Mutilating Stale Gummy Bears or That One Time When I Worked at that Corporate School in the Early Aughts

In the swirl of years after I graduated from college, I briefly found myself working at a corporate school for children with autism. My last job before that had been as a cocktail waitress — a job I stormed out of one late night as the requisite sexual harassment reached a fever pitch. “Don’t burn your bridges!” the manager yelled out after me, as I wadded up my diminutive apron, threw it on the bar, and stormed out. Luckily, I never did have to backtrack across that particular bridge. I spent that period of my life alternating between entry level jobs that required a B.A., and high-tip yielding, “front of the house,” jobs in the service industry that are readily available to pretty, young, white women who can smile over clenched teeth. When I applied to the job at the school for children with autism, I wanted to do something “good.” I had been drawn to education before, and had recently been a substitute teacher in a Northern California public school district. The last sub gig had ended with a girl in a freshmen English class, who looked not unlike I did when I was her age, approaching me, as I was packing up for the day. “Ms. McCracken?” she asked. “Yes?” I answered. “You got to leave. Why would you come back?” I stared back at her and probably mumbled some disingenuous answer, but inside I thought, “She’s right. This sucks.” And back I went to waitressing until I couldn’t handle that anymore.

I knew friends of friends who had worked at this particular school for children “with autism.” It was in my interview that I learned to refer to the facility and the children this way, as opposed to labeling anyone or anything “autistic.” The school was known as an easy place to get a job that paid better than minimum wage, and you didn’t have to have much, or really any, experience. A key bit of information was that, although they fingerprinted, they didn’t drug test. The job paid less than subbing, and dramatically less than waiting tables, but I needed a change, so I applied.

When I walked up the path to the main building for my interview, I admired the floor to ceiling glass windows, the tasteful contemporary architecture, the handsome, warm wood. There may have even been a pergola. The path to the front door wound through what looked like a contemplative Buddhist rock garden. In the front office there were a lot of tall, slim people with good teeth and expensive shoes clacking away on real tile. This was a far cry from the sad, fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored offices of the public schools I had been reporting to. I was quickly hired as a “Behavior Technician” and was required to sit through an orientation video extolling the virtues of B.F. Skinner and his lab rats. The goal of this school was “behavior modification.” They used these techniques on children with autism, as well as children diagnosed with ADHD, OCD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

I was placed in a classroom with four or so other technicians, led by one actual special education teacher. All of us were young, and white, and on any given day at least a third of us were recovering from sort of debaucherous night before. We were able to function thusly, because we weren’t actually teaching. We each had a station, where we did nothing but run drills, as the children cycled through. These were low functioning, non-verbal children. We were mostly trying to get them to stop engaging in self-stimulating behaviors that made me other people uncomfortable, like putting their fingers in their ears, or rocking back and forth. We would also try to get them to communicate with us by choosing the correct flash card. If you chose the right flash card, you got candy.

I chose the less virtuous path that life handed me at that crossroads in my early twenties, and am not now an educational professional. I am not qualified to say if these drills were actually helping anyone. I do know that I did not see what I would call progress in the time I was there, and that I felt heartbroken for the parents. There were frequent tours and I could feel the wide-eyed couples holding out hope that this place could cure their children. They would come through at the beginning of the month when our supplies were full, and never at the end of the month, when we would be spending breaks ripping stale gummy bears limb from limb in order to stretch our rewards. It struck me as fundamentally wrong that the executives in the front office were driving luxury cars, while I was making less than ten dollars and hour, and the children were eating nasty, old candy. The school was funneled public money allotted to these disabled children, and it struck me that most of it was going into promoting the school and into the pockets of business school graduates, and not into the classrooms.

I am reminded of all this lately, as I am navigating choosing a Kindergarten for my son. I live in New Orleans now, whose public schools, since Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing flood, have been reinvented as a virtually all-charter system. No child in New Orleans is assigned a school based on where they live, and all parents must fill out applications and rank schools in order of choice, and then cross their fingers come lottery time. For the last two years, my husband and I have been touring a handful of schools, trying to figure out which would be best for our son. The schools live or die based on good test scores, and procuring adequate enrollment. And, I wonder, when I’m attending these open houses and outreach events if this isn’t a lot like that corporate school where I worked fifteen years ago. I wonder how much energy all this salesmanship is taking away from actual administration. I wonder how many consultants and CEO’s are walking away with huge salaries, while they systematically standardize the work, and hire, inexperienced teachers they can pay less. I wonder how much energy is going into fundraising instead of supporting these teachers and interventionists. On our tour, they flash us nervous, toothy smiles, as they drill little, tiny kids in the hallways, no doubt preparing them for those all-important tests. I scan the young teachers for hangovers. And I look closely at the children, trying to see if there is light in their eyes, or if they’re just parroting back answers and looking for candy.