Dan Buck

Sunday

Dan Buck

The Jordan Neely Rorschach test

Most of those who follow the news have already seen the distressing video. A black man, Jordan Neely, walked onto a New York subway train screaming obscenities and ranting about his own destitution. Another passenger, a former Marine called Daniel Penny, came up behind him, took him to the ground and placed him into a chokehold. Neely lost consciousness and died. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist could not create a better scenario that perfectly exemplifies everyone’s societal meta-narratives, a Rorschach test onto which we can map our assumptions and biases. It resembles a “what do you see? Two women or a wine glass?” kind of picture. Is this a black man, destroyed and choked by oppression, or the inevitable result of societal decay?

jordan neely

Wednesday

Dan Buck

Why I left public education for a Christian school

Another school year has begun. It's another year that I’m grateful to have left public education. From the outside, it doesn’t make much sense for me to have left. I had a good reputation in my district among staff, students, and administration. The pay at public schools is markedly better. And being a private school teacher makes you something of an outcast among teacher colleagues — never quite “one of us.” I did not leave because of the standard accusation — that I couldn’t “handle it.” In many ways, my private school jobs have been far more difficult than my public school one.

Wednesday

Dan Buck

Banning Critical Race Theory in schools isn’t enough

While pundits bicker about whether bills targeting critical race theory in schools are ethical or constitutional, an equally important question is whether they’re effective. While such legislation is a workable stopgap to loathsome practices like affinity groups, it can only work as a temporary measure. CRT is manifested not primarily as a set of explicit ideas to be taught like the freezing point of water or the causes of World War Two. Rather, it’s a philosophy that informs the instruction, curriculum, and policies of various districts. We cannot outright ban CRT from our schools anymore than we can ban the influence of philosopher John Dewey. When the culprit is a belief system, bans are the wrong tool.

critical race theory