Over the past week or so that particular song from REM has been running in and out of my warped little mind as the changes just keep on coming here in our little corner of this overly-large school district.
Building on the chaos still churning from our big reorganization this year, we now have dire warnings of even more extreme budget cuts than we got this year.
Plus the superintendent announced this week that the school board has leased a new building elsewhere in the county and some of us will get sent to live there, although there’s still much uncertainty as to who and when.
With all that and a variety of other, lesser changes, I get a feeling from many of my colleagues that they believe this is the end of the educational world we’ve known.
It would be excellent if that really were the case, but I suspect it won’t happen.
During times of major upheavals some people re-evaluate their processes and test new ways of doing business.*
Many others cover their heads, hunker down, and wait for the storm to blow over.
The institution that is American K12 education, one of the most tradition-bound in our society, is in that second category.
And, unfortunately, once the economy recovers, our schools, and probably most in the US, will return to the comfortable feeling of business as usual as fast as financially possible.
Some things will change, of course, but I doubt it will be anything substantial.
So, it’s the end of the world as we know it.
But the one that replaces it will likely look very much like the one we had before all the economic trauma.
* I wish a whole lot more of that was going on at a state and national level.
Picture: End of the World by Yahya Natanzi, used under a Creative Commons license.
Ditto. Same things are happening here in higher ed. Same cuts, same reorganizing (if you can call it that – just rearranging the deck chairs IMO), and the chance for any substantive change is extremely small.
The single biggest change that I can feel happening is actually a very bad one. I feel a significant drop in morale all around me. When we survive all the cuts and other maneuvers, can we expect morale to just bounce right back up? I don’t think so.
…and unfortunately back to normal continues doing the wrong thing. This includes a reliance on an old financial system that creates a big divide and celebrates greed, a focus on the wrong values including in education, and an earth that continues to suffer. Morale is unlikely to improve as institutions such as ours will hold onto its core tenets at all costs.