We spend a lot of time talking about what’s wrong with American education. The test scores. The ideology. The fact that half the kids graduating high school can’t read at grade level but can tell you all about systemic oppression and their preferred pronouns. But every once in a while, a story comes along that captures the full, glorious decay of the public school system in one single, horrifying video. This week, a substitute teacher was caught on camera twerking in a classroom full of students, allegedly groping a student, and then — when police showed up to arrest her — screaming “I won’t be killed” while being dragged out of the building like a contestant being removed from a reality show she was never supposed to be on.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what’s teaching your children. Not a dedicated professional who studied education and passed background checks and genuinely wants to shape young minds — a person who thinks a classroom is a nightclub and a student is a prop. But sure, tell us again how school choice is the real threat to public education.
The video — because of course there’s video, there’s always video now — spread across social media like wildfire. And it’s exactly as bad as you think. The substitute is dancing provocatively in front of students who look like they range from middle school to early high school age. Students are filming on their phones. Some are laughing. Some look uncomfortable. None of them look like they’re learning anything except that the adults in charge of their education have completely lost the plot.
Then it gets worse. Reports indicate the substitute allegedly groped a student. We’re not talking about an accidental brush in a crowded hallway. We’re talking about a deliberate physical violation of a child by the person who was supposed to be in a position of trust and authority. The same person who, minutes earlier, was performing dance moves that would get you kicked out of a PTA meeting.
When police arrived to make the arrest, the substitute didn’t go quietly. She screamed. She resisted. She yelled “I won’t be killed” — turning her own arrest for allegedly assaulting a minor into a performance piece about her own victimhood. Because that’s what we do now. We don’t take responsibility. We don’t face consequences with dignity. We make ourselves the victim, even when we’re the one who allegedly violated a child.
Parents in the district are demanding answers, and they should be. How did this person get hired? What was the vetting process? Was there a background check, or did they just check to make sure she had a pulse and could fog a mirror? Because the substitute teacher shortage in this country has gotten so bad that some districts have essentially dropped their standards to “are you a mammal who can be in a room with children without the building catching fire” — and apparently even that bar is too high.
The teachers’ unions, predictably, will try to distance themselves from this. “She was just a substitute,” they’ll say. “She wasn’t a real teacher.” And that’s technically true. But here’s the thing — she was in a classroom. She was in charge of students. She was the adult in the room, operating under the authority of the school system. The distinction between “substitute” and “real teacher” means absolutely nothing to the kid who got groped. It means nothing to the parents who sent their children to school that morning expecting them to learn math, not dodge a twerking predator.
This is the system that the education establishment tells us we must protect at all costs. This is the institution that gets more money per pupil than almost any other country on Earth and produces results that would embarrass a developing nation. This is the machine that fights school choice, fights charter schools, fights voucher programs, fights homeschooling — fights anything that might give parents the ability to pull their kids out of a building where the substitute teacher treats the classroom like a strip club.
Every time a story like this breaks, the same people rush to say it’s an isolated incident. One bad apple. Not representative of the system as a whole. And if it happened once, maybe they’d have a point. But it doesn’t happen once. It happens over and over and over. Teachers sleeping with students. Teachers pushing political ideology. Teachers who can’t pass basic competency tests in the subjects they’re supposed to teach. And now, teachers twerking on minors and screaming about being killed when the cops show up.
At some point, “isolated incidents” become a pattern. And a pattern becomes a culture. And a culture becomes an institution. And when the institution is responsible for educating 50 million American children, maybe — just maybe — we should let parents choose something different.
The arrest video is going to dominate social media for a few days. People will be outraged. Commentators will comment. And then we’ll move on to the next outrage, and the system will keep grinding along exactly as it has been, hiring whoever walks through the door and hoping for the best.
Meanwhile, parents who homeschool their kids get investigated. Parents who question school curricula get labeled domestic terrorists. Parents who want to use a voucher to send their kid to a school where the teachers don’t twerk get told they’re destroying public education.
We’re not destroying public education. Public education is destroying itself. We’re just finally getting it on camera.