So my nephew Malik, a fabulous renaissance man who has taught sixth grade math, science, and Spanish as well as coaching basketball and baseball for the last six years, was given a pink slip. Again. It's a March ritual around here. School districts are dealing with slashed budgets and are not certain of enrollment. In response they send out a flurry of layoff notices. I'm pretty sure Malik will be hired back. He's got some time in, he's a beloved teacher, and he is extremely successful teaching students in his working class and low-resourced middle school.
But the whole thing is infuriating. I texted him to say I hoped he was doing OK. He texted back, telling me that he would never advise a friend to go into this profession. I was so sad to think about this response, the kind of feeling that so many teachers get at this time of year.
I tried to send him back some words of encouragement. I'm a teacher educator, after all, and it's my calling to encourage people to become teachers and help them to be successful. I wrote him something about the fact that the pink slip is an insult, only that, but he would certainly still have a job. But as I thought about it, I realized this is one insult piled on top of the many others that are being offered to teachers. While there is a small problem of some bad and ineffective teachers hanging on to their jobs, as there is with bad, ineffective, lazy lawyers, doctors, nurses, architects, bankers, cops, financial analysts, cooks, firefighters and farmers, there is a huge bleeding gash in the system -- the 40 percent of new teachers, mostly excellent teachers, who quit in the first three years. They are discouraged, demoralized, scorned, and ridiculed by the media, politicians, and bosses. I want you all to hang in there. So here is my attempt to pull together my thoughts. It is my "letter to a young teacher."
Dear Malik,
We are, sadly, living in the year of hating teachers. Whether it's Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker rewarding the super-rich while complaining about the high compensation of teachers or Obama's education secretary Arne Duncan applauding the mass firing of teachers and endorsing the teacher-bashing rhetoric of the right, we're having it hard these days. After decades of "devolution" of federal funding and escalating military budgets, state governments are de-funding education. Policy wonks fantasize about making schools in the US that look like those in Singapore -- with compliant students who study desperately to make the grade -- and the President talks about education designed to compete with China and India -- as if that were the purpose of education in a democracy. The national discussion of education, driven by right wing media and think tanks, suggests that teacher education, teachers, teacher unions, and just about everything else about schools is worth trashing. Professor William Watkins may be right -- these people may really have in mind closing down public education altogether.
On the teacher profession side we find plenty of despair. Teaching, like the other caring professions, has been regarded as women's work and therefore worthy of less respect and pay. And now teachers are being forced more and more into mindless scripted curricula, which amount to low-intelligence test-prep exercises. Teacher education programs are cutting back their offerings and fewer people, particularly with math and science degrees, are willing to go into teaching. Getting that March pink slip is just another turn in the barrage of insults teachers suffer.
As I was thinking about this, and how to respond to you, something dawned on me. I think we pretty much should stop waiting for respect. It's not going to come, not for a long, long time. We know we are creative, growing professionals who are engaged in one of the world's most demanding jobs and we know we should be honored for our work with children and adolescents. But perhaps we should simply stop thinking along the lines of that framework of professionals who should be respected.
Here are a few other ways we might frame our job:
First, the miracles. We teachers fight for success in the classroom every day and many days we fail -- like health professionals, it's part of the job and we try to learn from the losses. But sometimes we work our magic and it comes out right. That's when you want to leap up and give a fellow teacher or a student a high five. Yes, we get both emotions, 20 times a day. We have the honor of being with these students more than any other adults -- laughing and crying, seeing transformations before our eyes. And we usually find ourselves in a wonderful community of teachers -- intense, funny, brilliant, and deeply ethical colleagues who help us through.
I remember when I first went into teaching. I had been a restaurant cook for 10 years and I knew the slog of production: bring in raw materials, work on them, push product out the door, charge money, get a little pay. Mostly it was hard, physical work. I remember how amazed I was when I first started teaching: I could get paid for reading, writing, talking, and listening? What a delight. And it was the most intellectually and ethically challenging job I could imagine -- on the level of course content (we are always scavenging, studying, borrowing, innovating, learning more) and even more on the human interaction dimension (constantly studying the kids, doing close observation, trying to figure out how to be successful at inspiring, encouraging and challenging them). We get joy, real joy and satisfaction, from our students. Yes, that's the secret delight of this profession, working with inspiring colleagues, knowing these kids and being with them through the small and large changes in their lives, knowing their families and the heroic struggles of the communities they come from. We have the coolest job ever -- we are privileged to be working with young people every day.
Secondly, as that T-shirt says, "Be an activist, be a teacher." We might head off to work with more joy and positive feeling if we think of ourselves as organizers. Teaching, after all, is not only community service, it is a project of social change. We don't go to work to blithely reproduce the inequities that exist in our society. We want students to learn, not just the ropes of the game and the gatekeepers, but their own power, their own capacity. We want them to have the creativity and imagination to know that another world is possible; we want them to have the skills to make it so. If you were organizing Mississippi sharecroppers in the '60s or Flint auto workers in the '30s, you would not be waiting for someone in power to say you're great. You would expect to be insulted and vilified. But you do the work because you know it's right. We teachers do this job because we are change agents. A lot of people jaw about social change and activism but teachers do the work every day. Like an organizer, you are fighting for broader goals, ones tied to the doors you open for this student, the progress you make on that project.
We go back to work again and again for those goals, not for the ones defined by those who are selling off the public domain and the promise of equality, justice and the common future, the policy wonks who seem to be in charge today. My hero and heroine teachers are not the savior types you see in the movies. They are people like Septima Clark teaching in rural South Carolina, Paulo Freire organizing in the mountains of Brazil, Father Lorenzo Milani transforming peasant kids in Tuscany, Sylvia Ashton-Warner empowering Maori children in New Zealand, and so many others. They got no respect. They changed the world. Like organizers, we learn the hard lessons of social change -- it never comes when we are patronizing and hand out charity; it only succeeds when we respect the people we teach and act in solidarity with them. And, like organizers, we are energized by the knowledge that we just might win together, by the knowledge that we do win small victories every day.
Thirdly... there is no thirdly. Just those two. The joy of working with kids. The commitment to organizing and social justice. The pay is bad but, really, not that bad. One can have a decent, if modest, living doing this. And we may be scorned by idiots but we are revered by parents, communities, and students. All in all, not such a bad gig. Of course I'm pretty sure you're going to stick with it, Malik. And I hope you encourage other friends to join our ranks. We need them!
Affectionately,
Tio Rick
Randy Turner: The Failure of American Teachers
Lauren Sullivan: For the Love of a Teacher: Eloise Gale's Passing Inspires a Community of Giving
SaraKay Smullens: Color-Blind in Philly: A Courageous Teacher Takes a Stand
Elizabeth Hampton: Education Policy: Letting Teachers in on the Conversation
Meet March's Teacher of the Month
Teaching with Passion: Advice for Young Educators | Edutopia
I just finished reading Jesse Stuart's 1949 classic, The Thread That Runs So True, and watching Waiting for Superman. We have major issues, and the teacher unions are partly to blame for those issues. But in the end we must continue to do what we know is right. I don't need a teacher pension and won't teach long enough to earn one anyway (I'm 60 already). I'm not doing this for the money. The students I currently teach by and large respond well to my teaching, so I hope I can make a difference once I have my own classroom.
Rick, I'm adding you to my list of inspirations.
As you say, failure is a construction of our system. Traditional methods use both incentives and disincentives, but the process all too often ignores the real goal - educating ALL learners. In high school I actually flunked a semester of senior algebra and had to repeat it at night while taking all the following semester's classes during normal school hours. Do we still do that? Or do we use threats of sanctions such as retention to try to motivate performance? It would seem that our basic question is how we get them all educated, not how we get them through or out of the system.
Nothing like knowing when I finish I will be lucky to get a job that doesn't pay well, where I am forced to teach to a test, with no job security, and to top it all of I will be treated as an overpaid lazy person.
This is a great article. As a "older" person going into teaching I find the lack of professionalism in the educational system quite shocking. The administrators, politicians, and some teachers really buy into the "joys" of teaching. I think these smarmy descriptions are laid on so thick because many women are teachers. Imagine describing a male doctor feeling "joy" when his patient's eyes light up after surgery. I think teachers and teacher educators must let go of these poetic yet antiquated ideas that teachers are nurturers versus problem solvers. The notion is anchored in the past. There is so much emotional garbage attached with teaching and teacher training. Everyone thinks that teachers are fullfilling some type of instictive process and therefore will put up with the worst work environments and management imaginable. In truth, the "pink slip" ritual just proves there is some extremely bad management top to bottom in school districts. The lack of professional management is almost laughable. Gradually, teachers will become like any other "free agent." More and more teachers will start to "job hop" which is hugely expensive for schools. Teachers need to look after their own interests because no one else will. As for Inda and China, those are just a tangent that politicians go off on. There may be some correllation someplace but I have yet to see what the point of that discussion is as it relates to children. People can't get past A Nation at Risk - 25 years old.
So, yes, those are a few reasons i keep coming back to this. Or at least President Obama should not get to declare that we need a "Sputnik moment" without someone questioning the emperor's new pretext.
We are knee-deep in globalization whether I like it or not. The reason we outsource to China and India is they're really cheap and, well, pretty well educated. However, they know more rote-style, look-it-up-in-a-book knowledge, which is why call centers are an ideal career for them. However, with the test-crazy curriculum we have in America today, w're pumping out less innovation and more workers that, well, would fit in in China and Japan...except we're 5x the price. Therefore we are competing with other nations for jobs. But our educational climate of today is making us a lousy competition. My husband works in a large corporation and is finding many young workers can barely problem solve and he thinks our education is not helping. He attended an IB school overseas where they taught "21st century skills", few textbooks or test existed, and student input was important. I think that's the way we need to go, but then textbooks and testing corporations would lose a pretty penny on the ordeal. My blog http://3rseduc.blogspot.com
This isn't just the year of hating teachers. It will last longer than a year. And even if it subsides, it will be back. And the damage will still be there. Those that are convinced this year of the abundance of lazy, greedy "bad" teachers will believe that for the rest of their lives and nothing will change their minds.
It is a thankless profession and the attacks won't stop until public education is dead in this country. Because that is the ultimate goal of the attackers.
Leave now before it's too late. You're young and have a chance.
Also I get to be part of a wonderful group of passionate teachers on the group blog Cooperative Catalyst (www.ccopcatalyst.org) and we get to encourage, reflect and grow our teaching and learning together while we change education as we speak.
We recently posted a letter from a pre-student teacher on the cooperative, (http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/looking-for-voices-of-reason/) and I can't wait to share your letter with her.
it is not always going to be easy to convince people that teaching and learning is more important the stocks and bonds or war and bombs, but it is worth trying.
David Loitz
Please join us this weekend at the Cooperative Catalyst for our effort to help save the National Writing Project.
via http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/blog4nwp/
"I hope you’ll join me in blogging for the NWP this weekend, from Friday, March 18th through Sunday, March 20th, 2011. Please support the NWP by sharing your experiences with the project, its institutes, its teacher consultants, and the resources it freely provides for all teachers. If you haven’t participated in an institute or worked with the NWP, please join us in calling on the federal government to support the NWP in championing authentic professional development, teaching, and learning through programs like the writing project."
#blog4NWP
Or to write about anything really. The Cooperative Catalyst would love to have you. Also love to connect you with Scott Nine of IDEA, think you would be a great allie for IDEA.
feel free to email me at
dloitz@democraticeducation.org
Thanks again for this great article.
David Loitz
Thanks Rick for encouraging all the young teachers who move within the extremely challenging field of education.
Walk the mile in the teachers shoes. Then comment.
As for teacher bashing, it makes no sense for workers struggling with their salary or benefits to tear down other middle-class workers with reasonable working conditions and pensions. We should be fighting for more unionized workers in more fields, not less. Historically, when unions are strong, wages, which have been stagnant for years, go up. This is like workers fighting other workers. We are fighting each other. That's the wrong fight.
Chris Bowen
http://teacher2teacher.lacoe.edu/a-fresh-dreamer.aspx
I would suggest you quit your job and home school your daughters. That is the only way they'll get the education that will please you.
The reason is much like you say - the joy has been drained from the profession they once loved by legislative busybodies who can't leave well enough alone.
I was a casualty of much the same thing...only for different reasons. I stood up for my kids. My administrators didn't like that, of course.