What We've Been Ignoring In Education

There's a gap in education between what people know and what they're willing to say out loud. That gap is where a lot of the dysfunction lives.

In this episode, Edward names four things that people inside school buildings have been walking past and pretending not to see: the mental health of the adults nobody's asking about, toxic cultures that survive because the people running them genuinely care about kids, the believement gap between what educators say they believe about students and what their behavior actually shows, and the "we're fine" culture that keeps all of it protected by making honesty feel dangerous.

Naming something isn't the same as fixing it. But you cannot fix what you won't name.

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Transcript

Why Speaking Up Feels Risky

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A lot of people in education learn that raising your hand to say this isn't working is career limiting. It is relationship damaging and sometimes it's just not worth the fight. So instead, we decide to stay quiet and the problems stay too. Education needs people who are truly present, not just in the

Welcome And The Big Question

SPEAKER_00 0:24

building. I'm Ember DeShazer, and welcome to Home Room Attendance. Your seat is safe. What's going on, Pod? Welcome back to Homeroom Attendance. I'm your host, Ever DeShazer, and today I am asking, are you present or are you absent? Let's begin. This episode, I am going to I'm gonna say some things that people in education have been dancing around for a while. And I don't think it's because they don't know, they definitely know, but knowing something and be being willing to say it out loud in a professional setting are two completely different things, and the gap between those two things, between what we know and what we're willing to name, is where a lot of dysfunction in schools lives, and where a lot of dysfunction in the educational system

Naming What Schools Ignore

SPEAKER_00 1:32

lives. So today um I am going to name it. Um I want to talk about what educators have been ignoring. Um, I want to talk about what the people that make decisions have been ignoring. You know, it's not the students, not the funding, not these politicians that make decisions that they are wildly unqualified to make. But that's a whole different story. But what the people inside the buildings have been walking past, looking around and pretending not to see, because you you can't fully separate the personal one and the systemic ones because they really are intertwined um with each other.

Adult Mental Health In Crisis

SPEAKER_00 2:22

So the first thing that we have been ignoring in schools is mental health of the adults in the building. You know, not the students. We talk about student mental health constantly. Really, and tw once COVID hit, that became the highlight, not the highlight, the focal point for so many grants, so much funding. You know, we had counselors, billions of dollars went out to SEL programs, you know, check-in, checkout programs, trauma-informed frameworks, you know, and then those things are important. I am not diminishing them, dismissing them, or minimizing anything about those programs. I think they're critical. But we have built an entire infrastructure around the emotional well-being of the children inside our buildings staffed by adults whose emotional well-being nobody is asking about. A teacher could walk into a school and have had a panic attack in the parking lot, hold it together for six hours, and go home without a single person ever knowing. A principal can be three weeks from a breakdown, still running staff meetings, parent conferences, discipline hearings, and the system will not notice until the day they don't show up. We have normalized suffering in silence as a professional expectation. And then we wonder why retention is a crisis. The National Education Association has reported that 55% of educators were thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they planned as of 2022. 55%, more than half. And when you ask them why, the answers are not primarily about pay, even though we know that's a totally different discussion. They are about feeling unsupported, they are about feeling invisible, they are about feeling like the system takes everything they have and offers nothing back. That is not a staffing problem, that is a culture problem, and culture problems don't fix themselves. We cannot keep asking people to pour into children while we treat the adults doing the pouring like they are bottomless. This is not the $20 mimosa at the brunch that you love to go to.

Toxic Culture With Good Intentions

SPEAKER_00 4:54

The second thing that we have been ignoring is toxic culture hiding behind good intentions. And this one is uncomfortable, and I'm okay because this is where we're going today. There are schools, and everybody listening knows at least one where the mission statement is beautiful and the culture is quietly destroying people, where the values on the wall say one thing like community and respect and family, but the actual lived experience of working there is the opposite on all three. And here is what makes it hard to talk about the people running those buildings, they are not always villains. Some of them genuinely believe in what they're building, and some of them work incredibly hard, but good intentions do not neutralize a toxic environment. They just sometimes can make it harder for us to name it. Because when you try to name it, somebody says, but look how much they care. And caring is not the same as creating a healthy culture. You can care deeply about the place that you work and still be the source of harm. You can mean well and still burn people out. You can love the mission of the place that you're at and still lead in a way that makes the people around you smaller. Toxic culture and education often doesn't look like yelling and just plain out cruelty. Uh, it looks like meetings that could have been emails. It looks like where uh attendance is mandatory and assent is unwelcomed. It looks like a leader who says my door is always open and then makes you regret walking through that door. Uh it looks like unwritten rules that everyone knows and nobody talks about because talking about them has consequences. That in itself is a culture problem. And the fact that it exists alongside genuine passion for kids doesn't make it less of a problem. Caring about students is not a substitute for treating your staff well. Both things have to be true for school leaders to be good at what they do.

The Belief Gap With Students

SPEAKER_00 7:31

The third thing that we've been ignoring is the gap between what we say we believe about kids and how we actually treat them. Uh, I I've written a whole book about it calling uh talking about closing the believement gap. And if you haven't, go go check it out on Amazon or you can head to my website and grab its shameless self promotional plug in the middle of the podcast. But the distance between what you claim to believe about a student's potential and what you actually what your actual daily behavior towards that student says you believe, the gap is wider than most educators are comfortable admitting. You know, we say that we believe every child can learn, you know, and then we track or you know, we sort kids into tracks by third grade that most of them never climb out of. We say that we believe in second chances, and then a kid gets a reputation in October in your school and then it carries with them all the way through May. You know, we say that we believe in the potential in all of our students. Like that's a mission statement at some schools, and then we write off a whole classroom based on the CUME folder before we've even learned a single name of the kids. And let me be very clear because I don't think it's malicious in most cases, it's humans. Bias is human. Did a whole presentation about that in Las Vegas. Being biased is not a problem, it makes you a human being. But pattern recognition is human because our brain is wired to take shortcuts. And kids who have been labeled by the system make it very easy for the next adult to just accept the label. I am a perfect example of that. But let me be very clear. Easy is not the same as right. The work of closing the believement gap starts with us being honest about the fact that it even exists in the first place. And in not just in us, but in these systems. The assumptions that you carry into the building every single day about which kids are gonna be the problems, which ones are gonna be fine, about which families are engaged, which ones don't care, which parents will show up, which ones are a waste of your time, about which neighborhoods produce uh the students who are gonna be ready in your school and which ones are like, yeah, they're not gonna be ready. These assumptions are in there, and the question is whether you are actually open and honest and willing to look at them. You cannot close a gap that you refuse to acknowledge. And acknowledging it starts with yourself, not the system. And

The Cost Of Pretending

SPEAKER_00 10:20

the fourth thing, and this is the one that kind of ties everything all together, and it's what we've been ignoring the cost of pretending everything is fine. The we're fine culture in education is real and it's suffocating. It shows up in the staff meeting when the principal or admin or AP asks, Are there any questions? And the room goes silent, not because there are no questions, but because the people have learned that asking questions comes with a risk. It shows up in professional development sessions where everyone just nods along to some something that nobody believes because the culture has made disagreement feel dangerous. It can show up in the educator who tells their friends how broken their school is, then posts a picture of their classroom on Instagram with the heart emoji. We perform okay because the alt the alternative feels too vulnerable. And I don't think that's a teacher thing, I think that's a people problem. We perform okay because the alternative feels too vulnerable, because naming the problem out loud makes it real. Because somewhere along the along the way, a lot of people in education learn that raising your hand to say this isn't working is career limiting, it is relationship damaging, and sometimes it's just not worth the fight. So instead, we decide to stay quiet and the problems stay too. So, what I want you to hear in this episode is the silence is not neutral. Every time we choose not to name what we're seeing, we are making an active decision to let it continue. Pretending is not protecting anybody. It is distributing the cost of this dysfunction across everyone who has to live inside of it. The students feel it, the staff feel it, uh, everyone is always feeling it. A building where the adults are not okay is a building where kids can feel that something is off, even if they can't articulate exactly what it is. And the kids who feel that something is off don't learn as well. It's not an opinion. This is what research on school climate has told us consistently. The we're fine culture isn't protecting your school, it is costing your students and it is costing your educators.

Choosing To Lead By Naming

SPEAKER_00 13:07

So, where does that leave us? It doesn't leave us in despair. I don't think that's where I want to take people like those the sky is falling down on us. Um, but it leaves us with a choice. The same choice that this podcast and I've been trying to point you to uh since we rebranded it, we can keep reacting to to what's broken, or we can decide to lead through it. You can keep ignoring the hard things, or you can be the person in your building who is willing to name them. Naming something is not the same as fixing it, but you cannot fix what you won't name. And you will not name what you are afraid to see. So I want us to look at it the mental health of the adults around you, the mental health of yourself, the culture that exists underneath the talking points, the gap between what you say you believe in kids and about what your behavior actually shows. And I want you to look at the silence that's been protecting the wrong things. I want you to look at every single bit of it. And then I want you to decide what type of educator are you gonna be in the presence of what you now are willing to know or have already known, but now that you're willing to name. That's what I want to leave you with today. Um, not the most comfortable one, but it's the right one.

Share It And Stay Connected

SPEAKER_00 14:31

And as I always say, if this episode resonated with you, share it with someone. Tell a friend, like, hey, check this episode out. Because the work of naming it and doing it, you're not gonna be able to do an isolation alone in your building. You are gonna need to band together with up with other people who believe the same way and who can make the movement happen alongside of you. So, like this episode. If you're watching on YouTube, thumbs up it if you've made it this far. Uh, excuse me, leave a review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to. Um, but I appreciate you all for tapping in each and every week. Try to keep these episodes short and digestible. I don't want you to have to listen to some 30 to 60 minute episode until we start having we'll have some guests on soon. But you have been present for homeroom attendance. Class is dismissed.