What happened yesterday at a high school in my district should shock all people.

But what should shock people even more is that this is becoming a more and more common occurrence in which students physically confront educators and school officials who are performing their duties.

A video of the incident went viral almost immediately. Students at my school were viewing it by the end of the school day and sharing with others. Posts about it on social media were almost as immediate.

And then many people weighed in with both skewed and open-minded comments. Of course, it can be seized upon for electioneering purposes, especially here in North Carolina where the GOP candidate for governor has harked on about school discipline and the same party’s candidate for state superintendent has called for classroom cameras.

Here’s Michele Morrow’s tweet:

Funny that the person who calls for “penalties for assault” has been known to call for “assault” herself.

In other comments on social media between 2019 and 2021 reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Morrow made disturbing suggestions about executing prominent Democrats for treason, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Schumer and other prominent people such as Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.

“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” she wrote in a tweet from May 2020, responding to a user sharing a conspiracy theory who suggested sending Obama to prison at Guantanamo Bay. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”

In another post in May 2020, she responded to a fake Time Magazine cover that featured art of Obama in an electric chair asking if he should be executed.

Morrow is seizing the moment for political gain. I have as much faith in her keeping schools safe for teachers as I have faith in letting an arsonist loose in a drought-ridden forest with lots of matches and gasoline to play with and expecting all to be fine.

If you have seen the video, then you might be amazed at the composure of the teacher who remained calm and made no moves toward the student. If you have not seen the video, the student slapped the teacher twice while communicating threats.

As a teacher of 25 years, the number of these types of assaults has increased dramatically in recent years and the amount of verbal antagonism that some students display toward teachers and other students alike keeps growing along with culture wars over parental rights and baseless claims about social and emotional indoctrination (which Morrow wants to continually stoke).

Having to defend oneself as a teacher from any assault should not ever be in the job description for any educator. But it is becoming more normalized and unfortunately expected and in too many instances the responsibility seems to focused on schools and teachers.

It’s easy to point fingers at others when trying to ascertain responsibility. Morrow and Mark Robinson have built campaigns blaming the public school system. Maybe they need to spend more time in public schools wearing the shoes of teachers and administrators.

But they won’t. The experience would probably go against their narratives.

Whether you agree that a student videoed and shared a post of the incident, it does provide a great opportunity to reflect on what really happens in schools and what we as a state are doing to support the success of public schools.

What that video really did was show people what can happen in a hypervigilant environment like an overcrowded high school classroom in a public school system which is under- resourced in a state that sits on billions in “reserves” and continues to lower corporate taxes while putting more responsibility on local school systems to fund mandates.

What that video did was confirm the decision of many potential teachers to look for a job elsewhere when they realize the pay and the support teachers get now is not conducive for making teaching a career.

What that video really did was to show people that teaching involves so much more than what so many think it is.

What that video really did was to give evidence that the answer to improve schools in the eyes of the public like putting more money to vouchers and performance pay for teachers are horrible plans of action when nothing is being done to confront the very factors that drive the undercurrents of school culture.

What that video really did was reaffirm that the LEANDRO court decision needs to be honored because of all the different factors it addresses that in big and small qualitative ways would improve conditions for students and teachers in ALL schools like mental health and other proven interventions that could have helped prevent this incident.

The very same day this attack happened, an op-ed from the BBC was published.

It talks about “veterans, firefighters, health workers and TEACHERS.”

Here are some quotes that directly cited teaching.

In one study, the more participants felt educators were altruistic, the less opposition they had to a theoretical policy that cut teachers’ pay.

The researchers’ final experiments studied the participants’ opposition to policies that would harm workers’ rights. Would the hero label reduce or increase people’s outrage at news of teachers’ pay cuts, for example? To find out, the psychologists provided text detailing a policy to cut schools’ budgets, and then asked them to declare their attitude on a scale of one (strongly oppose) to seven (strongly support). In some cases, the text was accompanied by a cartoon image of teachers dressed in superhero costumes; in others, they simply saw the plain text.

You might expect that the natural respect we hold for heroes would reduce support for the pay cuts – but this was not the case. Thanks, apparently, to the associations with selfless altruism, the participants tended to show less opposition to the policy when they saw the picture of the teachers in the capes. “It’s brutally ironic,” says Stanley. “Because of our veneration, we’re more tolerant of them being treated badly.”

It’s like the British Broadcasting Company was writing specifically about North Carolina, a state that has not treated teachers well.

And North Carolina is a one-of-a-kind state; it has the lowest legal minimum wage, no collective bargaining rights, loosely regulated vouchers and charter school expansion, and a school performance grading system that measures achievement over growth. And there is not another state that has a lower state corporate flat tax. 

People like Morrow and Robinson want to rail against the teachers’ union here and accuse teachers of indoctrination.

Hell, if I could indoctrinate my students as well as Morrow says I can, then I would have them always turn in their assignments on time, keep their phones in their pockets during class, and not have students vaping continuously throughout the school day.

But incidents like what happened in Winston-Salem yesterday must be addressed with teachers at the discussion table. And their words must be heeded.

Or there won’t be teachers there to even have at the table.