THE LONG GAME: PART II: THE TEACHERS: A PARENT'S THIRTY-YEAR EDUCATION IN AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION

 

THE LONG GAME: PART II: THE TEACHERS

A PARENT'S THIRTY-YEAR EDUCATION IN AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION

 — OR, HOW I STOPPED TRUSTING THE HEADLINES AND STARTED LISTENING TO THE HUMANS

There's a particular kind of humility that hits you when you walk into a school council meeting absolutely certain you know everything — and walk out realizing you've been confidently wrong for decades. That was me. Armed with Walter Cronkite, Time Magazine, and the collected wisdom of every major newspaper in America, I strolled into Golden Empire Elementary like a man who had done the reading. Spoiler: I had done the wrong reading. The teachers' polite side-eyes said it all — the kind of look that says, "Bless his heart, he believes the New York Times."

This is the story of how thirty years of real-world education — the kind you get from actual teachers, actual parents, and actual midnight research rabbit holes — completely dismantled everything I thought I knew. And rebuilt something far more interesting in its place.

The Education I Thought I Had

Here's the thing about mainstream media's coverage of public education: it's not that it's entirely fabricated. It's that it's curated — like a museum exhibit funded by the people who want you to buy the gift shop merchandise on your way out.

For years, the narrative was relentlessly consistent:

• Failing schools ✓
• Bad teachers ✓
• Terrible unions ✓
• Heroic billionaire reformers riding to the rescue ✓

NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, your local paper — all singing from the same hymnal. And why wouldn't they? The foundations, non-profits, and astroturf groups providing the "expert" talking heads were extraordinarily well-funded. When the Walton Family Foundation, the Koch network, and the DeVos machine are all pointing in the same direction, the media tends to follow the money — even if it doesn't realize it's doing so.

I believed it. Completely. Enthusiastically. Incorrectly.

The Education I Actually Got — Room by Room, Meeting by Meeting

The Side-Eye That Changed Everything

My first Site Council meeting at Golden Empire Elementary was, in retrospect, a masterclass in the gap between narrative and reality. I walked in carrying the full weight of corporate reform talking points. The teachers and parents in that room had been living the actual experience. The side-eyes were not hostile — they were exhausted. The look of people who have explained the same thing a hundred times to a hundred well-meaning parents who arrived pre-loaded with bad information.

My mentor, Principal Irene Eister, was the first great teacher of this phase of my education. And she taught the way the best teachers do — she didn't hand me the answers. She asked me to find them myself. "What do you think you're missing?" That question, delivered with patience and just enough of a knowing smile, launched thirty years of genuine learning.

What the Teachers Were Actually Saying

Once I started listening — really listening, not waiting for confirmation of what I already believed — the picture that emerged was nothing like the one on television:

• NCLB's impossible standards — Teachers weren't reflexively anti-reform. They were pointing to the mathematical absurdity of the mandate: every child proficient by 2014. Every single one. Regardless of circumstance, disability, language, or resources. It wasn't pessimism. It was arithmetic.

• The funding catastrophe — California, once a top-five state in per-pupil funding, had fallen so far that Oklahoma was beating it. Oklahoma. I will not pretend that didn't make me furious, because it absolutely did.

• The vanishing services — No librarians. No school nurses. Gutted classroom assistance. These weren't abstract budget line items — they were the daily reality for kids and the teachers trying to serve them.

• The testing industrial complex — Standardized testing wasn't just a measurement tool anymore. It had become the curriculum. Prep time, test time, evaluation time — all of it consuming the hours that used to belong to actual learning.

The Late-Night Education: Google, Links, and the Rabbit Hole of Truth

When the Algorithm Is Also Compromised

Here's the uncomfortable truth about early internet research on education: Google gave you a lot of the same corporate reform narrative you'd already seen in the newspapers — because the newspapers fed the algorithm. Search "NCLB" in 2004 and you'd get a wall of foundation-funded "research" proving that privatization was salvation.

But — and this is crucial — Google also gave you 500,000 other links. And some of those links led somewhere entirely different.

I stopped watching sports. I stopped watching most television. I started reading research studies at midnight like a man possessed — which, in retrospect, I was. Some of those studies were, as I came to understand, bought and paid for by the very privatizers they were supposedly objectively analyzing. Stanford's CREDO, the CATO Institute, the Reason Foundation — producing "science" with the rigor of a pharmaceutical company funding its own drug trials.

Finding the Real Teachers

The internet, in those early days of Yahoo Groups and bulletin boards, was also hiding something remarkable: people who actually knew what they were talking about.

My first discovery was Mike Klonsky — a name I recognized from my SDS days, which tells you something about the ideological consistency of people who actually care about democratic institutions. Klonsky led me to Diane Ravitch. Ravitch led me to Leonie Haimson. Haimson's work connected me to the broader world of genuine education advocacy, including Randi Weingarten and the labor movement's perspective on what was actually happening in classrooms.

I never met most of these people in person. I once stood in a line to hear Diane Ravitch speak in Sacramento — and had to leave before I reached her because the babysitter had a curfew. The struggle is real, even at book signings. But I followed their work daily. I read their blogs. I argued with their ideas. I learned.

And then I learned from the people they connected me to — teachers, parents, and students from Seattle to Miami, from New York City to Los Angeles, and everywhere in between. This was my graduate school. It had no tuition, no diploma, and no end date. It still doesn't.

The Resistance Has a Roster

The warriors who held the line — and continue to hold it — deserve to be named. These are the bloggers, writers, podcasters, and organizations who did the work the mainstream media wouldn't, couldn't, or was paid not to do. Many of them are still at it. Some have moved platforms. A few have gone quiet, but their archives remain as essential as ever.

Here's a partial honor roll of the people and organizations fighting the good fight:

Warrior / Organization	Focus	Where to Find Them
Diane Ravitch	The essential voice — history, policy, daily dispatches	dianeravitch.net
Leonie Haimson / Class Size Matters	Class size, student privacy, NYC schools	classsizematters.org
Mercedes Schneider (Deutsch29)	Data detective, Louisiana, national scandals	deutsch29.wordpress.com
Steven Singer (Gadfly on the Wall)	Pennsylvania frontlines, sharp commentary	gadflyonthewallblog.com
Network for Public Education (NPE)	National advocacy, research, elections	networkforpubliceducation.org
FairTest	Testing accountability, anti-high-stakes	fairtest.org
NEPC (CU Boulder)	Rigorous, independent policy research	nepc.colorado.edu
Have You Heard (Podcast)	Jennifer Berkshire — myth-busting in audio form	haveyouheardblog.com
Peter Greene (various)	Daily, witty, indispensable	Multiple platforms
Big Education Ape	Aggregator, daily dispatches, the whole ecosystem	bigeducationape.blogspot.com

For the full roster — and it is extensive — visit the Patron Saints and Warriors of Public Education directory. It's the most useful single page on the internet for anyone who wants to understand what's actually happening in American public education.

What Thirty Years Actually Taught Me About Teachers

They Are Not the Enemy. They Never Were.

The single most important thing I learned — the thing that took me from smug media consumer to actual informed parent — is this: the teachers were right. Not about everything, not always, not perfectly. But about the big things? About the funding cuts, the testing madness, the impossible mandates, the class sizes, the gutted support services? They were telling the truth, and nobody with a television camera was listening.

Teachers are not a monolith of union-protected mediocrity. They are:

• Parents themselves — with the same fears and hopes you have
• Not wealthy — many working second and third jobs to pay rent
• Professionally constrained — by mandates, budgets, and policies written by people who have never spent a day in a classroom
• Genuinely invested — in your child, specifically, not as a test score but as a human being

The Best Question a Parent Can Ask

In thirty years of school involvement, I've seen parents walk into teacher conferences ready for battle, ready to defend, ready to perform. And I've seen the difference it makes when a parent walks in and asks, simply:

"What can I do at home to help my child learn in your class?"

That question changes everything. It signals partnership. It tells the teacher that you see them as an ally, not an adversary. It opens a conversation that the corporate reform narrative — with its villain teachers and heroic disruptors — was specifically designed to prevent.

Don't Panic at the Note

When your child comes home with a note from the teacher, the instinct can be to panic, to defend, to assume the worst. Take a breath. That note is almost always a teacher working with you, not against you. They care enough to reach out. That's not a red flag — that's a professional doing their job with more dedication than the salary warrants.

The Bigger Picture: Who's Really Failing Whom?

The billionaire oligarchy's education reform project — funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the Koch network, the DeVos machine, Jeff Yass, and a constellation of libertarian think tanks including CATO, the Reason Foundation, and the Goldwater Institute — was never really about helping children. The evidence for that conclusion is now overwhelming and well-documented.

It was about:

• Privatization — converting public assets into private profit streams
• Defunding — starving public schools until they look like they're failing, then pointing at the failure
• Narrative control — buying research, funding foundations, placing spokespeople on every major news program to repeat the same story until it became "common knowledge"
• Union busting — because organized teachers are organized voters, and organized voters are a threat to concentrated power

The State Policy Network, the ALEC playbook, the coordinated state-by-state ESA and voucher campaigns — these are not grassroots movements. They are extraordinarily well-funded top-down operations wearing the costume of populism. And for a long time, it worked, because most parents — like me — were getting their information from the outlets those same interests had already shaped.

 The Takeaway: Your Child's Education Starts With You

Here's what thirty years of real education — the kind you get from principals, teachers, midnight research sessions, and a blog called the Big Education Ape — actually teaches you:

For parents:

• Get involved. Not performatively — genuinely. Show up to meetings. Read the school newsletter. Ask the question.
• Know your child's teachers as human beings, not as abstractions from a news segment.
• Question the narrative. When every major outlet is saying the same thing about a complex institution, ask who benefits from that story.
• Your engagement at home matters as much as anything that happens in the classroom. Read with your kids. Ask about their day. Make learning feel like something that happens everywhere, not just between 8am and 3pm.

For everyone:

• The people defending public education are not doing it for money. The people attacking it absolutely are.
• Support pro-public education candidates at every level — school board, city council, state legislature, Congress. The 2026 elections matter enormously.
• Read the blogs. Follow the warriors. The truth about American public education is out there — it's just not on the evening news.

The Big Education Ape has been aggregating, amplifying, and occasionally hollering about public education for years. Find the full archive, the Patron Saints roster, and daily dispatches at bigeducationape.blogspot.com — also on Substack at ru4people.substack.com, Bluesky at coopmike48.bsky.social, and X at @coopmike48**.

Part I of The Long Game is here: The Long Game: A Parent's Thirty-Year Education in American Public Education