From Phonics to Profiteering: The Failure of the K12 Education System

Welcome to Deep Dives in the Shallow End, where host Donovan drags the American K–12 education system out behind the gym and gives it the wedgie it so richly deserves. In From Phonics to Profiteering, we explore how a public good became a private grift—ripping through the cobwebbed history, savage inequalities, test-mania, teacher burnout, corporate vultures, and tech-fueled delusions that turned classrooms into pressure cookers and profit centers.

It’s a wild, weird, and wickedly researched takedown filled with dark comedy, uncomfortable truths, and the occasional emotional support peacock. So sharpen your pencils—metaphorically, of course—and prepare to get schooled.

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Transcript

Recording from the underfunded AV closet of a public school that still thinks Windows XP is bleeding-edge technology, it's your host, Donovan.

Hey there and welcome to Deep Dives in the Shallow End—where we dissect modern life’s twisted institutions with the precision of a disinterested substitute teacher and the warmth of a fluorescent-lit classroom built entirely out of cinder blocks and broken dreams. I’m your not-so-expert host, Donovan and today’s subject?

The American K-12 education system: a masterpiece of mismanagement, where young minds are shaped like factory widgets and creativity is detained for violating the dress code. This is the place where idealism goes to get bullied, where the promise of opportunity is photocopied until it’s illegible, and where the only thing higher than the dropout rate is the standardized test-induced cortisol level of an eighth grader who forgot their No. 2 pencil.

Now, some of you may be thinking: “But Donovan, I went to public school and I turned out fine.” First of all, no, you didn’t. You just have access to the finest psychotropic drugs on the market now — assuming your well insured and if you’re listening to this that’s a tossup. And second, fine isn’t the bar, my friend. Fine is what your wife, with whom you cohabitate in livable hatred, flattly says when you ask how her day was. We’re not talking about individual survival here—we’re talking about systemic rot.

So we’re going to unbox this educational horror show like it’s a YouTube haul video—except instead of knockoff cosmetics, we’re pulling out inequality, burnout, underfunding, and the haunting realization that we’ve built an entire schooling system on the foundation of 19th-century obedience drills and Orwellian bureaucracy.

So grab your Trapper Keeper, your expired cafeteria milk, and whatever’s left of your childhood enthusiasm. It’s time to see why American education is less a ladder to success and more a hamster wheel set on fire. Let’s dive in.

Let’s rewind. Way back. To the 1800s. Before bussing, before juice boxes, before the cruel lie of “fun worksheets.” Back to Horace Mann—the father of American public education and a man who looked at the rigid Prussian model of schooling and said, “Yes, please. Let’s do that, but add more guilt.” Like North Korea meets Catholicism.

The Prussian model wasn’t about critical thinking. It was about producing compliant little cogs for the machinery of empire. And that blueprint? We just Xeroxed it and built our system on top of it. Rows of desks. Bells dictating your every move like a Pavlovian experiment gone horrible right. A hierarchical structure designed to prepare you for life in a factory, or if you’re lucky, middle management purgatory.

This isn’t education—it’s academic cosplay. We are still training students for an economy that no longer exists, using a pedagogy designed by people who thought bloodletting, thistleweed, and what turned out to be pure speed to be a solid treatment plan for whatever ails ya.

Standardized testing? That's not assessment. That’s ritual humiliation via Scantron. It measures how well you bubble in a circle under duress—not how well you think, argue, create, or imagine. Imagine if we tested swimmers by how still they can float while being pelted with rocks and shouted at by a man named Coach Pearson who smells like salami and has that gross white stuff in the corners of his mouth. Aww, now you got me thinking about gramps. Miss ya, pee-pa!

And then there’s the   of the meritocracy—where every kid gets a “fair shot,” as long as their zip code comes with robust property taxes, a Whole Foods nearby, and at least two parents who know what FAFSA stands for. Because nothing says equal opportunity like a kid who enters a school that has the same lockdown procedures as Rikers, but with fewer functioning toilets competing with another whose school has a planetarium, three anxiety therapists, and a grant for emotional support India-blue peacocks –  only the finest of the peafowl for our trembling kids – don’t be trying to sneak in a Javanese peahen, those are for the kids in title 5 schools.

We don’t educate. We sort. The American school system is a sorting hat with a broken algorithm, separating children not by talent or curiosity but by race, income, parental involvement, and whether or not your school’s vending machine budget was blown on iPads or expired Fritos.

And somehow we call this system neutral—objective—when it was built like a rigged carnival game from the start. You can’t “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” if you were never given boots and the kid next to you is wearing Air Jordans made of generational wealth and guilt-free privilege.

If you want to understand the brokenness of American education, don’t look at the kids. Look at the ledger.

American schools are funded through a deliciously regressive cocktail of local property taxes, state funds, and federal scraps. It’s a system so backward that it rewards wealth with more wealth and punishes poverty with dry-erase markers that stopped working three presidents ago.

Let’s put it plainly: your zip code is your destiny. In places like Scarsdale, New York, per-pupil spending can hit upwards of \$30,000. In Camden, New Jersey? Closer to \$12,000—and that’s on a good day, assuming the roof didn’t collapse again and eat half the maintenance budget. And let’s not forget about Mississippi, where public schools rank just above “makeshift tree fort with a substitute teacher made of scrapple.”

This is not just inequality—it’s state-sanctioned educational gerrymandering. The rich get AP Latin and robotics labs. The poor get asbestos and Chromebooks that wheeze when you open Google Docs. One school’s “learning environment” is a light-drenched atrium with ergonomic desks. Another’s is a glorified fallout shelter where every book has a mold problem and a racial slur carved into the back cover.

And when districts try to level the playing field? They get hit with the classic American response: lawsuits and dog-whistles. “School choice” becomes the new euphemism for pulling resources out of the public system entirely and flinging them toward private charters, religious schools, or some kid’s basement where a YouTube entrepreneur promises to teach French through Fortnite mods.

Meanwhile, teachers in underfunded districts are expected to work miracles with expired glue sticks, broken copiers, and a Target gift card they got from a parent who couldn’t afford groceries that week. They’re magicians without wands—unless you count the whiteboard marker they melted into a shiv for when the rats get too bold.

In the wealthiest districts, students debate Kantian ethics while sipping cucumber water from a compostable cup. In the poorest, a kid gets suspended for wearing a hoodie because it “disrupts the learning environment”—which, to be fair, consists of flickering lights and the sound of someone crying in the bathroom. Ahh, a magical place, highschool.

We tell ourselves that education is the great equalizer. But this system was built with a level and ruler made entirely out of privilege. And every time someone suggests redistributing funds to ensure every child gets a decent shot? A thousand NIMBYs scream into the void about “neighborhood character” and property values, as if kindergarteners were trying to install a meth lab, and spraypaint over the HOA bylaws instead of asking for a full set of alphabet blocks that don’t double as tetanus delivery systems. It’s redlining with a hot new, seasonally appropriate outfit — fewer hoods, more yoga pants and Nextdoor forums.

This is a country that will spend \$900 billion on defense, but won’t buy a class set of novels unless the teacher hosts a GoFundMe. And even then, it better be “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Of Mice and Men” because the school board doesn’t want to upset anyone with new ideas or minority protagonists.

You want to know why the system feels rigged? Because it is. And the people who could fix it are too busy arguing about whether the children are being taught too much Marxism and not enough cursive.

Let’s talk about the people actually trying to hold this crumbling chalk-dust kingdom together: teachers. Or, as they’re known in government budgets and school board meetings, “cost centers with a pulse.”

Being a teacher in America today is like being a front-line medic in a war that no one acknowledges is happening. Except your helmet is a reusable coffee cup, your flak jacket is a cardigan from Old Navy, and the closest thing you have to backup is Janice from the library, who is armed with nothing more than a taser and a pretty wicked case of sciatica — and, frankly, I’m not sure how much I can depend on her. She’s still grumbling about the Brown v Board of Education decision.

These are the people shaping the minds of the next generation while being paid less than the guy who stocks the energy drink machine in the cafeteria. And no disrespect to Austin, King of the Monster Ultra Zero delivery route—but perhaps someone teaching 35 teenagers about how to cite sources and not join a product-based cult of taking sports to the extreme, deserves better than a 17-year-old Hyundai and a tote bag full of  receipts that are waiting to be reimbursed like me waiting for Godot.

The average public school teacher salary in 2023 was \$66,000. Which sounds livable until you subtract out-of-pocket classroom expenses, union dues (should you be lucky enough to be part of one), therapy co-pays, and the entire bottle of what I call Irish Pepto (just add whisky) required to teach during an active shooter drill. Not to mention the fact that, thanks to inflation, \$66K now buys you roughly one-third of a garage in one of the sketchier parts of Barstow.

But sure, they get summers off—if you ignore the mandatory trainings, second jobs, and low\...-to-high grade substance abuse. There’s no beachside margarita, only a stack of lesson plans, a broken copier, and a migraine that smells like burning toast, followed by a few months of physical therapy to get that right side working before back to school night.

And burnout? Oh, burnout is the new baseline. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 44% of K-12 teachers reported feeling “very often”-to-“Always" burned out, which, oddly enough, also followed exactly with the response to “how often are you crying in the shower?” That's not a warning sign, that’s the entire building on fire while the superintendent plays the fiddle and sends another district-wide email about “self-care.”

We expect teachers to be educators, counselors, tech support, referees, social workers, and—increasingly—bulletproof. But god forbid they ask for a raise. Because suddenly, they're greedy Marxists trying to indoctrinate your kids with radical leftist ideas like… geography, physics, or...empathy.

We’ve created a system where teachers are one broken HVAC unit away from a complete psychological collapse, and we still have the gall to wonder why there’s a staffing shortage. It’s not a mystery. It’s just basic math. You can’t keep asking people to pour from an empty cup—especially when that cup was repurposed from last year’s PTO bake sale and has a crack labeled “Hope.”

Let’s talk about standardized testing—the sacred cow of American education, except this cow is riddled with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, bloated with bureaucracy, and has been milked so hard it’s started to lactate pure mediocrity.

In theory, testing is supposed to measure knowledge. In practice, it measures how well a kid can endure boredom, pressure, and fluorescent lighting for seven hours straight without gnawing through their own pencil. It’s academic hazing disguised as progress.

Thanks to No Child Left Behind and its overachieving cousin Race to the Top, we turned schools into test prep factories. The curriculum narrows, creativity gets suffocated under a weighted blanket of rubrics, and teachers are forced to spend more time bubbling in practice sheets than building critical thinking skills. It’s like we’re trying to solve the education crisis with paper, pencil, and a prayer.

We don’t assess. We interrogate. These tests don’t just evaluate—they punish. Fall below a benchmark? Your school gets defunded. Your teacher gets dinged. You, the 9-year-old who panicked and filled in the wrong bubble, now have a permanent record that says you’re academically “at-risk.” Welcome to institutionalized anxiety, brought to you by Pearson Education and the letter F.

And for what? Multiple-choice questions about reading passages no one wants to read and math problems that make IKEA instruction manuals look intuitive. Real life isn’t a Scantron. Unless, of course, your future job is to sit in silence, fear authority, and follow meaningless instructions to the letter—so, congrats, you’re already qualified to work middle management in a failing regional bank — or run the IRS!

Even worse, standardized tests pretend to be objective while being culturally loaded minefields. Questions regularly favor students from wealthier, whiter backgrounds. If your home library consists of three church bulletins and a coupon drawer, good luck understanding the context behind a story about a sailboat regatta or how to interpret the emotional subtext of a hedgehog in a tea shop.

Teachers know this. Students feel this. Parents suspect this. But politicians and testing companies? They’re still huffing the fumes of 1990s ed-reform Kool-Aid while cashing checks and quoting data like it’s gospel.

What we end up with is an education system that worships the measurable and ignores the meaningful. A child’s worth distilled into percentile rankings and bar graphs. It’s dehumanizing, it’s demoralizing, and it’s deeply, tragically American, and it should only happen at home between consenting adults.

But hey, at least it prepares them for adult life—specifically the part where you have to smile through panic, pretend to understand what’s going on, and hope no one notices that you’re slowly disassociating into the carpet pattern.

Ah yes, the pandemic—when the entire education system got tossed into the deep end of the digital pool without floaties, and half the kids forgot how to swim. Or speak. Or where to put the prepositions at.

Remote learning was billed as a solution. What it became was an experiment in educational necromancy: trying to resurrect engagement through a Zoom screen while students slowly dissolved into feral gremlins with ring lights. Teachers became unpaid IT support for glitchy platforms, parents were promoted to involuntary co-teachers, and children were left to their own devices—literally and figuratively.

EdTech companies saw an opportunity and descended like vultures to a fresh kill. Google Classroom, Canvas, Zoom, Kahoot—it was the Hunger Games of virtual learning platforms, and while I can’t say who won, I know who didn’t -- the students, who now associate the phrase “you’re muted” with a Pavlovian urge to fake a seizure.

And the digital divide? It didn’t just become visible—it became a yawning chasm of Grand Canyonian proportions. Some kids had iPads, AirPods, and tech-literate parents who knew how to turn a PDF into a life lesson. Others had a cracked Android, a dial-up connection, and a mom trying to Zoom from the kitchen while keeping her three other kids from lighting the curtains ablaze.

The result was predictable: massive “learning loss,” a term coined by policymakers to describe what happens when kids stop pretending to care. But what they call learning loss was really just the great reveal—that the system was held together with duct tape and kids-safe glue, so you know, not the fun kind, long before COVID showed up and sneezed on it.

We called it “resilience.” We called it “adaptation.” What it really was? Educational triage. And like most American triage, it was uneven, underfunded, and quietly outsourced to a for-profit contractor run by some elite’s shady brother-in-law.

And let’s not forget the rise of surveillance software—programs like GoGuardian and Proctorio (which sounds more fun than it should) that transformed school-issued laptops into digital panopticons. Students were watched, tracked, and flagged for “suspicious behavior” like blinking too fast or daring to look away from their screen for more than 0.2 seconds. Nothing screams “healthy learning environment” like being treated like a criminal while trying to spell “photosynthesis.” I’m thinking they weren’t paying attention in their class on the Ludovico Technique — back to the beginning!

We didn't innovate. We panicked. And in that panic, we built a school system on top of a tech stack that was never designed for empathy, nuance, or human development—just productivity metrics and ad space.

The long-term fallout? TBD. But if you’re wondering whether kids bounced back, just ask the 14-year-old who answers every question with a TikTok soundbite and thinks MLA formatting is a microaggression.

We tried to upgrade the system. What we did instead was glitch the firmware of an entire generation.

If you’ve made it this far, perhaps you are asking yourself in poor Latin, cui chaz bono? As mentioned before, it ain’t the chillins.

This is where from, stage right, enter the grifters. The consultants. The tech bros. The hedge fund-backed charter networks with names like *FutureSpark* or *Ascendancy Prep* that sound more like cults or experimental skincare lines that don’t offer a, let’s say, caramel palette . These are the winners of the modern education economy—the ones who figured out that if you slap the word “innovation” on a spreadsheet, you can siphon off public money with all the elegance of a wet-vac sucking nickels out of a storm drain.

Charter schools were sold to the public as a panacea: less red tape, more flexibility, better outcomes. What many turned out to be were loosely regulated cash cows where “student-centered” often means “teacher-optional” and “data-driven” translates to “test scores or bust.” It’s the same kind of structural flexibility I use towards my diabetes care when I remember to give myself my insulin shot — Daddy deserves a sweet treat!

And then there’s the school voucher movement, which is essentially a gift card for white flight. It lets parents funnel public education dollars into private and religious schools, including some that teach dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark and that cursive handwriting is a sacred covenant. Meanwhile, public schools are left to rot like an old sandwich forgotten at the bottom of capitalism’s backpack.

Testing companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill have also made a killing, literally designing the tests and then selling the textbooks that “prepare” students for them. It’s a closed loop of pedagogical profiteering. If this were a movie, it’d be banned for having too on-the-nose a villain arc. It would be like if Taco Bell also sold their own line of anti-diarrheal — God I love vertical integration!

Even the tutoring apps, EdTech platforms, and slick new “micro-school” startups aren’t immune. These Silicon Valley saviors promise personalized, scalable, disruption-ready learning ecosystems—translation: we replaced your teacher with an iPad, and it’s still giving 404 errors.

But the cruelest part? This isn’t even hidden. The privatization of public education is happening in broad daylight. It’s all very legal. Very bipartisan. And very, very profitable—just not for anyone who actually works in or attends most schools.

Because here’s the thing: public education is a \$700 billion industry. That’s a lot of zeroes. And anytime there are that many zeroes, vultures will circle, consultants will spawn, and someone in a Patagonia vest will whisper in creepy extasy, “We could optimize this.”

The result? A system increasingly built not for students, but for shareholders. And the children? They’re just data points on a PowerPoint presentation, shuffled around to justify the next round of layoffs, policy pivots, or bonus packages.

So if you’ve been wondering why nothing ever seems to get fixed—it’s because someone, somewhere, is getting rich off the dysfunction. And they’re betting that you’re too exhausted, overworked, and under-informed to notice. And if you do, well, good luck getting your rag-tag group of haggard teachers from the island of misfit toys to work against a group of attorneys and lobbyists in Armani suits (are those still popular or am I just channeling Gordon Gekko too much?) 

So here we are. End of the day. Bells ringing. Desks empty. The phantom hum of a projector still lingering in the air like the scent of adolescents who never learned that Axe body spray is both gross and not intended to be used as though they were fighting off stentch before their annual shower like one of the medieval peasantry.

We’ve walked through the industrial-age roots, the budgetary hunger games, the burnout, the bureaucracy, the testing rituals, the digital nightmares, and the corporate colonization of a system allegedly built for children. And still, we pretend it’s working.

Politicians will tell you that education is a top priority. And then they’ll turn around and approve another round of budget cuts while trotting out phrases like “parental rights” and “back to basics,” which roughly translate to “we don’t want kids learning anything that might upset their grandparents’ firm beliefs on phrenology.”

The right blames teachers for being too woke. The left blames the right for gutting funding. The kids? They’re just trying to figure out what a fax machine is and why gym class not only feels like a punishment for existing and how they can be forced to endure communal showers that leave them dirtier than when they walked in.

And yet, despite everything, despite all the rot and the rancid horse-glue and the motivational posters peeling off the cinderblock walls—there are still moments. A teacher who makes you feel seen. A class project that makes you feel smart, in spite of the cold, hard facts. A field trip that makes you feel alive (like when my 6th grade class toured the local Tajin packaging plant — does life get any better? I always loved field trip lunches because I knew I would get a king-sized bag of peanut M&Ms — thanks mom, sure I have diabetes, but its about the journey, not the destination) So, yeah, there are little flashes of light in a system that otherwise lurks in the darkness and thrives on trauma response.

Maybe the system’s not broken. Maybe it was built this way. To sort. To divide. To fail in all the right directions. But the cracks let the light in—or so I’m told by a poster in the counselor’s office next to the one about vape addiction.

Here’s what I know: we can’t fix it until we stop pretending it’s okay. Until we stop clapping for the band-aids and calling them solutions. And while grit is an important quality, we have to stop acting like its a perfect substitute for equity.

Because kids don’t need more testing. They need trust. They don’t need more tech. They need time. They don’t need optimized. They need actualized.

And if that sounds radical, then I just came up with this new concept called human dignity and it is going to rock your world.

So, my dear listeners, mostly composed of family members and close friends, keep your pencils sharpened, your critical thinking sharper, and to my fellow teachers: please stop calling your students kiddos, it’s obnoxious. Better yet, stop calling the parents of your kiddos “Mom” and/or “Dad" when you have meetings with them — it’s weird and off-putting. 

I want to give a special thanks to the ghost of John Dewey, Catherine Beecher, and the custodial staff of my consciousness, you’re the real heroes. And to that that one teacher who let me eat lunch in her classroom so I wouldn’t have to be berated with homophobic slurs because I didn’t like football, sorry to hear about your husband, but, silver linings, I heard he was well insured. And let’s face it, he loaded the dishwasher incorrectly anyway.

Until next time, take care of yourselves, and others. Buy your kids’ teachers a bottle of Two Buck Chuck (they’ve both earned and need it), and If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe, leave a rating, or carve my name into a desk with a protractor. And if you didn’t like it, remember: this is just a standardized test and your opinion will not be scored.