The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - Author Kurt R Johnson Is Today's In-Studio Guest; Johnson's Book "Schooled" & Charlottesville High

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

The I Love CVille Show headlines: Author Kurt R Johnson Is Today’s In-Studio Guest Johnson’s Book “Schooled” & Charlottesville High Johnson Taught At Charlottesville High School Listen To Johnson’s First-Hand Perspective At CHS Johnson: Sex, Drugs & Hallway Brawls At CHS Johnson: No Support For Teachers From Admins Johnson: Insight On Teacher “Sick Out” (ie Strike) Johnson: Meg Bryce vs Allison Spillman Race Read Viewer & Listener Comments Live On-Air Kurt R Johnson, Author of “Schooled: The Miseducation Of An American Teacher,” joined Jerry Miller live on The I Love CVille Show! The I Love CVille Show airs live Monday – Friday from 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm on The I Love CVille Network. Watch and listen to The I Love CVille Show on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, iTunes, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Fountain, Amazon Music, Audible and iLoveCVille.com.

Good Wednesday afternoon, guys. My name is Jerry Miller, and thank you kindly for joining us on the I Love Seville show. It's great to connect with you through the I Love Seville network. Our studio is in downtown Charlottesville. We are less than two miles from the University of Virginia. We are 30, 40 yards from the Charlottesville Police Department, a block off the downtown mall, a block removed from the courthouses of Albemarle and the city of Charlottesville, and smack dab in the center of central Virginia, a market of 300,000 people.

Today's show is one that I have looked forward to. Judah has said previously he has looked forward to. We have in our studio, you will see him in a matter of about 25 seconds, Kurt R. Johnson. And he is the author of this book, which I have in my hand, Schooled, The Miseducation of an American Teacher. I read this book in about two hours, two hours and change. It was an approachable read, a compelling read, and it's a read that I think is a must for any in the Central Virginia market and any of those that have children in a school of any kind. Kurt has experience in hallways and classrooms all over the world, and he has most recently

experience from teaching ninth graders at Charlottesville High School. And at this particular institution of learning, CHS, Kurt has highlighted that there's two schools within one school. The school of advanced placement and honors classes, and in an alternative learning environment. On that note, Judah Wittkower, if you can go to the studio camera and welcome Kurt R. Johnson to the show. You're on camera. The microphone is in front of you. Thank you kindly for joining us. Thanks for having me. This is certainly new territory for me personally. It's a pleasure to have you. I heard about this book from a number of viewers and listeners, and then I got a copy in the mail from you.

I read this book, and I could not put it down. Thank you. First, introduce yourself to everybody that's watching the show. Hi. My name is Kurt Johnson. I'm a veteran educator, born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm the middle child of two public school teachers, and my connection to Charlottesville started when I was 10. My dad took a sabbatical to UVA in

1981 and In addition to taking classes at UVA. He was also a graduate assistant for Terry Holland's Cavaliers with with Ralph Sampson I mean this was He was the national player of the year. He was, Virginia was number one for most of that, most of that year. Anyway, it was created a lot of great memories for me as a kid. And so when it was my turn to go to college, I decided on UVA in Charlottesville. You start the book by saying you had college basketball aspirations. I did. Basketball seemed to be woven into your childhood

through a passion of your father's that was transitioned into a passion in part for you. Then you highlight in this book, and you can tell I read it here, you highlight in this book that as soon as you started playing college basketball, what did you say? You described yourself as what, like a 6'3", 6'4 guy with limited athleticism, not much leaping ability.

And you're like, okay, this is college basketball. I get it now. I think I said I was gravitationally challenged. Fighting gravity. Judah just said it right there. Yeah. Yeah. So like my dad played college hoops, small D3 school in Northern minnesota concordia college my older brother went there uh it was the only school that recruited me probably because of my familial connections and so i went there as well and after two years i didn't really crack the varsity rotation so i i looked i looked beyond and i transferred to uva to kind of get the bigger college experience and and um at a school that I had been rooting for, obviously, since 81. You mentioned Ralph Sampson. He was here a few weeks ago in that chair right there,

quite an aura and presence to him, Ralph Sampson. He leaves the studio after doing this talk show and literally stopped traffic on Market Street. There was a car going toward the police department and a car going away from the police department both stopped in the center of the road with traffic behind them just to greet ralph samson and it's been decades since he's played basketball he's a legend he is an absolute legend but i want to talk about you it's so crazy that your decision to transfer to uva for to close your college career ends up being one of the influences or factors of you coming to Charlottesville from across the world. Sure. Put that in perspective. Yeah, I had a great time at UVA.

And my experiences here, particularly with Madison House and the volunteer experiences I did, sort of got me thinking about volunteerism after college. And so I joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Nepal where I met my wife and we we decided to come back to the states and and get certified in teaching because that was a good way to to spend a career internationally so after 21 years overseas teaching at different international schools, Singapore, Mumbai, India, and Jakarta, Indonesia. We decided sort of post-pandemic or during the pandemic, things were rough, you know, obviously around the world. It was a global phenomenon and our kids were entering high school. We thought, let's get them an American experience. And so, yeah, we didn't want to do Minnesota. We didn't want to do on to Texas so we decided split the difference and let's move to a college

town and we had obviously a connection here through me and yeah mountains ocean you know diversity great restaurants and culture and so all the reasons we love to live here exactly so we chose we chose Charlottesville so you you choose Charlottesville you write in the book you move to live here. Exactly. So we chose Charlottesville. So you choose Charlottesville. You write in the book. You move to Ivy. You rent a house in Ivy. And at that point of moving across the world to Charlottesville,

you're like, all right, I've got to figure out what I'm going to do professionally. And even in the book, you say, I didn't want to get back into teaching. I sort of thought I could reinvent myself. That ain't easy. No, I'm still struggling with it, but I, yeah, I cast, I think I said in the book that I kind of cast a wide net. I looked at Monticello. I like, I'm a history guy, so maybe, hey, I could work and give tours at Monticello. I looked at just anything, like maybe deliver mail, maybe kind of work with my hands, like just do something different. Use this next family adventure as a means to just try something new.

See what else I can do, as it were. But then, you know, kids are going to, kids are going to work or kids are going to school. My wife's going to work. I got to get something going for me. And so I, I decided to interview for what I, for what I do. I'm a, I'm a 20, 24 year veteran teacher. And so I decided to interview for position at Charlottesville High.

Bill McChesney on McIntyre Road. Welcome to the show. Vanessa Parkhill's watching in Earleysville. John Blair in Stanton. Dylan's Rule retweets us on Twitter. Ginny Hu retweets us. The show's, I knew this show was going to go viral here. It's because of this guy here. So you take a job at CHS. It almost seemed like that, and I don't want to put words in your mouth here, that they were begging you, Charlottesville High School, to take this job. Well, I mean, I interviewed during the teacher kind of prep week,

so it was really late for them to be hiring somebody. But I don't think that they were any more desperate than I was because I had applied for that particular position a month prior, and I hadn't heard anything. And I think it just sort of was that late in the game that they called me in for an interview. Did it concern you that that late in the game that there were openings of this magnitude? I guess I taught two years in New Mexico just to start my teaching career. New Mexico? New Mexico just off the Navajo reservation and you know it was a lower socioeconomic area that you know was it was a lower socioeconomic area that, you know, was a challenge. And so I sort of thought, after 21 years, I guess I was kind of naive coming back into the public school scene.

And I just sort of thought, hey, this is what I do. I'm a teacher. I've taught in difficult situations. And as the administrators told me during the interview, this is a barbell school, which I hadn't heard. What's that mean? It means they defined it as a school with two very distinct socioeconomic groups of people and not much in between.

And they said I would be teaching to the lower end of that barbell. So I got home from the interview, and I got a call, and they said, you got the job. And I said, thank you. I'll take it. Tom Stargel is watching the program. He's a retired teacher, a Golden Apple Award-winning teacher. He's watching right now from ACPS. You are at the start of the 2022-2023 school year

at Charlottesville High School. We are coming out of COVID. We are returning to in-person learning. We are, in a lot of ways, feeling the early collateral damage of the pandemic of of forcing kids to basically learn in their uh bedrooms their coat closets their kitchen tables and their underwear on screens as opposed to in person in classrooms in front of teachers and what we won't go down that rabbit hole um 2022 2023 school year your first day on the job what's going through your mind and then we're going to do the flip book of what was maybe the most challenging teaching year of your professional career i didn't keep a daily journal i think if i reflect back on on those those early days it was um what teachers go through at the beginning of any year. You know, kind of get, you know, learn the students' names.

Learn the routine of the school, as it was a new school for me. You know, meet colleagues. You know, where do I eat lunch? Do I eat lunch at my desk, or is there a place where people go to eat lunch? And just kind of figure out just the basic things that anybody deals with when they start a new job. But as for a teacher, it was just sort of find my place and figure out what was going on, what the day-to-day, the schedule, when's lunch, do I see the same classes at the same time every day, or do they mix it up a little bit?

So it was just try to kind of get going, learn names, learn colleagues, sit in meetings and ask questions. Phillip Dowell, watching the program from Sarasota, Florida right now. Okay, so you are transitioning, you are figuring the ropes, learning where the bathroom is, the faculty bathroom. The faculty bathroom comes up in this book. The faculty bathroom, not so much a faculty bathroom, much more of a student bathroom. And you feel for the students utilizing the faculty bathroom because the students utilizing the faculty bathroom in the book are fearful of what's actually going on in the student bathroom, so much so that they are going into a bathroom of their teachers, which if I was a high schooler,

I would not want to go anywhere near the teachers, especially not in a bathroom setting. But they did this out of survival. I'll get to that in a matter of moments. When did you start realizing, oh my goodness, this is a pretty precarious and tumultuous environment I'm in? Yeah, I mean, pretty quickly. Some of the early initiatives to start last school year were no eating in the classroom, no phones, phone zones and phone-free zones. And I noticed that all my students would just eat whenever they wanted and look at their phones whenever they wanted. And regardless of what I had to say, it wasn't, there was no change in the behavior. And this, you know, other things started, started to occur. We had a couple lockdown drills

early in the last school year. I could smell marijuana every day. I was witness to more than one fight in the first few months of school. And so it was just sort of like my eyes were wide open at that point. I thought I had seen a lot in my career, but as I mentioned earlier, I was just kind of naive to the things that, that I was going to be subject to. And I do want to just sort of say that I didn't write this

book to bash CHS. I was, you know, I was privy to a lot of dysfunction in my role there, but I know that there's a lot of functional things happening at CHS as well. There's a lot of dedicated staff. There's a lot of motivated students. But as the low man on the totem pole coming in, getting a job with a week to go before the school year began. I mean, you got arguably the most challenging job. I think, yes. When I think back to the people that left last year along with me, it was a lot of teachers of ninth grade students

who were not teaching AP. And that goes back to the statement that we talked about prior to the show, two schools within Charlottesville High School, the AP Honors Track, and then the non-AP Honors Track. We're going to pick that apart here in a matter of moments. Comments are coming in quickly. Deep Throat, who's number one in the family, he sends a graph that highlights the barbell disparity, a data-backed graph, the barbell disparity at Charlottesville High School. We can put that on screen when you are ready this is a dynamic talk show right here we got a lot of things going on I want to throw this to you Kurt I've said on

previous shows that it's no secret anyone who consistently watches this program knows that I am a huge supporter of decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana across the board. I think the effects of cannabis and marijuana incarcerations vastly impacts people of color when compared to people like you, me, and Judah, and the data backs up that statement. I also have said many times that cannabis can be utilized in many beneficial forms for many different types of either illnesses, anxieties, whatever you want to describe it as. It can be positive. I've also said on this program that I, myself, smoke. I will throw this to you. What took me aback in this book was the regular usage of marijuana on school grounds. As someone who's backed or supported or vocalized his platform on marijuana, I do not support or stand for it

on school grounds in any capacity. The regular nature of you smelling it every day, I was taken aback by that reading in the book because it shows a lack of accountability and a lack of enforcement of rules. If kids are walking out of classrooms in the hallways and daily on the regular smelling marijuana, it would lead them to believe, oh, I could do it too,

or what else can I get away with if this rule is not enforced? Yeah, I will echo everything you said about marijuana legislation and the criminalization of it in the past. I think in the past 10, 15 years, we're definitely going in the right direction. But just because it's legalized doesn't mean it should be used by children.

Especially not in schools. Well, it's not legal for them. Yeah. It's not legal for 14, 15, 16-year-olds. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. The libertarian? In part because he's like, let's get government out of certain issues. That was a big one for me. But yeah, if you walk the halls of CHS every day, there's no way that you cannot recognize the odor of marijuana. You smell it in the hallways between passing periods

as kids go off and vape in the bathrooms. You smell it on your students in their clothes. And, you know, I think the adults in the room need to come up with a strategy to better, you know, regulate the illegal use of drugs in the school. I mean, it's just, that's, I'm not asking for much here. And you said accountability. That's a big part of sort of my, you know, it's not mine. It's just this is what happens in, you know, you have to increase the level of accountability in schools

where they have, you know, lost their way a little bit because students are the first to recognize when they can get away with things. And it perpetuates. It snowballs. kids wouldn't openly smoke it in the hallways, but just the smell of it is obviously the telltale sign. did you bring that to anyone's

attention? Yeah. Or is it a don't ask, don't tell? It's like the monkeys with the emojis covering my eyes, my ears, and my mouth. Is that what it is? I did earlier in the year because that was when I thought, okay, I'll use this system. There's a system that we use as teachers there to note any sort of misbehavior, whether it's use of phone or perpetual tardies. On probably a half dozen occasions, I wrote up students and I said, I think this student is, I smell marijuana on them.

And oftentimes it was part of another, you know, dysplary thing. You know, they were rude, they were using foul language, and I smelled marijuana. And oftentimes, most of the time, there was just no follow-up on those things that I wrote up. I never knew where this particular infraction that I identified, I never knew where it went. It just I identified, I never knew where it went. It just kind of went into a vacuum where the ether.

That's got to be demoralizing. Well, you just stop writing kids up, and you deal with your world in your own classroom, and you do the best you can. And you come up with ways to get through that class period, get through that day, put out the fires on your own. That's what happens. You deal with it on your own.

Put in perspective, there's a portion of the book that describes an interaction he had with a student. And the student is late for class in the book and trying to get into Kurt's classroom. Kurt's the teacher of the classroom, is banging aggressively on the door of Kurt's classroom. I'll let you take it from there. Yeah, so we lock our doors. We're told to lock our doors once the bell rings to indicate the start of class. Is that the norm? I think so, yeah. Okay. It's to keep kind of a, it's to regulate who's coming in and out of your room.

Okay. But also to prevent random people from coming into your room during the class. Okay. And on this particular day, you know, two-thirds throughout, about two-thirds through the school year, the student was just pounding on my door as I was trying to get class started. And so I walked back. I walked from the front of the classroom to the back where the door was. I opened it. And I just asked the student, can we try that again?

I thought it was a teachable moment to say, this isn't how we try to get into class. This isn't how we knock on the door. And he became instantly volatile. Tried to get in my and he became instantly volatile tried to get in my room and so as he tried to walk into the room I thought I'd put my hands up just to sort of say

let's deal with this just one on one outside I don't want all the students to have to watch this there's nothing to see and as he came into my space I put my hands out but I guess I put my hands on him but he started to yell f you know drop f-bombs on me and by the time I just said you're not sorry you're not gonna be my class today

and I asked some some CSAs who explain what CSA is um community and safety advisor I might be getting the a wrong but they they are just people from the community that are responsible for kind of being present in the hallways and helping teachers out when they need some support for generally types of misbehavior. So this is a lower level school resource officer without the backing of police authority. It's a community member that's looking to maintain, order, or provide guidance in some capacity within the hallways at Charlesville High School. So a CSA comes to this or sees this interaction or is told of this interaction with you and the student that's banging on your door, rudely, trying to get in your classroom, and you're trying to basically use a teachable moment to say, this isn't how we do things.

And when you realize that it was no longer a teachable moment, that this is way past the point, you kindly ask the student, you're not, you disinvited the student from class. Yeah. I said, I can't handle this. I can't handle the aggressiveness, and I've got a class to teach. I've got 25 other kids sitting in their seats

who are here on time. And so I shut the door, and it locked. And he went and found a couple, that's what happened. He went and found a couple CSAs. They brought him back to my class. They said, the CSAs asked me if I wanted him in my class. And I said, no, he's been a distraction here early in the class period. I think he needs to be somewhere else today.

And it shook me. It was the last class of the day. And as I was sitting there after, after the final bell rang, um, you know, the principal came in and we talked about it. I guess a bunch of people in the office had seen the tape of, of the situation. And what's tape? There's cameras in the hallway? Cameras in the hallway, CCTV. Okay. And the phrase that was used was, by the principal to me, was it looked like you laid your hands on the student. And I just said, I put my hands up. He came into my space.

The student was a repeat. He had been repeatedly disciplined up to that point of the year for being in fights. And I was concerned. And you're not a small guy. I mean, he's sitting down right here. I mean, how tall are you? I'm 6'2". He's 6'2"? 2'10"? Yeah, on a good day. Okay, this is not a small person here. I mean, imagine if this was, you know, a smaller guy or a petite female teacher. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I'm all about as a teacher, good relationships with kids. That's what drives me. Take an interest in their lives. Find something to connect with them on

so that when there is sort of this potential volatility between teacher and student, like you have something to lean on. Common ground. Common ground. And it didn't happen that day. I was told that a letter of concern would go in my file for how I tried to de-escalate the situation.

That clearly didn't sit well with me. I didn't really think I had any sort of leverage. I don't know much about the unions in Charlottesville, but I knew I wasn't paying any dues or anything. I talked to some colleagues about it and they thought it was BS as well. I didn't want to quit. I'm not a quitter. The situation didn't sit well with me but neither would quitting and just saying I'm going to take my ball and go home.

It impacted me. That kind of conflict doesn't belong in schools. It's sort of this cussing at your teacher because they're trying to give you a teachable moment, yeah. The principal in this turn of events is Principal Rashad Pitt. I bring his name up because Principal Pitt during this school year, the one after Kurt's school year, during the 2023-2024 school year, Principal Pitt was the principal who announced that he was going to resign prior to Thanksgiving,

right around Thanksgiving, and that was mid-year. And then he shocked the Charlottesville public school system by resigning on the 9th of November prior to the early resignation date he sent he established weeks ago weeks prior he quit before he said he was gonna quit and that's during the school year so we're gonna get to dr. Pitt here or principal Pitt here in a matter of moments before we do comments are coming in quickly Kevin Higgins is in Greenwood, Virginia. He said, Kurt committed to doing everything with limited resources. I bet no resources at all. This dude is a hero. He's a hero because he cares for kids. What a staffu some schools are in right now. This guy seems like a genuine dude. He's much nicer than I ever would be

if I was in the classroom. You have another educator, David Riddick, watching the program on LinkedIn right now. Multiple media outlets watching Kurt on the show as we speak. The book, I'll plug it, is School, the Miseducation of an American Teacher. I want to talk about the portion of the book that talks or highlights. What was the free period called during Charlottesville High School? You describe it in the book. It's a weekly, a black night period. A black night period. There was a portion of the school day called black night period where students are giving a little bit of freedom where they can get ahead of homework, they can read, they can socialize. Black nighttime.

BKT, sorry. BKT, black nighttime. The mascot is the Black Knights for Charlottesville High School. Walk us through the portion of the book that talks about black nighttime and why it ended up getting throttled or limited. This floored me here. Yeah, well, it's, you know, once a week, there would be black nighttime where students could,

it's kind of like an advisory period. Students would sit in my classroom. They would watch the weekly update, the news update that the high school audiovisual team would put together, kind of like a TV show, and give updates on things. Kids would do surveys on the types of music they wanted to dance or whatnot, and kids could go see teachers that they had missing work with.

They could go to the gym sometimes. The gym was open at different times of the year. And at one point, one of my students said, because the gym was closed this particular black nighttime, and he said to the rest of the kids in the class, he's like, do you know why the gym is closed during black nighttime? And I was like, uh-oh. What's he going to say?

And before I could head it off, some girl said, why? Why is the gym closed? And the student volunteered that there was a couple kids that were caught underneath the bleachers messing around, to put it mildly. And the book is, and I'll say it, having sex.

Yeah. In the book. On grounds. Allegedly. Right? I mean, I wasn't there. I heard what the kids said, and I guess it wouldn't have shocked me, no, if that was actually what was happening and why the gym was closed.

News like that didn't trickle down to teachers. We were never really informed of things that I felt that we should be informed on. Why are things the way they are? And is that chalked up as ignorance as bliss? Is that chalked up to maintain morale? It depends on your perspective, yeah. You know, what do you... I would imagine the administration would sort of think,

what do the teachers need to know? You're on a need-to-know basis, and you don't need to know this. Maybe. I don't know. But yeah, there is a lot that sort of is uncommunicated. Yeah. Put in perspective the role of teachers when it comes to breaking up fightings or brawls. You highlight in this book, you can tell I read the book, you highlight in the book, there's a portion outside your classroom where it's like a magnet for student traffic.

It attracts different flows of students in different directions. And because this hub or this nexus is close to your classroom here, you had a clear vantage point of physicality. Shows yours. Yeah. Early in the school year, there were some ninth grade girls fighting outside my classroom. One of the students I had in class.

And so it was kind of, you know, it was just sort of a chaotic space of 30 students, two of whom were fighting. And a lot of students, you know, take out their phones and start recording it and they're laughing, kind of egging them on. I try to grab the girl that I know kind of, but I'm not sure what I should do. And so I kind of didn't do anything. Fortunately, some admin and some CSAs ran up the steps and kind of put the individuals in a bear hug and removed them from the situation. I kind of talked to other teachers, like, what am I supposed to do? Well, I mean, if you couldn't put your hands on the student that was banging on your door,

and by put your hands up, you basically put your hands up like this to kind of like, he's in your personal space. I mean, how can a teacher grab a student in a brawl? Yeah, I didn't know. And so I kind of grabbed her shoulders, but then I realized that wasn't going to be enough. And so then now what do I do? And then again, as I said, fortunately, some people that were experienced with de-escalation, physical de-escalation came up and saved the day.

But I asked colleagues, like, what do you do? Most were just like, yeah just just don't get involved just stay away or you're gonna catch a an elbow or catch a fist or um and that's happened at charlesville high school that happened this school year yeah it happened last school year too yeah um we've had other teachers on the program bill mooncatchy talked about this at almore high school where teachers were catching elbows or errant punches and seriously injured trying to de-escalate these brawls just staying away and doing nothing I feels really there's where I want to go really helpless yeah and you know it's there's

many more students than there are adults in any school building, obviously. There's only so much you can sort of head off before things get violent or physical like that. But yeah, you just sort of feel, yeah, what am I doing? I'm a bystander. I'm no better than the rest of the people standing around watching this. Yeah, it's sad, I guess.

What's your stance on school resource officers? I mean, I was... I know that's been a real contentious issue. At CHS? I don't know much about that history. I know it's more of a post-George Floyd national issue. And I don't think you can look at all schools as having the same needs, coast to coast. There are many different types of public schools, private schools.

But I think some schools, they're more needed than others. And I think when you paint all police with the broad brush and just sort of say they create some negative vibe throughout the school community, I think you have to weigh that against the alternative if they're not around, to be a presence, a law enforcement presence that is respected. And, you know, I think, you know, police have always been well-respected throughout most of my life, but that's changed in the last seven, eight years. And like any career, like any profession, there's good and there's bad. I think the vast majority of policemen are good.

But, yeah, I think the SRO conflict just became about post-George Floyd. You know, police officers in school sort of became a red flag for a lot of people. Multiple comments coming in, and we have a ranking of viewers and listeners. We've given some nicknames, others we utilize their first and last name. The number one in the family, he goes by the moniker Deep Throat. He put the data set together on the barbell. He highlights the next door thread about the book. He says there was an interesting thread locally on Nextdoor about Kurt's book. And in a very

on-brand display, the chair of the city Democratic Party, a UVA professor, without ever having read Kurt's book, said this, quote, Charlottesville is great. My kids went there, and they were doing advanced work, end quote. Deep Throat then says, yeah, UVA professors' kids are doing great, but pay no attention to the 44% of the student body that is economically disadvantaged and based on the SLO numbers floundering. He then says, typical. That's a great way for you to put the data set on screen of the barbell. The barbell data sets on screen. You're on point today, Judah Wickauer, highlighting what Kurt has said with two schools within one school. Everyone look at the screen

and look at the data that is on screen that reflects what we just said. I'm going to go to LinkedIn where this show is streaming on. Number two in the family, he's John Blair. He says this, Jerry, I'm truly interested in Mr. Johnson's perspective on this. Does he believe that his students were prepared from their education in earlier years to be a high school student? I know a couple of teachers at CHS who are disappointed, discouraged year after year when they see students who are functionally illiterate in their high school classes? Did he see this phenomenon? You know, I think I'll try to answer this the best I can. I think schools exist to foster competencies. You've got the academic competencies and you've got socio-emotional competencies. And I think the pandemic took a lot out of kids to the point where they didn't always know how to behave socio-emotionally and how to succeed academically.

And so I think some of the things we're seeing now are reflective of some of those challenges during the pandemic. And so to answer the question, yeah, I think there was a big dose of sort of illiteracy as it relates to those competencies coming up into the high school. Or any level, right? If it was third grade students suffering during the pandemic, then their fifth and sixth grade classes experienced sort of this divide, this chasm, you know, from what pre-pandemic kids did to the pandemic era kids. So, you know, so what do we do? How do we approach that as educators? How do we, as administrators, how do we meet the kids where their needs are? Well, it seems that CHS, one of the ways to approach it, or the way to approach it, is, what is it called, social promotion? Yeah. Where the choice is to continue to graduate

or matriculate the kid or the student through school, because if the student is held back that then means said student is on grounds longer and potentially hampering other students in the classroom longer yeah we didn't talk a whole lot about social promotion generally and as my the vast amount of my experience has been overseas where you don't really have that my understanding was it kind of ended at high school. So like once, you know, once you got to high school, then it was time to, you got to earn, you got to earn enough credits to graduate. And that is the case at CHS, absolutely. But I think one of the issues that's happened, not just at Charlottesville High, but, but

as I feel like I'm pretty well read on educational issues throughout the country, expectations have been lowered. You know, if we look at things like standardized tests have been taken off the table for a lot of school districts. For a lot of colleges and universities. And now they're finally starting to kind of go back on that. And saying, oh, my God, we needed to set standard to admit kids into the school and equal playing field,

which in a lot of ways is obvious. It's common sense. Yeah. Well, there's been a lot of great inflation. Right. You have so many kids just getting A's that colleges can't even figure out what to do. But that's just another example of lowering the bar, you know, great inflation or taking away honors classes i read recently where the i think it was the seattle public school system took away their gifted and talented program

so we've got sort of this ideological thing happening with um everything's looked at through these lenses of the whole dei thing and you know i don't you know i'm'm not an expert on it. I just feel like from the collective things that I'm exposed to as just a conscientious adult and a former teacher, I'm not teaching this year, it just seems like everything is being driven by this equity piece where we don't want anybody to feel like they're not as smart as somebody else or is or working as hard as somebody else or I mean that's that that's a life skill we have to we have to get kids ready for the real world too yeah so um yeah can we talk about administrative support? You mentioned Dr. Pitt already. He shocked the school system with his first semester, this past first semester, resignation prior to Thanksgiving.

And then when Mr. Pitt, Principal Pitt resigned, shortly thereafter, the teachers, and you highlight this in the book, a large portion of the teachers at Charlottesville High School did an unofficial sick out where they all called sick on the same day, which if memory serves, caused the cancellation of two days of classes prior to Thanksgiving. And at that point, it was at that point that I think the community truly realized, and I hope the teachers realize, the true leverage and power they have.

Yeah. The teachers are calling the shots here when they can do an unofficial sick day and force the superintendent to send a message to all the parents

that school's canceled for two days before Thanksgiving. Now you've got to figure out what to do with your kids during the work day. Yeah. I want to talk, Principal Pitt, and I want to talk Dr. Gurley, the superintendent of Charlottesville Public Schools. Anywhere you want to go on those topics. I mean, Mr. Pitt hired me. It was last year, my only year at CHS, that was his first year. And he hired me and I had a good relationship with Mr. Pitt.

Really good guy. He was very personable, in my opinion. Obviously, all these things are my opinion. I guess one thing that's not an opinion is that he was very visible. He had this stand-up rolling desk, and he would always be working on his computer, but in a visible place, in the cafeteria, in certain hallways where there had been things like the fights that we talked about earlier. So I was impressed with that about Mr. Pitt. I've never been an

administrator. There's kind of a disconnect between teachers and administrators, us versus them, not necessarily contentious, but just sort of the reality of our jobs. I guess in reflecting on what I have done as a teacher, generally I try to take care of things myself and not rely too much on administrators. I mean, I've got plenty of friends that are administrators, and when they make that transition from teaching to administration, they talk about how the only times they see teachers anymore, now that they're administrators, is when there are problems.

And, yeah, I mean, the most interaction I had with Mr. Pitt was during that situation with a student that earned me a letter of concern. But, no, I like him. I was sorry to hear that he left. Dr. Greeley, I haven't had any interaction with. I don't think I've ever met him. Is there any indication, and perhaps there's not, any indication of the influence that the superintendent has on the day-to-day operations of charlottesville high school i don't know okay i don't like i didn't um i didn't have any sort of as a brand new teacher last year yeah totally i wasn't there one year i wasn't in on the meetings i wasn't in on the school board stuff i just i was just doing my

job you highlight you bring up school board you highlight in the book and and i saw uh dr bryce today this morning um interestingly you highlight a school board race in a different district this was in alamaro county it was the at-large seat between a race that featured Allison Spillman, who won the race, and Dr. Meg Bryce, who lost the race, a race that saw collectively both candidates, I think if memory serves correct, the collective fundraising totals were north of $700,000 for a school board race, the fundraising totals, guys. A race that we can make a legitimate comment, this school board race, that was perhaps the most watched school board race in American history. Part of that is media is more ubiquitous now than it's ever been in the past. Cable News, Fox, MSNBC're covering this school board race all over the newspapers

in the Washington Post, in the New York Times, the Spillman-Brice school board race. I want to start open-ended before I pick this race apart. Spillman versus Bryce, at-large seat, Albemarle County School Board anywhere you want to go? Part of my thesis, part of part of what I realized while writing this book was that everything's gotten more political and it's getting more political at ever younger at ever younger levels of education and so while I was initially surprised that there was this really contentious politically divisive school board race, I mean, ultimately, the more I've learned, the less surprising it is.

I think what is surprising is how in this community, basically, the Democrats really have a monopoly on the local school boards and I guess again I shouldn't be surprised by that because education is a left leaning industry it is and that's fine I've got a lot of left leaning friends and family members how would you characterize your ideology I have a feel for this already and let me see if I can guess

center if anything libertarian leading, physically conservative, socially liberal. Yeah. Yeah. I think most folks are that way. I was in the Peace Corps, right? I mean, I'm not a crazy right winger. I'm moderate. There are certain things I'm more conservative on than others. I am socially liberal. But that has limits too because I think things have become more in your face with certain things like the transgender participation

in women's sports. And I don't know if we want to go there. I don't know if I want to go there. But as to the Bryce Spillman contest, it just sort of seemed to be that Meg Bryce lost because of who her dad was, or that certainly didn't help her, right? I mean, there were spray-painted signs out on 250 Ivy Road that had Scalia spray-painted across a sign that said Meg Bryce. I mean, if we're measured by our parents and our

other relatives, like what does that say about like the issues? And the issues as I saw them were, you know, post-pandemic scores are lower and kids are not achieving the academic competencies that kids in the past years had. And so when Meg Bryce said, I want to focus on the results, I want to focus on the academics, that seemed like a reasonable place to start. Whereas Spillman, you know, I've been to her website, and, you know, it's just a lot of the buzzwords right now in education, you know, inclusion and making sure kids feel safe at school.

And I'm all for that. I'm all for empathy and kids feeling comfortable at school. But schools have a multifaceted purpose that includes academics, and those need to be factored in as well. So I wasn't surprised that Bryce lost. She would have lost by fewer percentage points if it wasn't for her dad. A thousand percent agree with that. And, you know, the Spillman campaign manager creating that website, Meg Scalia Bryce. Christopher Seaman.

Yeah. I don't know him. I know he quit. But it just felt a little dirty, You know? Felt a little dirty. And hugely dirty. Background on that for the viewers and listeners. One-time campaign manager for Alison Spillman, Christopher Seaman, created a website. And interestingly, Judah was one of the ones that discovered that the website was tied to him. Was it the, you can weave you in, Judah. Was it the... We've you in, Judah. Was it the DNS records?

The DNS records were not protected? Yeah, I think so. I don't know that it was me that figured that out, but somebody went on a deep dive and found stuff like, you know, you can check what someone's IP is and it will give you information on who's registered the website.

And I think somebody had also made the incredibly smart, sarcasm, choice to use Chris Siemens' name as one of the logins. So a screenshot showed his name in... Anytime he did a blog post. Yeah, basically. Showed his name. I mean, yeah, right. We've curved back into this.

So the campaign manager of Spillman has to step down immediately as campaign manager of Spillman because he gets doxxed of creating a phony website that paints Bryce in a negative light. He then has to distance himself from the candidate, Alison Spillman, and say, oh, no, this was me doing it. Then he tries to attribute it to a political action committee that he's a part of. And it just shows that the nastiness of federal and statewide politics

has infiltrated the grassroots level in the most local way possible. These folks are making $500 a year on the school board. It's effing bananas. That's what they make. I didn't know they made anything. Yeah, $500, effing bananas. That's what they make. I didn't know they made anything. Yeah. $500. Effing bananas.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, as I mentioned in the book, like, you know, Meg had a tough question to respond to when she has to acknowledge that her kids are in private schools and she's running for the board of a public school board. But I thought she handled those questions well, being part of the solution, being part of a community. But clearly that was a, I mean, anybody can acknowledge that that put her in a difficult position from the start. And had her kids been in public schools, would the election have flipped? I don't think so. But, again, I think that would have helped her. I think your read of this is perfect. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know her. I did send her a book, just unsolicitedly. So, you know, again, this book is more about me trying to add to the conversation I don't have all the answers certainly but I feel like I have a lot of experience I'm a I'm a conscientious adult who pays attention to the issues I'm a parent how many kids do you have I have two okay yeah and so what are their ages um they're in high school okay and and you know they're they're getting a good public school education so i'll i'll leave it at that yeah yeah absolutely but um yeah i just i just think if if if i can sit down with somebody that disagrees with some

things in the book sure let's have a coffee and let's talk about it. Because I think in a lot of sectors of our society, we've lost the ability to have conversations. We all kind of exist in our echo chambers and surround ourselves with the viewpoints that we already agree with. So, you know, here you go. Most teachers are Democrats. I am, I'm not, I would not describe myself as a lifelong Democrat. But I've been having conversations with them, very civil conversations my whole career. And, and, and it's, it's kind of fun. It's okay to disagree. Well said. Judah Wickauer, we're going to weave

you into the mix here in a matter of moments. Comments are coming in. I know he's got some questions for you. Vanessa says, 25 years ago, I had a friend describe Almaral High School like this barbell model. I don't think things were as extreme back then, but the concept applied then too. The students that fall in the middle of a bell curve will be best served when they have family involvement at home. High achievers get what they need. There are plenty of services targeted at students who struggle. She also says the more community members ask or allow government into their daily lives, the more things will become political.

Maria Marshall-Barnes is watching the program, said, The sad reality is this is happening at all of our local schools. SROs are beyond needed in the hallways of our schools. I concur with that. I 100% concur with that. Judah, if you want to get Bill McChesney, then I'll get you in on a three shot. Yes, it's been that way for years. The AP college track kids had their schedules built around band and orchestra. The other students had lesser electives. This was true when my kids were there in the early 2000s at Charlottesville High School. Judah Threeshot, I think you had some compelling questions we talked about in pre-production. Yeah, they may have changed. So my first is, of course, the pandemic severely affected kids, but I can't believe that, I mean, as others have noted, this has been going on in schools for

a long time. And so I wonder, you talk about, you know, two-thirds of your students, you know, being interested in learning, being there for an education. And the other third is is uh do you have a sense for where in their in their educational development they i i guess uh what's what's uh gave up uh term you know just is there apathy like what does school mean to them is this just an opportunity a filler for their day i mean i wouldn't think that that was something that was a learned behavior in high school. Somewhere along the line, whether it was kindergarten, elementary school, somewhere they either gave up,

they didn't think they could succeed, or they just had so much of that from their fellow students that they kind of just stopped going to school to learn and started, like you said, lying at the back of the class in a bookshelf, scrolling their phone, wandering the halls. As I said, do you have a sense where in the process they... Lost hope. The school system failed them? Given the brevity of my experience in public schools after 21 years overseas, I don't have the context to really talk about when these kids were lost. I think looking at issues like chronic absenteeism, though,

and I had probably 120 kids rostered across my five classes, and on any given day I'd probably see maybe 90 kids. And so you have a chronic absenteeism problem in some of these classes that sort of shows an indifference to education, but also a lack of accountability for the parents and guardians who used to be held accountable, again, via sort of law enforcement. I mean, there are Virginia laws about making sure minor kids go to school. And so I think there's a lot of stakeholders involved,

and I think they've all kind of dropped the ball. Just from, again, from my limited perspective, given the time I've been here in the States. Yeah, well, that leads me into a follow-up question. You're, as a teacher in Singapore and the other places that you had jobs, you talked about the administration, and I'm sure the parents as well, having a high bar that they wanted the teachers to live up to.

And is that part of what's missing in our school I mean you know there are you said at CHS you you got to you got to help out in other classrooms so you saw the other side you saw students that were doing well students that were you know in calm classes was the difference something similar where they have, perhaps not administration at CHS, I don't want to, but parents, other people in their lives who cared enough to set that bar high, not just for the students, for their children, but for the teachers as well? And I want to add some background to what he's saying. You helping out at other classes was not necessarily by choice.

He highlights in the book that we did not have enough substitutes. Substitute teachers when teachers were sick or out that day. So the teachers had to utilize their free period, were basically told to utilize their free period to fill in for these other teachers that were absent that day because the substitutes were not available. Correct. We would get emails that said it was our professional responsibility

to cover so-and-so's class at such-and-such a time. That's basically the professional guilt trip. Yeah. I mean, we were paid. We were compensated. And I think for me, I didn't always like to do it, but it was interesting to look at the contrast between what I was experiencing on a classroom level to what other teachers were because I substituted for choir and act and you

know drama AP classes business administrator business classes ESL classes and so in most cases they were pretty tame, you know. And the lesson plans that the teacher left were good, and the kids did what they were supposed to do, et cetera. Back to Judah's question, you know, I think there's the intrinsic value in learning when kids are just curious about the subject matter. And that drives

what they learn i think that that's a huge thing and not every kid loves every subject then there's the extrinsic stuff like um are your parents have high expectations for you does your teacher have a high expectations for you are you in a classroom where there is sort of this this common um drive to to succeed and compare your test scores with the kid next to you or your friend. So I think in some cases, you know, both are an issue. Where that comes from, I think is... That comes from home. It comes from home. It comes from home. Yeah.

It comes from home. But, like, we have a six-year-old, and I'm already seeing with our six-year-old a competitive drive in him. Yeah. And I say every night to him, you know, every night I talk to him. My wife is the consistent, calm rock of our family. And then I come in right before bedtime, and I end up wrestling with him or punching him or wind him up. She's like, dude, what are you doing? We're trying to go to sleep and start watching some Netflix. Don't wind up our kid.

As I'm leaving the room, I say to him, I love you. Be the best version of yourself every day. That comes from hearing that from your parents. Yeah. Not everybody has two parents at home. Not everybody has parents that are invested in their kids

as much as others. And so how do we support those kids? And that's when you get into this it-takes-a-village mentality. And I mentioned in the book, like, you know, maybe so much of school today is based on the assumption that every kid's going to go to a four-year college. Trade schools are great.

Plumbers make great money. Not everybody wants to go to a four-year university and sit in lecture halls. So where's the creativity, where is the innovation to sort of make kids intrinsically motivated by something that they find engaging? Like, we just, you know, again, I don't have all the answers. I have some ideas. I don't in any way think that I could necessarily put something together that's going to make sense tomorrow. But, you know, if you look historically, there have been all sorts of educational innovators that have gone into low socioeconomic communities and raised expectations, increased the accountability, improved the home-school partnership, and they have experienced you know great success so yeah we you know i think

ultimately you know maybe in some senses schools rest on their laurels and they do what's what's easiest not not what's best what have you seen and you're killing this interview we're an hour and change in here it's flown by here what have you seen with cell phones and social media and the impact of cell phones and social media on learning, on human connection and interaction? I mean, there's thought given to these cell phone bags where you put the cell phones in a bag that you don't have access to, provided by a third party to the schools. I think schools need to explain, particularly to parents. Not all schools have the cell phone problem, and I'll leave it at that. Well, that's one of those socio-emotional competencies,

is self-control, self-regulation. Plenty of adults have problems with it. You go to a restaurant and there's people on a date, they're both looking at their phone. I think schools, again, need to be the adult in the room. They need to make a good case for why cell phones are an obstacle to learning, communicate that effectively with the community, and make a good value decision based upon what's best for student learning. And phones are not.

Phones are the biggest distraction. I would say the biggest obstacle to student learning right now because if the school doesn't enforce the rules that they have regarding cell phone usage during class, then there's really nothing a teacher can do. We're told not to take the phones. That's just going to create a confrontation that we've seen on social media. We've seen it go violent.

Teachers have been struck across the country for trying to take kids' phones. So like any other rule and regulation that's not enforced, it's meaningless. Do you fear any backlash from the book? You know, maybe. I don't, you know, I'm new here. When we moved here in 2022, I didn't know anybody. And so that hasn't changed that much in a year plus, I guess I would, if people are offended by it, I would say, Hey, get ahold of

me. Let's talk about it. I I'm not a, I'm not an offensive person. Um, I'm not confrontational either, but I feel like given the experience I had last year, I had a unique opportunity from somebody that just kind of was plopped down in a U.S. public school. Without pretense, without past experience to jade your view. Yeah. And, you know, I don't come at this with any ill intent. Right.

I come at this as curious. As an educator. As an educator. Yeah. I'm curious. I want to better understand it. And I don't think any of the things that I'm advocating for in the book are sort of any groundbreaking, divisive things.

They're just things that should be part of the conversation. There are things that are part of the conversation, but more often than not, it's not teachers that are interjecting their opinions. It's politicians, it's school boards, it's pundits, it's the teachers' unions. It is people that are not sort of there day-to-day interacting with kids

and experiencing what's happening in the classroom. And again, there are issues all across the country, in Canada, in the UK. I mean, these are not unique dysfunctions to Charlottesville High. These are things that have happened recently, and I think the tide should kind of swing back and increase the accountability, raise expectations and give students more

choice. Kate Sharks in Ivy Virginia says this, my sister-in-law taught at a private Christian school and got several emails from parents daily. She now teaches in a public city school and cannot get more than a few parents at open houses and she almost is never emailed it's sad but if kids don't have parents holding them to expectations then they likely won't do it themselves it's well said yeah i'll close with uh obviously how folks can purchase your book um i want to put the cover of the book on screen so people can find it. I thought it was a fantastic read.

Judah read it as well. I don't know if you want to offer any of your thoughts on it. I mean, this is a book you can read in a sitting or two. It is a page turner. It's a short book. It's a book, but it's a short book, as I said in the acknowledgments. But the fact that, I'll even add some more background to this. The fact that we live in this community and a large portion of the book

is about the only high school in the city that we're doing business in and living around makes it even more compelling. It is worth your money, ladies and gentlemen. So, anything we're missing? Anything that should be out there before I ask you

how we can buy the book no I don't think so I think I've said you were fantastic dude again I this kind of thing is anxiety inducing to me I'm not here because I want to be a

I told you this prior I'm not trying to enter into the fray of the social warrior arena. Thank you. But yeah, this is one guy's perspective. Take it or leave it. It's on Amazon. It's a Kindle and paperback if you're interested.

I would appreciate your consideration. That's awesome. You can buy the book, guys, on Amazon. You got it on screen? Excellent, on Amazon. You got it on screen? Excellent. Excellent interview. Thank you, Kurt, for the time. For those that are watching that are asking, I see you asking, the interviews archive wherever you get your podcasting content. You can watch it start to finish. We archive all our shows on iloveseville.com if you want an easy access point to getting the content, iloveceville.com.

His name is Kurt R. Johnson, and his book is called Schooled, the Miseducation of an American Teacher. And I have a very strong feeling that this book is going to be quite popular in this central Virginia community. For Kurt and for Judah Wickower, my name is Jerry Miller, and that's the I Love Seville show on a Wednesday afternoon in downtown Charlottesville. So long, everybody. Take care. Thank you.