Let the Fight Over Who Owns MAGA Begin!

On Tuesday and again yesterday, I posted stories about my experience at Holyoke High School in Holyoke, MA, where I came in as a substitute teacher and found myself confronting a classroom environment which was almost too toxic to be described. The school, which has been under state supervision for the last seven years, has a complete and total absence of even the slightest degree of order, discipline or anything which would allow even the most rudimentary teaching activities to occur.

The result is that the school has a graduating class each year in which more than half the students cannot read or write at a 10th-grade level, which means that at best they will be consigned to the lowest-paying, crummiest jobs for the remainder of their working lives. That is, if they ever get a job.

The City of Holyoke has an average annual household income which is 60% lower than the average household of the state of Massachusetts, and this school isn’t doing anything to help things change. At least not for a change to the better.

But the problems with public schooling in Holyoke shouldn’t alter the fact that as a society we must be wholly and completely committed to increasing literacy and learning skills across the board. I don’t understand how the government doesn’t classify lack of reading and writing skills to be as much or more of a…