Please Don’t Kill Me

Last year 4,007,908 teachers toiled in our nation’s public schools, 3,197,000 of them in California. The last few years have been rough on students nationwide, what with pandemic lockdowns, distant learning, social-media saturation, and general isolation, the long-term cumulative effects of which we won’t fully understand for years. It’s been rough on teachers, too. A national survey taken late last year by EdSource found that 1 in 5 teachers said they will likely leave the profession in the next three years, including 1 in 7 who said they will definitely leave. This discouraging trend is reflected in California’s ranking as the state with the third-highest teacher shortage; the California School Boards Association reported that the state needs to hire an additional 100,000 teachers.

I have yet to hear a teacher say that he or she went into teaching for the money, but as far as pay goes, teachers in California receive the second-highest salaries (behind the state of New York) in the country. The average salary for a California public school teacher is $65,500 per year. Public school annual teacher salaries in California range from $27,500 to $102,500 depending upon, among other things, skills and experience. As public employees, teachers also receive defined pensions, a once-upon-a-time common benefit nearly as rare as the dodo these days—plus they get summers off. So what gives?

For the third straight holiday dinner, after the dishes had been cleared away and the gingerbread cake crumbs brushed aside, I sat across the table from my daughter as tears rolled down her beautiful face. She’s been a public Bay Area high school teacher for over a decade now, and had recently gone through an especially emotional lockdown after her school received an anonymous report of an armed shooter on campus. Though the threat was ultimately deemed a hoax, nobody knew that at the time and my daughter stood amid her panicked and sobbing students as she listened frantically for the number of emergency bells that would signal the severity of what was going on outside her classroom. In the eye of this emotional storm students reflexively pulled out their cell phones and called their mothers. “They always call their moms,” she said tearfully. In that moment there was little else to do outside of barricading themselves in their classroom according to protocols put in place to increase their survival odds if the unimaginable happened and an active shooter breeched the door. 

U.S. News & World Report recently reported that, according to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been 664 school shootings nationwide where at least one victim was killed or physically wounded. Fifty-three of those shootings happened in California, besting even gun-crazy Texas with its 52 school shootings. School shooting hoaxes – known as “swatting” - are also on the rise; according to edweek.org, schools across California, Michigan, and Vermont all received false shooting threats over a single week in February that required lockdowns and dramatic police “swarms,” just like at my daughter’s high school. 

There is no shortage of opinions about what to do about all this. Democrats want to ban guns; MAGA Republicans want to arm teachers, among thousands of other fruitless ideas across the political spectrum, all desperate measures doomed to failure under the long and lengthening shadow of the NRA. But the problem with gun control is that guns, like diamonds, are forever; the WWII carbine I inherited from my dad shot just fine more than half a century later when I turned it over to my then-local volunteer sheriff’s department in Humboldt County.

Most proposed solutions to this latest evidence of the unraveling of our shared society involve punishment. Somebody must be to blame, or, in the new law enforcement vernacular, “held accountable.” A list of blame candidates has sprouted from every corner: social isolation, ubiquitous social media, online violent images, drug addiction, and domestic violence, to name just a few. The answer: all of them. Add readily available automatic assault rifles designed for the battlefield to the toxic stew of our country’s unraveling and you get exactly what we’ve got.

About punishment. Do we have less violent crime since kids can now be tried as adults, or that some murders have been elevated to hate crimes? In the larger world, have embargoes and other trade restrictions ever stopped a war or improved the lives of the ordinary people who are the real victims of those “punishments?” 

I recently reread one of my favorite novels: Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell. It’s the male half of a Kansas City lawyer’s take on his life in 1930s Kansas City. The book’s companion is Mrs. Bridge, which for me is far less interesting. In the manner of the day, Mr. Bridge was expected to determine how best to punish his children when he got home from work. During one such incident where he sat like Solomon before his squabbling teenage daughters, he had an epiphany:

…he had touched a truth half buried like a root in his path, stumbling over it—the futility of punishment. But at once his instant of enlightenment lay in ashes while logic reasserted itself, pointing out that from the beginning we have believed in punishment, we have ordained it, therefore this precept of society must be valid.

There is no simple solution for how to unwind what’s happening to kids in our violent, dystopian society. The only true solution is to redefine what’s important: that’s why the simplistic solutions offered up by those in power do not and will never work: They maintain the status quo instead of changing it.