A fairly popular (and apt) metaphor in public education is to be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. (Incidentally, if you type “rearranging” into Google with suggestions on, as of tonight, this precise phrase pops up as the 6th suggestion, with nearly 70,000 results.) There is usually no sympathy in it; it is just to say, This ship is sinking, and look at what the idiots are doing. But I think there is a more sympathetic understanding, too: here there is a desperation, or a sense that problems are severe, even dire, and that something must be done; but it is not at all clear what can be done; maybe the problems are in fact so profound and so fundamental that as individuals we are impotent against them. So we pick something, maybe somewhat arbitrarily, and we project importance onto it out of proportion with its real significance. It becomes a superstition. We say, This ship is sinking goddammit! For chrissake will nobody help me move this lounger? It might not always be about idiocy so much as impotent, foolish heroics.
As a school teacher in Mississippi, I heard in every room, in every hallway, a hundred times every day: Shirt-tails, shirt-tails, tuck in your shirt-tails, we will send you home, we will suspend you, shirt-tails.
Now that I’m a student most of the time, and a part-time tutor in a public high school in Santa Fe, every day it’s: IDs, ID badges, IDs out, get your IDs out, we will send you home, get your IDs out.
If they were lyrics, they’d be sung to the same tune.