Teaching in NYC
How My First Year of Teaching Inspired My Now
It was a sweltering hot, July day in Ashgabat. I was standing in a cramped bus as the only foreigner, collectively sweating with others when it hit me. I had just had a conversation with my country director in the Peace Corps office. He was explaining the growing racial achievement gap in education in the United States. Having been out of the country for 2 years, I just couldn’t understand it. How could the model democratic nation of the world have this problem? Then, it all hit me like a ton of bricks: the only explanation for this is institutional racism, and oppressive systems and structures. It was at this moment that I understood a life dedicated to combating these racist structures would be a life worth living.
Fast forward a year later, and I found myself in the Bronx, New York City, teaching at what was once one of the biggest public schools in NYC. The school was currently being “phased-out.” This meant they were closing the school by eliminating a grade level each year for four years. The reason for closing the school was they wanted to turn the school building into a “campus”: six schools, one for each floor. There were already five schools there, a mixture of public and charter schools with no affiliation with each other, as far as I could see. If anything, there was a sense of rivalry between the staff and students of the floors.
Though, I had a license to teach English Language Arts, I started the year teaching 3 classes that were not ELA classes, but were called, “Media…” something or other. I taught in a classroom that had a studio where all the resources were locked in a closet, the key guarded tightly by one of the assistant principals. Two of the classes started with about 12 students on the roster. By the end of the semester, they were about full with 30. The reason for this: the school needed to hold places where students coming back into the system, many of whom were coming out of incarceration at Rikers Island, could have classes to attend. I saw students come and go, some of them disappearing despite my efforts to find out what happened to them. Shrugs were all I received. The paraprofessional working with me fell asleep in class often. One day I asked her: “What motivates you to come to work?” She said, “Nothing.” She retired by the end of the week.
Many of the teachers at the school, mainly the white teachers, were shocked I chose to be there. Unlike me, they did not sign up to teach “these kids,” as many of them referred to the students as, which I could only assume were black and brown students. They signed up to teach at the school when they had different students, more honors class, more programming. Now that the school had shifted, these veteran teachers would cost a school too much, making it difficult to find other places to work. They were stuck. The principal came on board to close the school, garnering hatred from the staff that already didn’t want to be there. Classrooms were chaotic, resources and materials sat in locked rooms, teachers taught in areas they had no qualifications or experience in. Some classes had 43 students on the roster. In Turkmenistan, we Peace Corps volunteers spent a lot of time looking at the oppressive systems in the country and reflecting about how great America is. Now, I could only reflect on how America’s public education system was a complete disaster. How could this happen?
According to the teachers there, the school used to be highly celebrated across the city, but a series of unfortunate events caused it to be a target of one of the new administration’s goals to break down large schools, and co-locate the building with smaller school environments. In order to do this, they had to justify closing schools down. For this particular school, this meant funneling enrollment of an influx of students with IEPs and special needs, a vast majority of whom were black and brown and coming from underserved communities. Then, they cut funding for the special ed. department. Soon, test scores dropped, suspension rates soared and you had a failing school. This is the environment I stepped into as a first year teacher, ready to change the world.
My first year teaching was one of the hardest years of my life, but looking back, the injustices that I witnessed served as fuel to my fire. Education needs to be changed. Oppressive, racist systems need to be disrupted. People, most importantly, black and brown people, are not expendable. This is why I do the work I do today.
That was nine years ago, which takes me to the here and now. I am highly concerned about the very near future of education during this time. I’m concerned about what this new virtual learning environment will bring. I saw what happened in the spring: minimal student engagement. The reasons for this are all there. Most of the students and families I work with come from historically underserved communities, many have barriers which make this model of virtual learning very difficult, and highly ineffective. This can lead to some very inequitable outcomes. For a district that boasts one of the highest achievement gaps in the country, I fear that this current system is about to make that gap even wider. We need to think bigger. We need more innovation. We need to think about each other, our community. What are we going to do about it?
