Last week, teachers in Colorado marched, much like their colleagues in other states around the country, in protest of reduced public school funding. Teacher pay is certainly an issue — the Denver area has one of the fastest growing economies and one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, but teacher pay has not kept pace. Many teachers feel priced out of the area and undervalued.
That’s not even including funds for buildings themselves, buildings that need air conditioning for classrooms (despite administrator offices having it), pest extermination services (with several generations of rats and cockroaches living within school walls), basic technology developed in recent years rather than from 2009, and books written at the very least past the Bush II administration.
However, having taught in public schools out here from 2000 to 2016, I can tell you that teacher anger goes far deeper than the money. The poor funding is bad, very bad, don’t get me wrong. Low pay and building decrepitude must be dealt with in cities all over the US. But teachers also want to be taken seriously.
I have had classes with over 40 students in them, many kids literally having to sit on tables. The teacher across the hallway and I would shift desks between classes. Her second period civics class had close to 50 kids in it, and she’d come in with some students to grab desks while I had my lesson planning time. Then in period 3, my American lit class had 42 kids, so we’d move the desks back. We did this every day for 2 months. Sometimes, the school would hire additional teachers, but not always. We had to make classes engaging, create thoughtful assignments, provide carefully thought-out feedback, and make every kid feel that they were listened to. Sometimes half the class was comprised of English Language Learners, while the other half was made up of native speakers. Scaffolding for this — having to look up every student’s history in Infinite Campus, the cumbersome education software our district used — took hours.
Then there were the district assessments that could take a full week to administer. They were often in 3 parts, and when students missed a part due to absenteeism (which was pretty wide-spread), scheduling the make-ups meant they’d miss even more content once we got around to actually teaching the lesson.
This is where a lot of people get confused: shouldn’t the kids just accept that they’ve missed class and now it’s up to them to make up the work? They’ll get the class notes from someone else, or come in at lunch time or afterschool. If not, they must face the consequences. Oh dear. No. While we have a lot of success stories from Title I schools, there are still many kids who have decided to give up on themselves very early. We chase those kids down. We make phone calls, drive to their homes, and try to help them see that education will give them actual options in life. When those kids agree to show up consistently, often they are content to just get the academic credit. The grade is not the important thing, so C’s and D’s are perfectly acceptable.
Sad as this was, administration tacitly encouraged this. They needed kids to graduate. Their metrics looked at courses passed and numbers of kids earning diplomas. We were told to “consider” making 50% a D. We were told to accept late work in all forms. We were told that if students did not understand a concept then it was up to us to make sure that they understood it, never mind the fact that the student didn’t understand due to having missed 1–2 days per week.
Working in Title I schools means that your battles are different. I want kids to graduate. But I don’t want them to start playing a game where their behavior essentially leads us to lower the bar. I know that plenty of kids in urban districts miss school because they have to translate for a parent in the hospital, or they have to provide child care for someone else in the family, or their parent’s car won’t start, or they are embarrassed because they have no clean clothing. Poverty is a deep well to climb out of, and it’s a well with many obstacles that get thrown in from above. I also know from students’ own admission that many times they ditched school to go party or just stay home and hang out. These were kids for whom most days were the “senior ditch day.” Those kids needed a lot of guidance. However, when your basic standards, if not your credibility are undermined by the administration in charge of running the place, then the job becomes an exercise in pounding your head against a wall. Admin threw all of the responsibility at teachers, and when kids didn’t thrive, teachers were blamed.
Let’s go back to those district assessments. Once they were administered during class time, we were in charge of reading and scoring all of them. That might mean over 150 tests. I would drive into school early on a Saturday morning to get a few hours done and that still would not be enough time. And the tests all had to go to directly back to the district — the kids did not get them back and learn how they did. One teacher I know surrepitiously made a copy of a district test. After all students had taken it and all of her tests had been scored, she handed out the test for her students to go over, question by question. This was in direct oppostion to district policy — not sure why — but she was determined not to have those weeks of sitting and testing be a waste. The students needed to understand what was being asked of them and which of their skills they needed to showcase, like any assessment.
Then of course, there were the big April tests, the CSAP and the PARCC, coming out of national policies like No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds. States spend piles and piles of money on these tests, in the end, that mean nothing for the students. It is all for the states and districts. We have had to move Heaven and Earth to ensure that students showed up. They got free movie tickets and T-shirts for coming. Did schools do the same thing for the SAT or the ACT — tests that actually meant something to the kids? Not until the state required that all juniors take the ACT (which has been replaced by the SAT). Why would a student take a test like the CSAP seriously? If they did not get the test back, if they did not see their individual score, if they did not need this test to graduate or gain admission to college, why would they or should they care? Administration officials thought they would automatically rally together, for the good of the school. This same school that stuck them in a class of forty other kids.
Most fun of all, we had the teacher evaluations. Here, an administrator would sit in our classroom and hold our lesson up to a metric to make sure that our content and language standards were met, that we offered proper verbal feedback ensuring that everybody’s needs were met with sensitivity, that we had data and student work posted on the walls, that our lesson was challenging enough. All of that is fine. That was my job, and I would try and do all of that regardless of admin presence. As long as I knew what admininstrators were doing, they were welcome in my classroom every single day if they so wanted. The problem came with administrators who had a beef with a teacher. I was never in a conflict with admin so I never personally experienced this. But others did. Words would be taken out of context. Attention would focus on something like a student rocking back on a chair, or whether a student glanced at a phone. These things might become magnified in the admin report to suggest that the classroom was “out of control.” Conversely, there were teachers who had cozy relationships with administrators — I knew of a few who were having affairs and others who were good time drinking buddies despite being mediocre teachers, and they received glowing reports despite rarely assigning homework, or frequently taking off Fridays to go skiing. The very teachers — again, not too many of them — who ought to have been told to get their act together were just too damn fun. This was annoying not least because the rest of us could also be fun, but we were often too tired to go beyond two drinks after school. At the very least, the super-fun people never really lasted too long.
And sometimes the administrators were just knuckleheads who knew next to nothing about the subject the teacher was teaching. They could not follow the lesson, so they gave generic scores to reflect a job well done, but not so outstanding that they’d have to actually talk to anyone about it. Great. See you at happy hour.
One year, school officials were under pressure from the central district to show that they were making changes, and they went after those they deemed “bad teachers.” How the administration defined bad teachers was never clear — was it about test scores, classroom climate, or something else? Whatever it was, the district went full on Dolores Umbridge and rooted people out. The easiest group to target were the first and second year newbies. A huge percentage of the pool of teachers in the three-year probationary window got slashed and many solid, if not actually strong teachers were non-renewed (fired). The reasoning behind it was always vague. Some “standard” was just not met. The newbies and veterans alike knew this was a load of crap. Those teachers were deliberately downscored. Nobody, or at least very few in that group received scores stating “meets expectations.” Many of these teachers even met their testing objectives and could show two years of solid lesson plans and had colleagues offering testimony about their efficacy and dedication. It was an entirely symoblic move that upset parents and communities. But administration was determined to show that any and all district problems happened in the classroom, a clear sign of passing the buck and refusing to tackle problems on their own.
Once I needed to use the photocopier in the main office, and I came across the paper that had been left behind from the previous copy job. It said, “20 Ways to Show Your Teachers Appreciation,” and went on to list things like, “1) Ice Cream Social, 2) Pizza Party! 3) A Night of Bowling! 4) Roller-Skating Fun!” Now I’m nobody to reject any of those things. But you could have easily replaced the title with “20 Ways to Throw a Birthday Party for a Ten-Year-Old.” Teachers are well-educated adults, many with masters degrees, doctorates, or national board certification. Yes, we love ice cream too, but perhaps one of the items could have been, “sit down, be quiet, and note what the teachers have to say about their job.”
So yes, teachers are fed up. Teachers love their kiddos and love being a big positive part of young lives. It’s actually incredible knowing that you’ve had an impact. That being said, none of us are perfect. We all have done things at some point that we wish we could erase or at least have handled with more grace. Waking up at 5:30 am to get to work by 7 doesn’t always produce the elegance that the day requires.
I have known some outstanding teachers, principals, administrators, and of course, students. These people worked their asses off every single day and their passion never wavered. For nearly two decades, these people were my family. I miss the classroom and I miss my former colleagues. Some events in my personal life convinced me that I needed to take a new direction, but occasionally I wonder if I ought to return because the job had so much meaning for me. When I was a student, I relied on my teachers for guidance that went well beyond academics. I wanted their approval, their constructive criticism, their moral support, and often, their friendship. Teachers are pillars of their communities, pillars that hold up students of the past, the present, and the future. Nobody really listens to the “glorified baby-sitter” talk anymore, thank goodness. But would it kill anyone to treat teachers like adults?