In the fall the next school year began as usual with a fervor akin to mild insanity. One is not sheltered from this in a Resource position because even though you don’t have classes to prepare for, you must find all of the Special Ed students that are in the Regular Ed classes and create schedules for servicing them according to the minutes per week that are required by their IEPs. Since there were four Resource teachers, the workload had to be somewhat fairly distributed to cover all three grades. Low and behold they chose me to take the overflow from all three grades that each one of the other three teachers found conflicts with in their schedules during the course of a workday.
The other trick was to discover who the Special Ed kids were. This was not information that any child would voluntarily disclose. One must realize the negative stigma that is attached to being the “retard” that needs help in the class. And for some reason this knowledge was not made available in the enrollment data for our school. There was no coordination between Welligent, the district Special Ed IEP program, and the individual schools enrollment data. Armed with my traveling office, I would go from class to class following the students schedules with known IEPs and see if any of my other students were in the classes. They usually weren’t and the search would begin to discover their whereabouts. Sometimes a student would go for an entire semester or longer before we discovered that he/she had an IEP.
So with such preoccupation it is easy to see how I almost completely forgot what I had done with The Guardian. Weeks and months went by with no further word. Thoughts came of the Washington Post’s dilemma just before they published the Pentagon Papers. But I had to bridle in my ego. “Back to planet earth,” I had to keep telling myself. “I am Edward Overscore. I am not Daniel Ellsberg. Keep it in perspective.” This I knew was not anywhere near the same galaxy as the Pentagon.
Then it happened. Upon arriving home after a day in the trenches. I sat down with a carton of egg fu yung and a cup of hot jasmine tea. I checked my email first which is my routine. There it was – a short encrypted email from The Guardian Education Department. I decrypted it with my private key and it read as follows:
Dear Mr Overscore,
As you will see in today’s lead headline, we had decided to publish your information and the facts that we have uncovered concerning your allegations. Please accept a sincere thanks from all our staff here at The Guardian for your tireless efforts to insure public school students in the United States receive a quality education. It is unfortunate that there are forces at work which would undermine the futures of thousands of children for monetary gain. You have been instrumental in bringing the power of public scrutiny to bear on these forces and hopefully undo them. Best of luck in the future. And if you have any more information, you know where we are.
As soon as I finished, I encrypted it again with my private key and put it in my Guardian folder. And then almost as if in the same motion clicked on The Guardian shortcut on my desktop. And there it was under “Headlines” with the sub cap “Education”:
Guardian Investigation Reveals Education Conspiracy in the US
The Guardian has uncovered a secret national conspiracy in the United States educational administration of public education. This conspiracy is intentionally aimed at destabilizing public schools to garner favorable public opinion for the privatization of education.
An exclusive source has revealed to The Guardian documents which show that an institutionally systemic pattern of educational policy exists which undermines educational codes. Furthermore, The Guardian’s comprehensive analysis shows a diversion of necessary public school funding to charter and private schools hence destabilizing further the country’s public schools. The Guardian’s additional research has supported initial evidence offered by our source and has uncovered a national guideline to defunctionalize public education and is supported by the highest levels of the federal government in the United States.
Research by The Guardian has revealed that this secret policy is managed and administered by a conglomerate of foundations and private investors under the code name of “The Foundation”. Evidence of The Foundation creating a strategy of the systematic avoidance of educational code requirements has surfaced in The Guardian’s investigation. This pattern of code avoidance has perpetrated the entire country’s educational system to almost every school site according to Guardian researchers.
Educational codes exist and are legislated at the state level in order to protect and assure quality educational practices. However, if these practices are subverted or compromised then proper educational practices break down and substandard education is the result. One of the possible outcomes of substandard education is the low scores on standardized testing which is a talking point for those supporting privatization of education….
Copyright © Barclay Totten 2019