Class Is in Session: Yertle the Turtle

My sibling reads my columns. They like them and occasionally comment on specific columns. They sent me an e-mail recently with a story about student discipline, asking the question, “When did student behavior become the school’s responsibility, not the parent’s?” It reminded me of all things about the story of Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss. Published in 1950, it is a story about Yertle, the king of turtles, and how quickly you can go from the top of the heap to sitting in the mud.

Yertle was the king of the turtles in the pond he lived in. He decided that the stone that served as his throne wasn’t big enough and demanded that the other turtles in the pond stack themselves so he could sit higher and see more. They do, and Yertle marvels at what he thinks he now rules. However, the stacked turtles are in pain because of the weight of each turtle above them.

The turtle at the very bottom, named Mack, is bearing the weight of all of the turtles and asks Yertle for a respite. Yertle tells him to be quiet. Yertle commands more and more turtles to stack themselves so he can see higher and higher, even though the weight of all those turtles is causing extreme pain to the turtles on the bottom, especially Mack, who asks again for a break. Yertle yells at him to be quiet.

Yertle sees the moon rising and wants to be able to reach it by stacking even more turtles for him to sit on. Before that can happen, Mack is done. He burps, destroys the turtle throne, and Yertle winds up in the water, now “King of the Mud.” The moral of the story: do not treat those who work for you too badly, or you will regret it when they leave and your “empire” crumbles into dust.

The public school system is the way it is partially because the teachers allow it. The teachers are the turtles in the story. They allow themselves to be used and abused, to be guilted into doing things that are not healthy or helpful to anyone, because it looks good.

The administrators are Yertle, and I don’t mean only the principals and vice principals. When I say administrators, I mean the people sitting in office buildings miles from any school, in nice, comfortable offices, making twice that of any teacher. They shuffle papers and justify their jobs in every way possible. They make the curriculum decisions, the testing decisions, and all the “important” decisions but take none of the blame.

If parents question the testing practices or the curriculum being taught, they’re not talking to the person making the choices; they’re talking to the people who do not control the choices: the teachers. Should any complaints be heard, just like Yertle, the administrators tell the teachers to stop complaining. Eventually, the teachers will have had enough and quit, leaving the administrators scrambling for other teachers to take their places.

That’s what’s happening today. Everything is dumped on the teachers, the people who control almost nothing regarding the materials they’re supposed to be using. Yet it’s all their fault when the students don’t meet the right benchmarks or when too many students fail. There is no help, no support. Just constant criticism. Then, when teachers quit, the administrators are surprised and claim they have no idea why so many teachers are leaving the system.

Hiring teachers is not a problem; retaining them is. Approximately 44% of K-12 teachers leave within the first five years, citing burnout and lack of administrative support. To put it another way, seven in ten teachers leave within five years, according to a 2025 survey from the Center for American Progress. Look at that: SEVEN in TEN teachers leave within five years. I did. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Even today, 20-plus years later, I still have acid reflux problems that I can trace back to the classroom. It makes me wonder how much more my health would have suffered if I had stayed.

This is what’s known as a retention cliff. Most of the time, money and effort put in by people wanting to be a teacher, and by school districts wanting to hire teachers, is wasted. Why? Because the people running the system don’t care. Why should they? What incentive do they have to care about the very people who make the system run? None. Just like Yertle demanding that more and more turtles stack on top of each other so he can see higher and higher, the people running the system just look for more people to throw into the system.

Had I stayed another year, would things have gotten better for me? Supposedly teachers who make it to the sixth year and beyond stay longer — ten or fifteen years. I wasn’t about to find out. When you are in physical and mental pain almost every day, you lose what interest you had in the job. When I left, one of the other teachers in my department, who had made it past the five-year cliff, muttered about chasing away teachers because no one can be bothered to support them. She was right. When everything is your fault, what does it matter what you do?

After the principal who hated me and everyone else in the school left, a woman was hired to be principal. I think she lasted three years and then went off to sell Mary Kay cosmetics. I’m completely serious. The work environment was so toxic that she’d rather sell cosmetics than remain in the job she had spent years training for.

I say this because one day she called about 100 teachers into a mini auditorium in the school. We were called in because our failure rate was higher than the district average, and we were made to explain ourselves. We had to write down why our failure rate was so high. No problem, right? Just explain that the failure rate was because some students simply refused to do the work. Easy, but no.

The fact that students didn’t do the work was not allowed as an explanation. Obviously, it was the teacher’s fault that the students didn’t do the work. Somehow, the teacher must not have made the lesson interesting enough for the students. They didn’t show how important the lesson was. They didn’t impress upon the students how the lesson would determine their grade for the class. And on and on and on.

The gentleman sitting next to me, who also taught ninth grade English, was from Nigeria. He had been a soccer player when he was younger but decided he wanted to be a teacher in the U.S. It was his first year in teaching. He was open-mouthed at what he was being asked to do. He wrote down on a piece of paper: “My students fail because they refuse to work.” He handed it to the principal and left. I followed his lead. What was the school district going to do? Fire me?

Folks, this was in 2002. It’s only gotten worse. With some exceptions, students are exempted from acting like human beings. Nothing is their fault. NOTHING. The example my sibling sent me involved the daughter of a friend. The daughter was a first-year kindergarten teacher at an older elementary school in the district, by no means run-down or impoverished. In the kindergarten class, there were four boys who terrorized the entire class. The worst one ripped things off the walls, threw things, and screamed because he could.

The teacher sent the boy out, and he was back in an hour. After a month of this, the lead teacher told the school and the school district that something had to change or that teacher was going to quit on the spot. The school moved the boy, and the parents complained, saying their child was “special needs” and had attention deficit disorder (ADD). My sibling doesn’t know if the woman is still teaching.

My nephew has ADD. I’ve watched him grow up; I toted him around as a baby. I ran after him as a toddler. I picked him up from school with my mother, his grandmother. He never behaved in such an undisciplined manner. Even at the age of five, it never would have occurred to him because his parents did not allow him to behave that way.

My sibling and I were raised in such a way that misbehaving in school never would have occurred to us. My sibling ends the story with “If the school ever had to call my mother, my dad would be waiting for me. If my children ever acted that way, they would be grounded: no tv, no phone, no friends.” I can add that if my (widowed) mother had to leave work because of my misbehaving in school, kill me now, because she will.

Unfortunately, unless the people at the top are removed and common sense begins to prevail, not much is going to change in the public school system. That includes the constant exit of teachers. They’re tired of being at the bottom of the stack and being told to be quiet.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.

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