How much compensation would you require in order to spend your days as a living target? For me, it's an annual salary of $70,000. That's not too bad an income these days, but then again, I'm at the top of my pay scale, with 23 years of experience. Besides my professional certification, I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in a desirable subject area, as well as a master's degree and 40 credits beyond that. Moreover, there is a tremendous shortage of qualified applicants in my field, and my employer is trying to recruit new candidates from all over the world.

What sort of job so desperately needs warm bodies, yet can't seem to attract enough candidates? Easy: I am a teacher in the New York City public schools.

I am not complaining about the city's reticence in settling our contract negotiations, nor am I whining about how little we get paid compared to surrounding areas. The purpose of this article is rather to give an insider's look into the daily idiocy that passes for the business of education in our city. Many would argue that teachers work "only half a day, only half a year." The truth is that a good teacher—and there are many good, dedicated teachers in our system—spends many more hours preparing lessons, marking papers, gathering information and buying (often with their own money) supplies than he or she actually spends in the classroom. Moreover, each hour spent in the classroom is like a dog's hour. It simply drains the lifeblood out of you to try to juggle all the things happening at once: you must be entertainer, clerk, enforcer, janitor, manager, psychologist, besides trying to teach a lesson that the kids have absolutely no interest in.

I'm not entirely blaming the kids here, either. Kids are kids, no matter what their color, background, or family income is. They need structure in their lives, whether at home or in school, they need love and respect (don't we all?) and they are naturally curious. I have found that they do want to learn about the world around them, but at the same time they must not appear to their friends to be too eager to learn, or they will be branded with that most dreaded epithet: "nerd." That's a pity, as there are many bright, interested, curious kids who are tremendously bored in school because they don't dare do well enough on their tests and in their classes to be placed in more advanced classes, because, after all, peer acceptance is far more important than anything else. And it's not that their priorities are screwed up: Much as in prison, a kid who is branded a target might not survive to graduate.

Don't get me wrong: the kids are not necessarily the heroes in this piece. Through a damning combination of lack of guidance at home, whether by parents who are either too busy leading their own lives to care, or who work so many jobs that they are just too exhausted to cope, and the ever-growing influence of the peer group, too many kids are bringing themselves up. Gang influence flourishes in such an atmosphere. The graffiti on the desks in my junior high schools reads "Baby Bloods" and "Crip-Killers." Toughness and swagger is prized. To be nice, gentle, and well-mannered is to be weak and a victim. There is very much an "us vs. them" mentality present, no matter what the situation.

What's even scarier is that the hard-won lessons of racial harmony are being undone. I'm tired of being told, "I don't have to listen to you because you're white," being called a cracker, and hearing young kids call each other "niggers." When I overhear them use the "n-word" in everyday speech, I tell the kids that they can't use any words in my classroom that I can't also use. That gives them pause, but only for a moment. A colleague has kids write a letter home to their parents quoting themselves using that word. Several parents have had the decency to call to apologize, or had their kids apologize, for their words.

The concept of children's rights might have gone a bit too far, as well. "Corporal punishment" is now defined as any situation in which a child feels threatened in any way. Aside from the expected ban on physically striking a child, this is now extended to all forms of discipline. If the class enters the room noisily, the teacher may not line them up and have them walk in quietly again: This is corporal punishment. An unruly child may not be stood in the corner, nor physically separated from the class. This, too, is corporal punishment. Even asking, with a smile on your face, why the young Einstein did not complete his homework assignment is deemed corporal punishment if the child feels threatened by your actions. Any such incident of "corporal punishment" reported by a child must then be phoned in to the district office. You may be removed immediately from your classroom, and sent to the purgatory of the district office, where you may languish for two years as a highly-paid go-fer while receiving unsatisfactory ratings for those school years. You are guilty until proven innocent. And the kids aren't stupid: not only do they use the threat of reporting their teachers to get away with whatever they want to, they also threaten their parents that they will report them to the Bureau of Child Welfare if they are punished at home.

This certainly puts a crimp in the disciplinary process. It forces the teacher to re-think every action, and to back down even when you know that the child is doing something potentially harmful. Which brings us to anther point: if they're going to fight, students will sometimes move the teacher out of the way, so that the fight may proceed without interference. The teacher's natural inclination is to step in and separate the combatants but this is dangerous on two counts—first, if you grab a kid who is fighting, the kid can turn around and accuse you of corporal punishment, and second, if you get hurt in the course of breaking up a fight, your union warns you that this might not qualify as an on-the-job injury, and so may not be covered under New York State law. So what does the savvy teacher do when two junior Mike Tysons are determined to beat the hell out of each other in the hall? The official; answer is send for help, pray that it comes, and yell, "Stop fighting! Break this up right now!" Yeah, it works every time.

And then there is the administration. In my 18 years at my current school, we had one principal for 12 years. As with any other boss, some of us liked him, some didn't, but for the most part, he let us do what we all did best—teach. Kids knew that being sent to the principal's office would lead to some severe discipline, and teachers, for the most part, could look to him for professional guidance. However, after he retired, we have had 8 principals in the last 4 years-five in one year alone. Each one brought his own brand of incompetence to the job, and each one has been more incompetent than his predecessor.

Schools all over the city are suffering from this same lack of leadership. The principals have become totally responsible for the success of their schools, including the all-important test scores, and their tenure has been removed. Anyone in his right mind knows that the principal cannot, no matter what high-minded reading program has been put into place, make children learn to read. It is the parent's responsibility to make sure that their kids start school with the basics, like knowing right from left, how to sit still in a chair, their own name (true story: a friend who taught pre-kindergarten had a child enter her class in September who did not know his name. One can only wonder if the child was spoken to at all before beginning school.), and perhaps the alphabet.

With all these pressures, few would choose to become a principal. The older, proven ones either retired the moment they could, or left to work in the suburbs where they could not only earn a better income, but for the most part, run a school where the students were interested in learning and the parents cared that the learning took place. The new candidates are ill-prepared for a leadership role, having been for the most part recruited out of desk jobs at the notorious district offices, or simply not having enough classroom experience to be able to effectively lead a school. In addition, those with any teaching experience at all immediately forget what it's like to be on the front lines, and because they are under such pressure, lean on the teachers to try to do the super-human.

For all this, the principals receive no tenure, are required to attend hours of meetings with the district superintendent, often between the hours of 9 AM and 3 PM, instead of being physically in their school where they might do some good, and are held personally responsible for the school's reading and math scores.

The various and sundry reading programs that have been tried through the years are another joke. Years ago, we all learned to read through the tried and true methods of phonics, some sight-recognition, and lots and lots of practice. But someone decided that this is too boring for the little darlings, so a host of new teaching methods were introduced. It's interesting that since these "modern" methods were introduced, the ability to read has diminished considerably. The latest disaster, which is being whole-heartedly embraced by most school districts in New York City, is the "Success For All" program. This is a program, foisted upon us by Johns Hopkins University, in which an entire school stops to do its reading lessons at the same time. Every lesson is "scripted," that is, every teacher in every classroom, must be literally on the same page, on the same sentence, at the same moment. "Facilitators" walk around the building to check that this is taking place. The lesson goes forward no matter what, no matter how many children need review or explanation. It is assumed that they will catch up as the succeeding sessions make the previous lesson clear. There is no creativity, no tailoring to student's needs, just the lock-step of the script. Teachers hate it. Kids are not reading any better, and, as a matter of fact, reading scores are going down even further. But lots of money has been invested in SFA, it is being promoted by a prestigious university, and school administrators are desperate. What better recipe for success is there?

The standardized reading tests, too, need some serious re-vamping. In the old days, reading tests checked comprehension, the ability to read a paragraph, story, or poem, and answer questions about it. Today, perhaps in an effort to pad the tests, or to dumb them down so more kids get better scores, listening comprehension as well as the ability to chart or graph a story are integral parts of the test. No one would deny that listening comprehension is an important skill, but the passages that are read aloud for these exercises are long, abstruse, and often on topics that no child has ever heard of, so that from the kid's point of view, they are listening to gibberish. It's difficult to answer questions about a selection that makes no sense. As for the standardized math tests, they are a joke altogether. The correct answers to the problems are less important than the method used to arrive at the answer. A child who does the computation in his head, then writes down the right answer, gets less credit than that genius who writes down any stray thought or number that pops into her head, goes through contortions to try and fit those numbers into the problem, and arrives at a wrong answer. Here, the ends can only be justified by the means.

Still to come: Bulletin boards—the educational tools of the future?

 

Lost in the blackboard jungle? Send us e-mail at editor@corporatemofo.com

Posted May 19, 2002 10:42 PM