time Catholics, Transgender and Gay people, and any invented threat , they do so by presenting a huge, overpowering, nebulous entity  whose human members are constantly ignored in favor of the image of a huge cloud on the horizon.

Gool Lawd, as a teacher who happened to be Gay, I spent my adult life dealing with these overly broad tropes about me as a teacher on one hand and on the other me as a Gay man. In neither case was what was being levelled against my profession and orientation in any way close to the reality of either because it was all based on some undefined but often invoked reference to a  Gay Agenda, and as a teacher hearing all the stupidities people would come up with to attack public education and those who teach.

At one point during my Gay Student Advocacy that began because of another teacher’s concern about a student’s questionable death, and was, therefore, based on a presented need, I was accused of having no real concern for Gay Students, but was merely acting on the direction of some Nig Gay Entity.

It was just an attempt to justify not doing what needed to be done.

They did not have to deal with an important topic because they could dismiss it as coming from some Gay Mount Olympus.

The hatred of teachers unions is not based on the reality that while they deal with the hours, wages and conditions of employment of the teachers, and the first two may seem to deal exclusively with teachers, the conditions and education readiness of a classroom directly benefits the students who get the books, supplies, equipment, and environment that allows learning to take place.

Ichabod Crane and the spinster School marm died as teachers demanded more say in their profession and better conditions in their classrooms, better books for students, more modern approaches t the modern world, and less on being chained to the way it was in the past in relation to what is needed to learn and what teachers needed to make that happen in the classroom.

A proposed Texas bill, No Federal Funding for Teachers’ Unions Act, stipulates “no Federal funds may be provided to a labor organization the members of which are education professionals (defined as someone who is employed by an elementary school, secondary school, or institution of higher education.”

Ronny Jackson, who introduced the bill, justified it on his ignoring of reality in favor of the Bogey man approach.

“Teachers’ unions have a disturbing history of choosing self-interest over students and indoctrination over education.” 

He obviously has done little if any research choosing instead to refer to a monster under the bed.

His lazy babysitting and lazy politics was clear when he explained that unlike what is actually happening in the classroom, teachers are

“Promoting racist curriculums and gender confusion” and “this certainly doesn’t represent my values or the values of the parents, students, and teachers in my district”.

His solution is that

“The federal government should not give one cent to organizations that use their influence to empower Democrat politicians instead of students and parents. My legislation is an important first step to holding greedy teachers’ union bosses accountable and to restoring parental rights in education.”

He was praised for the bill by Corey DeAngelis, an education policy expert and head of American Federation For Children, who, after saying it was a good first step, went on the say,

“Public sector unions shouldn’t even exist. Teachers unions certainly shouldn’t receive any taxpayer funding, especially when they’re an arm of the Democratic Party that fights to trap kids in failing government schools. House Republicans should take it a step further and pass a bill to abolish the federal Department of Education. They should also pass a bill to revoke the National Education Association’s federal charter – and to empower families with school choice.”

As bad as schools and teachers are assumed to be, a recent national report card showed the largest decrease in reading scores in three decades during the Pandemic when students were largely homeschooled by those parents who claim they are the only ones who know anything about education. Math scores also decreased.

So, when teachers were replaced by parents, test scores and student progress were weakened unlike previously when the student’s education was provided by those who work with them daily in a classroom.

I guess dumber is referrable to the teachers’ indoctrinating kids on Math, Science, and Grammar, three subjects that just lend themselves to it.

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