Dear Michael Kirst

Daniel Speechly Argues for Teacher Independence

Dear Republic,

I guess it’s Vent Day at The Republic of Letters. Actually, maybe it’s Vent Week. If you need to vent about something, send a piece to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Vent” in the subject line. For our “Letters” series, Daniel Speechly writes to Michael Kirst of the California State Board of Education. ROL certainly has never heard of Michael Kirst, but, you know what, fuck that guy.

-ROL

DEAR MICHAEL KIRST

Dear Michael Kirst,

It’s difficult to argue against educational reform. It’s even more difficult to argue that teachers ought not be better prepared. Obviously, education benefits everyone. It’s a mantra that’s older than our republic. In fact, education is so important that its effects are regularly measured by economists who have agreed to classify the profession as a merit good. But they’re not the only ones who understand the old adage ‘Give a man a fish and he’ll be hungry in a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll never be hungry again’ and hell, he might even catch a few extra to sell at market along the way.

But in our day and age we might also consider whether teaching a man to write about a fishing expedition might help to fill his belly or whether inventing a better fishing pole might be a more worthy goal, unless of course the increased consumption caused by a sudden jump in the popularity of fishing were to cause further marine life depletion. What I’m saying is that there’s always another perspective, and that you, Michael Kirst, that is, you and your cohort of education specialists, ought to take these other perspectives into account before issuing opinions on how to improve education outcomes.

In the spring of 2025, in your position as former president of the California State Board of Education, you wrote an op-ed suggesting that California’s teachers were woefully underprepared. Then you put forward a solution. You proposed that certified teachers work toward earning micro credentials under the purview of a central body that would (pun very much intended) micro-manage one of California’s largest work forces. Your proposed policies won’t prepare teachers, won’t help students, and will ultimately lead to more of the same problems that already plague education.

The reason you are unaware of this, Mr. Kirst, is because you don’t have perspective. You represent the technocratic managerial class. And your op-ed makes it clear that you have their interests at heart. It’s clear that your primary concern is the maintenance of power for this group, and it’s obvious that you do so through governing bodies whom you wish to empower with additional responsibilities—responsibilities only tangentially related to improving education. I say this because your answer to what ails us is to further control teachers: to tighten the noose and rein in the leash. This would be a huge mistake.

I’m sure you’re aware that the California State Board of Education has had major implications for teachers, students, and parents as well as employers and even everyday Californians. And you should know better than anyone that those implications were largely negative. And you know this because you were the man in charge of the policies that led us to where we are now. You are responsible for all the attendant problems pointed out in your op-ed.

Because of your policies, education is in a death spiral. When teachers are told to empower students while simultaneously being asked to cede all authority to the likes of your cohort, what even is a teacher anymore? Are they mouthpieces for policy makers? Are they allowed free will? How do you expect teachers as proxies of the middle class to wield even the smallest bit of power in a beneficial manner when they are hemmed in by authoritarian education policy? Micro credentials like the ones you’ve proposed, would only weaken their power, diminish their supposed expertise, and prove to skeptical parents what they thought they already knew: teachers were never qualified in the first place.

Post-modern Persuasion

I must admit that you’re a hard man to argue with, Michael Kirst. Not because you make compelling arguments, but because you’ve come about your power through the obfuscation of intention, and you’ve done so through a practiced aversion to clear and precise language, allowing you to duck, dodge, and deflate arguments against what you’re doing. You’re in education. Therefore, you’re just trying to help, right? You may even believe it. But one thing about you is clear: in a state as democratic as California, where it was once believed that power ought to be diffuse (where citizens are allowed to make propositions to change law), you forward the opposite case in the guise of the term “stewardship.” By applying the hazy language of generalities, by which I mean the post-modern redefinition of what words actually mean for cheerful substitutes, you make allowance for simultaneous, contradictory claims. One is that teachers simply need help through stewarding: the polite form of gentle control absent the force of authority so clearly present in your former position of president. The CTC would merely help teachers. Your second claim, however, posits the insidious intention of what you really mean. You imply that California’s problems can only be solved from the top down, that is, with stewardship from above, forced upon educators without consent by a class of “education specialists,” who by their very nature as managers are divorced from the realities of teaching. Whether you’re aware of this use of language in your op-ed is a potentially contentious issue, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter. Such awareness would only make a difference if we were trying to determine where you sat on a range starting at stupidity and ending in deceit. You’re somewhere on the scale, but it’s not clear how far to either side. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’re a genuinely smart guy with answers to our biggest problems, in which case I implore you and everyone like you to lead by example. You can prove your merit by teaching at a title 1 school. You, and only you, can show us how it’s done. Commit to your profession. Be a teacher. Demonstrate intellect through action. Be an undercover boss.

I know, however, that this wouldn’t suit you. Good teachers need to be clear and direct. In contrast, your language practice is haphazard. It’s no fault of your own, it’s simply a feature of the discourse community to which you belong, that is, the community of education specialists: a group for whom it is nearly impossible to get a straight answer, a clear cut explanation, or a touch of logical alignment that suggests a consistent worldview. As an example of the logical inconsistency in education today, consider how teachers are told to empower students while simultaneously being disempowered by education boards. How can the disempowered empower others? Why is it expected that teachers should trust students when education specialists can’t even muster an ounce of trust in teachers? As interesting as they are, I can’t answer these questions except to say that interrogating them uncovers the fragility of current education policy. And I’m not here to answer these questions, I’m simply here to analyze your op-ed.

And what I noticed is this: after making your claim to steward, you state your true intention: “But we can take advantage of this division by increasing the CTC’s role.” And I commend you for making yourself clear, for it appears you finally make a direct statement. Rather than steward, you wish to empower your cohort. You even go so far as to use the language of military strategy—the very language of guerrilla warfare—to discuss how you would overthrow the current educational “regime” (your word, not mine). “Of course, this needs to be done carefully and deliberately” you add, using two hollow adverbs in place of any meaningful discussion of what you mean, suggesting that you don’t know, and pointing to the fact that like so many other specialists who have preceded you that you are shooting in the dark, identifying problems where none exist and finding solutions that leave all stakeholders not only unhappy but potentially worse off and definitely dis-empowered.

Because of your former position, you should know that more teachers than ever are quitting within the first four to five years of employment than ever before. Moreover, more students are more depressed as well. Might the two things be linked? Isn’t it possible that the standards you claim to support—standards which are higher than they were when I went to school in the 90s, and certainly higher than when you went to school in the 60s—isn’t it possible that these very standards are the reason why education is “broken” in California? Your policies have not only removed the ability of educators to make local choices, but have prevented good teachers from making decisions that best benefit their students. I ask you to imagine what would happen if your meetings were so controlled that you couldn’t risk addressing questions or going off script. What if the agenda were the minutes? What if the minutes had to be shared before the meeting, and what if any discrepancy from the minutes resulted in a write up? This is the level of madness that your policies create. If you want to understand what’s wrong with education, you must understand what it means to disempower.

What you and your cohort fail to realize is that teachers are professionals. Moreover, their education and certification stand for effectiveness in the classroom. If their certification didn’t prove this, then what would be the logic behind granting the CTC additional oversight over the failed education of California’s teachers? How can it be that additional bureaucratic processes would improve outcomes?

The only way to begin to improve education in America is to cede power to teachers. They should be allowed to adapt and devise curriculum as needed. They need to be trusted to do a good job. Your cohort needs to institute a policy of trust rather than control. Trust teachers to stay within community norms. Give teachers the authority to care. Support them in their mission to teach, and understand that, like those in any profession, experience breeds expertise. Therefore, a better and far simpler way to improve education would be to create incentives for teachers to remain in their profession. California is not only struggling to attract educators but to maintain them. Put power back in teachers’ hands and they will stay. Ultimately, teachers should be the ones who control efforts to improve education as they are the ones most likely to understand what needs improvement. You, on the other hand, have never taught in a public school, and by dent of your Harvard education have likely never interacted with the middle class in any meaningful capacity. Your cohort must realize that they have no practical answers to address the issues facing California. The impact of the bureaucratic state has already been felt far and wide, and the outcomes, as you so succinctly state in your op-ed, have been poor. What we need is not more control by an elite class of disconnected specialists. No, what we need is a democratic solution—one that would look to one of our largest educated workforce for answers: practicing teachers.

In sum, stronger stewardship should come from giving teachers a role that allows them to become stewards in the classroom. They need to be allowed to be stakeholders and take on all the attendant responsibility this entails rather than serve at the whim of dictatorial education boards, disconnected state legislators, and disaffected education specialists. California has enough problems caused by authoritarian government, and just like the woes facing California’s housing market, in which there are too few owners and too many renters, we need to work together to ensure that teachers can become stake-holding owners of their profession rather than a tenant class beholden to the institutions that seek to control them.

Daniel Speechly is the Academic Manager at a private language institute in Seoul, South Korea. His most recent publications appear in Litro Magazine UK, LIT Magazine at the New School, and Lit Mag News. You can find a full list of links to his writing at NFEscapism.com.