No Love Among the Ruins

This is the final in a multipart series.

I did not stay for Year 5.  I told the principal exactly what I thought of him and slammed the door behind me.

The school had become a total wreck.  Completely unrecognizable from the place I had fallen in love with just a few short years prior.  The few others who remained and cared left as well, including the assistant principal and the experienced teachers who were not close to retirement.  The most experienced teacher in the school left to become a car salesman!  The art teacher became a stay-at-home mom.  I do what I do.

What follows is hearsay.  I still tutor some students who attend the school.  Their stories, and those of their parents are depressing to say the least.

• The French teacher is no longer allowed to teach.  He is forced to use sub-par language teaching software in all his classes.  This teacher is a native French speaker who knows nothing about computers and loathes them.
• I was replaced by a lady who knows nothing about teaching music.  She's a singer who chooses truly awful repertoire, and has no budget because the dreck she gives her students is in the public domain.  My students tell me what they are learning in class.  All of it is developmentally inappropriate, and contrary to the way humans learn music.
• A mother saw my copy of Story of the World in my trunk and asked me about it.  When I explained that it was history written specifically for children, she told me about her attempts to fill in the gaps in her daughter's education.  Gaps like history and writing. 
• The art teacher told me the school was redesigning their curriculum based on Understanding by Design by Wiggins & McTighe.  This mess of a book is the antithesis of the founder's educational philosophy and vision.  It is the apex of illogical thought and educational fad.
• One client (who has since left the school) was forced to hire a tutor because the school failed to teach his son to read.

Looking back on it now, years after the fact, makes me sad.  An oasis in the vast educational desert choked with sand all due to the incompetence and machinations of one small despot.

The fish indeed rots from the head.