Duncan OhNo

Arne will be the new Education Secretary for Obama, it was announced yesterday. So he can do for the country what he's done for Chicago? Front for the business/corporate community which wants to downsize public education?

Close schools, fire teachers, displace students, dismantle all the "underutilized" schools, siphon off public money for charter school showcases, to be closed quietly after a bit of fanfare and create a two-tier system, a whole set of second-class lower paid teachers, non-union unprotected, fired-at-will --

Think of the school system being run by Fedex -- or, doing for schools what HMO's and insurance companies have done for health care.

I knew this was coming and I KNOW you can only be disappointed if you expected something better.
AND my job is to get a job.

I do not have TIME or ENERGY to splutter about this and years of abuse. To me. There was a study on stress the CTU sponsored, but I can't get anyone to tell me about, where it is, or where I can read it. The study focused on, did teachers get harassed or abused by a)students b) other teachers, or c) administrators -- that is, physical or verbal abuse.

I flash quickly on, the talk in faculty meetings about, oh no Ms B, the students don't see me like YOU!, and hearing the most obstreperous students tell me, I HAD to pass them because I 'wasn't a real teacher'.

Thank you NCLB for sending to the students the information that I had not taken a Spanish competency test -- which I'd never been told was necessary. The req's were changed after I got an endorsement, and I found out about the change by the letters to students telling them I was not "not highly qualified". When I passed the test, no such school wide mailing was sent out correcting the undermining information.

Unraveling this little story, I do need to remember that I got into the mess by being assigned to teach off-certificate, a history position teaching Spanish 4 classes by my principal. and other things like it-- put in a classroom barely big enough for ten students, with a full class-load, no windows -- a room the previous teacher had died in, when he had a heart attack. All those changes I dealt with by..ignoring them until I left the school -- out of the frying pan into the fire.

Splutter, splutter.
I know ( all the paragraphs start with I today) there are teachers in schools where they feel supported. But even as I write, I realize, I'm never going to be one of those teachers, not in this system. It is so hard to let something go that I love. Can't let go of the anger or the fond memories,
like the moment the other day when the student made an ignorant comment about, it's okay if a gay gets attacked by a monster (Halloween stories) and I jumped up to say -- you know, one out of every ten people you KNOW are probably gay -- could be, your teacher! Really, another student asked, are you a lesbian? (Freeze, is it safe? Breathe caught in my throat) Yes. Cool, my mom is too! And she high-fives me. You, another says, are the coolest sub we ever had! I think they call that, a teachable moment.

So, there are moments which I use like a pro biotic, to reintroduce the living part I love.
And try to remember why it's necessary to do something else.

So many stories, so many details to the painful etchings I carry around with me, trying to find a place to lay them.

Factory occupations and school stories

It was really exciting to hear about the plant occupation by workers at Republic window-- it's hit the national press. Raises all kinds of ideas about what to do when the corporate interests that own factories --and run schools -- renege on their commitments. At Republic, they closed the plant from one day to the next -- and workers took over the factory, demanding they give 60 days' notice and pay the pension requirements and HEALTH CARE the company owes.
So, if the the Chicago School Board reneges on its commitment to public education, and closes more schools -- shouldn't we, as proposed at the union meeting, do an emergency picket the Monday after this is announced? Yah, yah, the union has AGREED not to take job actions while a contract in is force -- but what if the Board doesn't meet its commitments, and closes schools for factors teachers don't control... what are the options open to us? What would our fellow workers be willing to do? How would we get support from parents and community?

It's still pretty hard to get motivated to sub--especially since it takes so much more initiative than just, making myself available. I have to call schools to ASK if they have openings-- probably more likely to find individual schools who are willing to call than rely on the central call-center to call.

I write today to try to set up a pattern.
I am thinking of a book to be titled, "why I am a bad teacher ' the first impression is, WAY too self-deprecatory, but it's in the spirit of Linda Bubon's performance, 'Why I am a Danger to the community, " about a copper-miner's wife fighting the copper bosses in (Arizona? New Mexico?) a la Salt of the Earth. And Ray Hanania's, "I'm Glad I look Like a Terrorist". He wrote pre-9/11 I think, he's a liberal Palestinian writer who did talks for the Mayor's commission on human rights....
Of course I am a bad teacher. Too much going off on my own. I took my lead from my students, to organize the social justice club, to start the GSA, to organize a trip to Europe ( on Easter vacation to Rome, no less....).When the principal suggested I should organize a tour to take her and her favorite teachers to Europe as chaperones... I just faded into the woodwork. And got told no fundraising schemes were permitted because they weren't legal. Till they were done my another teacher, for another cause. What is that button, DOES NOT work well in groups-- at least in the scratch your back group that passes for taking a lead from the boss and delivering favors. I'll never forget the way one principal brought me into his office to show me how another student group showed their appreciation for him by bringing him flowers! This is how you kiss up, dear. And my colleague and I were spending 15 hours a week after school putting together plays. Amazing. That was NOT the way to get his attention. Takes my breath away to think about it.

I set up a website where students wrote their own poems ' Yo soy de...' a bilingual poem trying to get kids to talk about their own lives and learn the Spanish words for struggle, hood, fried chicken, basketball court (as opposed to where the law is decided).
And I fought, argued, STATED the teachers' side when I was the delegate and a High School vice president pf the CTU. I didn't 'get to yes. I have acquired more negotiating skills, on HOW to explain to the local manager ( as a principal is) how things would go better if they got teachers' support versus central office. But I knew how to convince teachers better than bosses. Not a bad thing, just, doesn't put you on the short list for darling of the school system.

And oh, did I want to be admired for my teaching! Oh, my. Still the student who wanted the A. They say most teachers are that kid who strains and strains for the teacher's praise -- for whom the model worked, in some way. Teachers are also the single occupational group most likely to have significantly changed their class position by going to school OF COURSE they love Horatio Alger!

While I found it harder and harder to say, you can be whatever you want. To tell kids in the inner city and children of two parents both working ten hours a day at less than living wages, you can be president.
Instead I fastened on, in your life, there are many in the society who are waiting for you to fail. They expect, and they teach you to expect it to. Conditions in the world (class dynamics, the controllers, whatever) have conspired to give you a narrow little space, thismuch room where your initiative matters. But this is the space -- use it, take it, push it to the limit. For all those who are waiting for you to fail, prove them wrong.

But I wasn't good at organizing a network of support for myself. I read too many superhero comics -- heroic knight in armor, Saving people?

I still like the quote, in the book Civics for Democracy (K. Isaac) where Ralph Nader says,

" a democracy is a society in which less and less courage is needed of more and more people to spread justice and the blessings of liberty throughout the land. "

I used it when got the school to let me teach political science at the high school level, NOT an AP class. Now, what if I had known how to do that, with other grownups?
I haven't found the voice yet, to tell the individual stories of just HOW I feel I was broken, traumatized, how I literally watched friends die (a teacher, in constant conflict with the principal over running the school and on the LSC, who dropped dead of a heart attack during a 'professional development' meeting where some overpaid expert nattered on at us about brain research and wasted our extremely precious free time Telling, not Asking. Anyone else get a Fry grant?)

So many wrongs in so many ways. So many stories of victories and defeats. I guess that's what this opens. I find a place to mention the stories and will go back here to tell each one. With details. And breaths. And complete sentences.
The definition of stress is, all responsibility and no power.

New teachers and old, a little history

Subj: RE: Teacher job retention? Toledo Plan Scam and stress -- notes I wrote to a listserve about the Toledo Plan -- and its effect on new teachers.

We (all teachers and teacher-advocates everywhere) need a discussion on this.

OF COURSE unions were established to defend teachers -- so teachers were not dismissed at the whim of their boss.

Chicago has tried a myriad of schemes to rid themselves of 'bad teachers' -- about which I can tell you plenty. They got rid of teacher seniority in 1995 with the School Amendatory Act, when every teacher had to reapply for a job if they were displaced. We have seen intervention, reengineering and now Renaissance 2010, the charter schools initiative.

The one that sounds MOST like Toledo was 're-engineering' -- teachers sit on the panel to decide who stays and who goes . The CTU Secretary at the time, Pam Massarsky, defended at a delegates meeting, thundering, but YOU know who the bad teachers are! Massarsky lost her job the next year, and reengineering got a new package.

But the 'reform', ' school improvement' has the same attraction as the old 'team concept' tactics used in auto and other industries. Who HASN'T had a basic need to have their work be valued? For team concept, they used workers' impulse to tell the boss how to run things better -- to shrink the workforce and destroy unions.

Same here. The elephant in the room is, EVERYONE has either HAD, KNOWN, or BEEN or been afraid of becoming that bad, burnt-out, defensive teacher, the alcoholic, the one on autopilot, the one who got off the line, or out of the classroom, because it was too hard, and had a cushy non-teaching job telling others what to do.

The question is not, how do you get rid of 'bad teachers.' The question is, what kind of institution is it that CREATES 'bad teachers', DESTROYS its workforce, UNDERMINES and demoralizes its workers, sets up the perfect laboratory conditions for stress -- all the responsibility, no power -- and then wonders, why can't we get, or keep, good teachers?

I worked at a Chicago school where my life was made hell because I served as school delegate. I jumped-- to a 'failing school' (low scores)which had two more years before it closed. I was 'displaced' along with the other 9 teachers still there, because I didn't have the savvy to QUIT on my kids working for graduation, and jump to a different school. I worked for a year as a reassigned teacher, getting my salary but tagged as a 'failing' teacher. I went to job fair after job fair, set up not to get teachers jobs, but as shapeups where the principals could look over the pool of available labor. When I didn't land a regular job I was " honorably discharged", too young to retire, but with no position. Day in and day out, when I work as a sub, a teacher or a student pulls me aside and says -- ' you're a real teacher, aren't you?" And after the demoralizing experience of being in a closing school, I get the even MORE fun experience of being a sub, where kids are in a dysfunctional school, and the one person it's ok to pick on is the sub.

We won't be able to deal with the ghost of 'bad teachers' until we start asking, Bad , how? You mean burnt out, exhausted, demoralized? And how, pray tell, did they get that way? Were they told, perhaps, that they could triumph if they were Supermen and -women? That they were Better than those other, older traditional, teachers? That the first thing they must do is disregard all but the Authorized Experienced teachers who were friends of the boss(Principal, Superintendent, overseers) and OF COURSE anti-union, because the union protected bad teachers..

I ramble, but you get the idea. Go try googling 'teacher stress' and you either get articles on 'bad' teachers' or one of those hints pages which say things like. ' don't overdo. Work smarter, not harder.' Uh huh.

Turnover? NCLB is the top pincer in a squeeze move. The steps are, add outside help and use the school budget to pay for it. Allow school choice, so the students with more clued-in parents transfer their student to other schools. Replace the principal. Replace the principal AND teachers. OR, close the school and open it under a new name -- new teachers, another four years time limit to show improvement, and one more shuffle to cut down the non-performing students - who just happen to be the ones with the hardest time jumping through bureaucratic hoops to stay in the new school. Result? Higher average scores.

If you are Chicago, you also manage to tear down public housing and gentrify the neighborhood. Magic -- new students, better scores. I cannot contain my disgust for this charade.

Why I Am a Bad Teacher, no. 1

On his first day meeting with teachers at my southwest side Chicago high school, the new principal announced, 'Some of you are worried about my being part of the old boy's network. Well, at least I'm not part of the menopause mafia.'
Previous principal: a highly successful woman who went on to higher office in the Board of ed. Population of school's teachers: 70% female. Consequences for the principal: none. At least until his continuing efforts to demean and undermine teachers resulted in his contract being cancelled. I'd been the delegate and an outspoken opponent of his, in the school, before the Board, and in Springfield.
Consequences for me: never getting appointed to the position. He appointed a brand new student teacher, and then turned around and abolished my position.
Many, many bloody parts of this story. Slowly is the way to tell it. I am still surveying the damage. Like an accident victim on first waking in the hospital bed. Where does it hurt? What's missing?

What do we do now? Not even called to sub

It is now the first week of October and after working for 15 years in the Chicago system, I have been fired from my regular job, hung out to dry as a substitute for two years, and finally, left in silence, not to get to work at ALL. I hear that now there are an average of 50-100 spots open each day. There are about 2500 substitutes -- AND 150 DISPLACED(FIRED) TEACHERS WHO MUST BE PLACED BEFORE THEY EVER GET AROUND TO CALLING US SUBS. And that doesn't count discouraged, early-retired, on-leave teachers who are not in the pool anymore.

How do we stop Duncan and Daley from privatizing/dismantling the urban school system?

Went to a great meeting of Chicago Teachers Union delegates who met anyway, after the CTU officers had cancelled the regular House of Delegates' meeting (October1) allegedly, because of Rosh Hashanah. Hah. First time they were so concerned. In fact, CTU officers did the math, realized they would lose votes ( as in, whether to reinstate expelled vice president Ted Dallas) and cancelled the meeting . Great discussion, maybe a beginning, but we are always stuck reacting to a reality which may not exist anymore. At the next House meeting... will there be one? How do you start to fight against an attack which is so enormous, so thorough, so undermining? How do you unite the new teachers, being taught they will fix everything because they're supermen/supergirls, the experienced teachers being sidelined, the parents who simply want a good, functioning school to send their kids too, the students bounced around, warehoused, not taught and lied to?

Good teaching conditions are good learning conditions.

Look at two things when you go to a school to find out what it's like.
1) What do the kids' bathrooms look like? Are they open, pleasant, supplied?
2) What do the teachers' non-teaching rooms look like? Ditto. Is there a place to eat, to read, to call, to talk with others, to be alone? Are there any teachers in it?
I want to put every CEO and every educational charletan in a classroom for a day, where they aren't allowed to go pee, where the room is dirty and too hot or too cold, where they have no phones or quiet or space, and then say,-- So, how's it working for ya, trying to get something done here? Hmmm.......?
I want to put every teacher in the robes of the medieval scholars we wear at graduation, or crowns or some other sign of office, and everyone should be obliged to salute us, or bow or something. Instead we are not even equal, in common experience but somehow less than... Kids don't learn this from parents -- they learn it from everywhere.

It has taken me three years to be able to get back to the idea that I am a teacher, an educator, not at the mercy of the Board of Ed, but because of what I do. I was in a school about to close, and continued insults and injuries taught me a condition of learned helplessness it has taken me a long time to unlearn. How dare they?
I'm less unnerved now, and wondering why I didn't cry out before, and why so few asked where I had gone. But I get my voice back little by little.

Teachers in our society are wildly undervalued because profit is the reason for organization, so self-discovery, enrichment, humanism have no intrinsic value. Teachers are useful if they produce the workers necessary at the time. Ask any student why you need to go to school, and it's the rarest one who will say, to learn about the world I live, to be a fully conscious actor in my life and in society (OK, this is a teacher answer), because I want to KNOW things.
Usually it's , 'to get a good job', to be turned into the kind of product, the producer of labor power that some capitalist wants to hire, somewhere. And the way things are, they're not wrong, they DO need to scramble to make sure they can market themselves.
Students hear how bad their schools are, either because they're bad students (read, stupid, ignorant, lazy) or we're bad (stupid, lazy, just interested in a paycheck, old). When Terrell, Dodge, and Williams were closed for poor performance (the first to go) students turned to a teacher there and asked, "Are are we closing because you're [bad,at fault], teacher, or are we?"

Where, in the 19th century two needs coincided -- people/workers/citizens needed an education to be citizens, and capital needed literate and numerate(numbers-literate) workers in their factories, people who could show up on time (bell-schedules?) and obey the boss (I decide when you eat, move, pee) -- So in the social contract that has existed at least since Horace Mann, a part of society's resources were designated for education -- public schools.
NOW there is less demand for workers, for labor. After downsizing and reframing WHAT schools will exist and WHO needs to go to them, capital (through its lieutenants in the government and a myriad of foundations and consultancies) is dismantling the public school system.
That is the only way you can understand how No Child Left Behind, charter schools, the 'crisis in education', etc. testing, Chicago's Ren2010, and other cities' dismantling of schools make sense. Privatization -- and dismantling what's left.
This is a two-tier workforce, like those in other industries. It's the elimination of seniority, a return to the suck-up system with a vengeance, it's age discrimination, it's devaluing teachers -- and we don't resist it as a whole because we experience it as individuals -- What did I do wrong to lose my assigned place? Why is MY school so awful? How can I keep my head down and get through the day?
With no work.
With 59 kids in my kindergarten class.
With 17 teaching positions cut, in one school in one week.
With sitting at the phone a 6:00 am every morning and never getting called.
What's your take?

How can I keep from singing: Messages of liberation in the media

martin sheen was the special guest on the Prairie Home Companion show (9.30.07) rebroadcast today, and he explained that he went to work as an actor in New York, and the disector sent him to a soup kitchen to supplement his meager paycheck. The kitchen was run by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, and as he said, that's where he learned about social justice movements. He then went on to sing this, his favorite hymn.

Sheen said he’d never sung in public before, but now he wanted to sing his favorite hymn because of the “great lamentation” that’s “rising out of the violent darkness descending on Burma”…. he describes, “in response we lift up our voice in a simple act of faith and nonviolent solidarity with the Burmese people.” He sang the three verses below.

and the words:

How Can I Keep From Singing

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And hear their death-knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging.
When friends by shame are undefiled,
How can I keep from singing?

What through the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
What through the darkness round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of Heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

———————————————————————–

You can find the rest of the hymn, by Robert Wadsworth Lowry, by googling it. I don't have much use for God-talk, but this was interesting.

I was impressed by a few lines. First, there aren't many hymns I've heard that talk about tyrants trembling.
Then at the end, the song says that love is lord. Most prayers and like say LORD is LOVE -- this one gets the order right, I think.

Paul Siegel, in The Meek and The Militant , says succinctly what is in other Marxist writing about religion-- that the political debates and ideas are refracted through a religious lens, and this is a good example. I rejoice in the trembling of tyrants, in my unshakable inner calm, and in people's solidarity.

Anne Feeney also uses a religious figure to express outrage about the ICG's company's responsibility for the deaths of the miners in Sago, West Virginia in You Shall Answer. Why did you send these miners to me too early? You'll have to answer for worshiping Mammon instead of me, letting them die for profit.

She does that song either before or after the more traditional approach to religion in "The Preacher and The Slave". (http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/usa/longhair.htm) Pie is the sky? Just a lie.

People, including young people, have such great spirit, such a passion for justice and fairness, such power in their belief -- which they then attribute to some external abstract thing -- not where it is.

In my journey trying to stay in touch with my own motivations, emotions, willingness, spirit, trying not to be betrayed by my own "no"! at the wrong time, I am always impressed at the power of that spirit.

I finish with a Hindi greeting --

Namaste. The immense joy within me greets the immense joy within you.

CPS displaces 650 teachers -- We need to find each other

Dear teachers

I write to find out if you are, or if you know, displaced teachers who were not placed in tenured positions after they were displaced. I was displaced when the school I worked in was closed, and even though I am certified in an area of high demand (foreign language) I have never been rehired. I have been working as a day-to-day sub.

Other displaced teachers and I have marked the trend to hire new, cheaper teachers in positions we would be delighted to fill, and leave us to twist in the wind. Age discrimination? Maybe. Unionbusting and destroying any figleaf of seniority? Definitely.

When the Union Teacher features articles on the veteran teacher, and the novice teacher s/he taught when they were in CPS, I read the articles halfway through and don't know whether to laugh, cry or tear up the paper. I was called to sub in a school where I met a former student. He went into teaching, too. (How exciting!) He'd been hired at this school. In my subject.

An agreement between the Board and the CTU made the year my school closed required that principals interview displaced teachers before hiring anyone. I have found NO instance of this occurring.

There were 40 of us "honorably discharged" in these conditions in 2007. No doubt there are dozens, more now-- if the numbers are not more.

I wrote in, before Substitute Services closed our email accounts (February 29, 2008)-too much teacher-to-teacher talk! And I write again, to ask you to answer or FORWARD to someone in the same situation. Or maybe you have good news-- are they hiring you in a permanent position? GOOD!

It's time to get together to see what can be done, before our numbers swell again. And again.

PLEASE WRITE BACK TO

sojourner17@earthlink.net

Thank you,

An Unembedded teacher

Elle en a ras le bol

In a west side school which used to be only middle school, had an interesting chat with two students. One said, the teachers are too soft on the kids, let them get away with too much. The other explained, we didn't used to have doors on the classrooms. And kids are used to going in and out as they wish.
I find myself exhausted just with the energy to say, YES, you have to have an ID, NO you can't play cards we have an assignment. Till I find they got the cards from the security guard.
The teacher has the most beautiful set of pastels, and I ask for a sentence, and a picture to illustrate it.
Too much too ask. As someone said to me several weeks ago, don't you understand the objective of having substitutes?
It is astounding to me that NObody actually expects anything useful to happen.
I have to get over this urge to educate, to draw out. I CAN'T get over the bottom line feeling that it is NOT acceptable to treat me like wallpaper.
Over and over, I keep remembering that, this is what they do because I'm the one they GET to treat with this much disrespect-- except for the kid who's different. -- body-insults and code-words.
My new approach today was something like, nothing new under the sun-- I have done so much and seen so much, there is NOTHING you can do to me to hurt my feelings. Seemed to get some recognition.
So I ask the young man of lady, would YOU accept the treatment you're dishing out to me? And what would you think of yourself if you did? SO, what should I do? And how about, what should you do?
Do I expect some sensible, humane response? Yah, some days, when people are not so brutalized they won't see. The scariest thing I sense is this lack of reciprocity, this total lack of recognition--not of someone of high-status or authority, just of another human being. I want to require them all to do mirror-exercises, with ME.
These are the ex-Austin kids, for whom they didn't even provide an alternative, when they closed down their school. It IS different from the north-side school I was at earlier this week, where faculty see themselves as all progressive. I could refer, there, to the poster on the wall which listed the golden rule as voiced in five different religious traditions. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you-- Confucius, and Islam, and Judaism, and Jesus-- and another, Buddhism. No such references, except the wonderful things I see teachers do --a trip to cook at the international youth hostel, for the french class.
But it was a long day. J'en ai ras le bol avec eux.

an earlier introduction to daily life

(First posted on February 28)
vaguely daily blog about teaching in a big public system.
Last week I worked in a school where the sub was required to be IN the gym WITH students, but WITHOUT anything to do. Teacher couldn't be trusted to keep basketballs safe.
So a student, not in the class, came anyway. No way to tell when students would not STAY on number (the way gym teachers take attendance) until attendance was taken.
He lunged at students and at me with a shade-pole (the ones used to open an close windows or shades in a tall room), carried around the fire extinguisher and punded on the bleachers upstairs, precariously close to the ledge above others' heads) refused to tell me who he was. PROBABLY showed me a fake ID. My wallet was empty when I left the class.
Later someone (him? His friend?) sneaked into the boys locker room and stole a cell-phone.
I got into a talk with him about why did I have short hair like a man. My dress that day? Or a squaring of the jaw from stressors. Or what? A school where girls tend to be veiled, FEmale teachers dress more femininely? Who knows. Every new place, a new climate-- and it changes over time.
Strange recalling of days at my last regular ("failing" ) school, when kids dissatisfied with the way things were, would lash out at the weakest link. They're predators, says Judy Dench in 'Notes on a Scandal'. They sense weakness. And they hunt.
Scariest part?
The scariest part of this whole day was, I was disregarded and disrespected all day. I didn't THINK about telling anyone until this student's behavior became an issue for another student -- when a cell-phone was stolen from the locker-room. I didn't think it was big deal, or that I should take any measures, until it was a question of someone else's property. I was told I was responsible, of course, because no students NOT dressing for a class ( who are they? ) are allowed (by me?) in the locker room. Not my loss, my fault.
I want to use a log to keep track of what happens and my reactions. Pretty risky to do it in a public place. I can't help thinking there are hundreds, thousands who live a rather besieged life, bumped, bumped, bumped into less and less viable places, because they were taken out of the first place because it was not making AYP*.

*Adequate Yearly Progress, see No Child Left Behind provisions, and definitions at any state education office site.

A new start

After over a decade in the Chicago school system, I started teaching in an inner-city school -- Spanish to kids who didn't think they had ANY reason to learn Spanish.
I was in a school scheduled to close in two years-- and I had no idea what that meant when I started. All those years, and that last final kick in the teeth, managed to break something in me, to make it impossible to do something I loved.
This blog is a way of sorting out that experience, coning to grips with, what is going on in CPS and urban systems all over the country (and maybe the world, in terms of education) and pulling together political/personal/emotional insights, so that maybe they can help me and others.
What is a "failing" school? How can the wealthiest, most technologically advanced country in the world fail so many of its young people? How can a system survive which uses up its workers? Why. after a life of surviving spectacular dangers and risks, was I not able to get through, when clearly many teachers do find a way to work a whole career? Where was my purported defender, the union?
I still sub, as the title says, as an unembedded teacher, in high schools all over the north half and sometimes the south half of the city. Like the liminal persona that the anthropologist finds to be a confidante or informant, I feel like I've developed a sixth sense, being able 'read' a school, its students, and its workers, in the first ten minutes I am there.
And I still have no skin, no way to shield myself from the love/hate moments I experience.
Perhaps you will recognize something.
Last week I taught in a big school, in a business class, where all the kids could use computers. I spent maybe 15 minutes with students, encouraging one to go ahead and start the project that was due today. The student stared at me for a few minutes, trying to decide whether to ignore me, challenge me, or accept advice. Is she serious? Does she think I'm going to do what SHE tells me? A teacher observing asked me, You're a real teacher, aren't you, not just a sub?
Yes, I said, and told her my story. I don't know how to say what that felt like, just to be recognized, yes, I'm a real teacher. Yes, I'm being paid half a salary because no principal hired me when my school closed. I was in a "failing" school, you see, with "failing" teachers who didn't jump ship before it sank, still teaching "failing" students, the ones who stayed, stubbornly insisting that they still wanted to graduate, when their housing was torn down (Robert Taylor Homes) and they had to travel hours to get to school, and the classes they needed were cancelled, and their friends were "dropouted"* and the principal tried to throw out some, for complaining too loudly about the raw deal they got.
Theirs wasn't the only story, of course. There were teachers who'd given up, who learned how to get through the day to get a check, without disturbing themselves or the students. That's another story. For another day.

* Under NCLB every school is supposed to make Adequate Yearly Progress by raising attendance, graduation rate and test scores a certain percentage. One way of raising these percentages is by getting rid of students who are problems. Although each child is legally entitles to an education, the school can haul in a kid and his/her parent, and explain, they have this may absences, this may failing grades -- and this many suspensions or disciplinary actions. If they don't "voluntarily" drop out, the school can make the student's life unpleasant, with more discipline, etc. Even if the kid is one with behavior problems, this often arises from frustration with their own learning, or lack of it. These are often the kids whoneed the most help. They drop out, the schools scores go up. See also, the movie, "Pump Up the Volume".