So I recently decided that the old title of this series of posts was kind of pretentious sounding. "The Many Faces of Education"? What does that even mean? I have so little authority to talk about what education looks like. All I have is this tiny little lens of a classroom in this tiny little school in this relatively tiny big city. The new name, "Teaching to Learn," reflects my own realization of how little I know about education. Almost a full school year into it, I realize that my experience teaching has really been an experience in learning: not only how to teach, but how to connect with people cross-culturally, how to navigate a confusing and problematic system, how to overcome barriers to being an effective educator, and how to stay positive when I can't find a way over them. It's funny, a year ago as I was finishing up at Pomona I had serious doubts that real life would be as captivating and as stimulating as college had been. Turns out, real life blows college out of the water.
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One thing I love about kids is that they haven't learned to be adults yet. They haven't learned when to run and when to walk, when to whisper and when to shout, when to play and when to settle down. My favorite thing they haven't learned yet is not to hug everybody all the time.
Kayla (not her real name) hugs everybody all the time. Saying Kayla hugs is like saying lions purr. This little lady could suffocate you if she were any older than six, and for now she's just a highly effective tourniquet.
Her approach is devious. She'll walk up to you slowly with her arms at her sides or folded behind her back, smile wide and eyes scrunched closed with the effort of using so many facial muscles at once. Then she'll pounce, lifting her arms and throwing them around whatever part of your body she can reach. If you're standing tall that's probably your hips, and if you're short or bent over she will go straight for your neck. Then she'll just hang, giggling hysterically until you tell her to please get off for the seventh or eighth time.
A couple months ago we started taking our first grade garden class to recess at the same time that Kayla's kindergarten class is on the playground. It's usually not more than a minute or two before she locks in on her favorite target, my right leg. Recently she's taken to swinging her arms around my thigh and criss-crossing her legs around my ankles, forming a pretzel out of her body. We make a game out of it. "Uh oh, is that a Kayla on my leg? Where did it come from? How am I going to get it off?!" I'll shake my leg, lift it, or jump up a couple times in a feigned effort to remove her. Finally I'll pretend to give up and start walking around with her still hanging on. She never gets tired of this. She never gets tired ever, really.
Kayla seems like a pretty happy kid. She's lucky to be part of a really exceptional classroom led by a really exceptional first-year teacher. The whole circumstance is really exceptional, since I'm told almost nobody teaches really well in their first year. Teachers tell me it usually takes at least a year to feel comfortable in a classroom, and at least a couple more before you really figure out how to teach to your potential.
Most of the teachers in my school have less than 5 years teaching experience, meaning very few of them have even come close to their potential as educators. Many of them are doing a really incredible job with their students despite limited experience. Several have already bloomed into great educators (in this layperson's judgement), and others will undoubtedly do so in a few years' time.
Unfortunately, almost none of them will be around to benefit Kayla and her classmates.
Like so many charter schools in New Orleans, my school demands more of teachers than a standard public school would. Between data collection, lesson planning, classroom preparation and weekly professional developments it's not unusual teachers to work a 70 hour week. Most of my co-workers get to school around 6:30 AM and leave around 4:30 PM, then go home and work even more, sometimes late into the evening. More than a handful come in to school on Saturday or Sunday as well.
It's a pace that's just not possible for most people to sustain for more than a year or two. It's not a coincidence that most of the teachers I work with are young, unmarried, and without children. People with families to support struggle to make such a lifestyle work, and my heart goes out to those who try.
Out of the 15 homeroom teachers in our elementary school, only four will be returning to their classroom next year. A couple intend to stay with the school in different capacities, but most are leaving to teach elsewhere, to go to grad school, or to find another career. It's an extremely high rate of turnover, but it's not unprecedented in New Orleans public charters, the type of school that enrolls nearly 80% of the city's students.
By the time a first-year New Orleans teacher becomes pretty good at what she or he does, she or he will probably be teaching somewhere besides New Orleans, or not teaching at all. She or he will be replaced by another young and extremely hard working person, a year or two out of college (if that) and already a year or two away from burnout.
It may strike you as absurd to have a school system that burns through teachers on such a consistent basis, but it's actually by design. Since Hurricane Katrina New Orleans has become ground zero for charter-based school reform, a movement which seeks to improve education by handing public schools over to be managed by independent, private organizations.
(A more thorough and big-picture recent history of New Orleans schools will follow in a later post. Suffice to say that it's complicated.)
Many charter schools follow similar educational philosophies and strategies, emphasizing data collection, teacher innovation, frequent and ongoing professional development, a "no excuses" school culture, and following the latest trends in educational research and curriculum development. Hence the 70-hour work weeks. Hence the burnout. Hence the need for teacher training pipelines like teachNOLA and Teach for America which recruit bright, young, motivated individuals for one- or two-year teaching commitments.
For some schools, turnover is actually a big part of their strategy. A 2010 article in the Times-Picayune reported that, "A growing group of educators and policy wonks say they are not particularly concerned about chronic teacher turnover in urban schools, as long as there's a pipeline of bright workaholics to fill the vacancies." Even if it's not desirable, some believe it can be sustainable.
In my school this high-turnover system actually seems to be working along the standard metrics. Test scores increase every year, the overall school grade goes up as well (D+ this year is our all-time high), and the school continues to receive more funding in the form of grants and state aid.
But then there are things that aren't measured. How much time and how many resources go towards teachers who won't impact the long-term success of the school, or any school for that matter? How much pressure is put on administrators that have to train and acclimate a new and inexperienced group of teachers year after year? What does it mean that its almost impossible for schools to attract skilled veteran educators? What are the long-term effects on New Orleans and its students of a teaching workforce that's overwhelmingly young, highly educated, unmarried, and culturally white?
It all seems so wasteful to me. Just as teachers begin to hone their craft they move on to something else. And that's only scratching the surface of wastefulness. After Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board lost control of the majority of its schools to the state level and fired 6,800 district employees as a result. Thousands of people with thousands of years of collective educational knowledge are located all around New Orleans, doing something other than teaching. Charters generally are less interested in hiring those people because they have families, lives outside of school, or differences of opinion about what constitutes fair working conditions. I'd surmise that many of those educators would rather find work elsewhere than return to the same career but with more hours, less pay, fewer benefits, and far less job security.*
Then there's the effects on students: what's the emotional toll on them to see new faces every year? What about the ones who don't have a consistent and supportive adult present in their home life? What does it mean for them that none of the grownups they've ever known have believed in them for more than a few years at a time?
I can only guess at what kind of effect this turnover-based system might have on them. I've tried considering what my schooling would have felt like if every year a quarter or half of the faculty left and was replaced. I think it wouldn't have been so bad since I got a new teacher every grade anyway. Would I really have noticed that much?
And then I consider that I had a mom and a dad at home every day for 18 years to make me dinner and ask how my day was; to take me to the movies or baseball practice on weekends; to hug me when I felt lonely or overwhelmed. I'll never fully grasp what a profoundly good job they did in making me feel loved and supported for my whole childhood.
I don't know the home situations of most of my students. Probably a lot of them are really terrific and caring. Probably a lot of them are really tumultuous. Whatever the breakdown, I'm sure that many of my students don't have their emotional and developmental needs met at home, meaning it's crucial for them to have those needs met at school.
In a way that's the driving logic behind the charter model. Make up the difference with our students by being ultra-prepared, ultra-cutting-edge, and ultra-hard working. No doubt that some schools like mine have shown results, but it still leaves me wondering if the school system could be a little less ultra-stressful and a little more sustainable. Maybe we could ease up a little on our younger teachers in the hope that they'll stay a while longer. A fifth-year teacher can probably do a better job in 60 hours a week than a comparable first- or second-year teacher can do in 80 hours a week. It's getting them to year five that proves difficult.
A charter school leader would argue with me, saying that accepting more reasonable hours would mean lowering expectations for what students could achieve. But I don't think it's a question of lowering expectations so much as recognizing that maybe we can reach even higher expectations if we exercise a little patience in getting there. A school leader might counter by saying that there isn't time for that, since state funding for next year depends on their school's performance this year. And she'd be right. The school system in Louisiana is run on market logic: spoils to the winners, school closures to the losers.
I don't want Kayla to end up on the short end of that logic.
I don't want her to go to a school where suddenly one year everyone decides to leave, and the next year she doesn't recognize any of the adults. I don't want her to think that she can't be a teacher because she's black, or that certain people must not have anything to teach her because they're not young, white and highly educated.
I don't want my school or any school in New Orleans to fail because the only people willing to take jobs there are people who have never taught in a classroom before. I don't want anyone to have to choose between another year of work and starting a family. Or between lesson planning and taking their kid to the park.
In just a few years Kayla will be tall enough to hug her teachers above the waist. She'll be strong enough to really do some damage but wise enough and kind enough to know when to ease up. Someday she will probably learn, as most children do, not to hug everybody all the time.
Let it not happen so soon, though. Let it not be because all her favorite targets have gone away and been replaced by new names and faces, new legs and waists. Let her always find solace in the contours of a familiar body of a teacher who loves her.
Let her stay a kid, at least for a little while longer.
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*Another consequence of firing 6,800 teaching employees: United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) lost much of its membership and former leverage. Teachers in New Orleans currently have no collective bargaining agreement. The Louisiana Legislature also recently passed a law changing the provisions of tenure that makes it far easier for schools to fire teachers who underperform.
Thanks for posting this Sam. I am planning on going into education and I feel like a lot of time charter schools are advertised as the cure all for public education in this country. It is good to know that the charter system is not perfect and that it means longer hours for really young teachers. I have been thinking a lot about how long I could last in a low income public school because I feel that burnout is a very real problem there. Thank you for putting this out there. I really appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I am not saying that the charter school that you are working at is a low income public school. I have just been working at a low income public school for the last two years and burn out is a serious problem. What are you teaching at that charter school?
DeleteHey Mal,
DeleteThanks for reading and responding! I do work in a charter school with a low-income student body. I think about 93% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch.
I'm a garden teacher, meaning I teach a science-based curriculum using our school garden as an experiential learning tool. I spend most of every day outside, which has been great until recently when it's been about 90+ and humid most days!
Charters in New Orleans have a really complicated recent history which I plan to delve into more in my next post. The short version is that the school reformers who advocate for charterization tend to want to privatize public education and run it like an industry rather than a public service. In New Orleans that's meant less public accountability, less power for parents and families, an increased emphasis on data, measurables, and testing, and a shift away from teaching the whole student.
It's a complicated picture, but the end result I think is a school system that will prove not to be sustainable and that has already begun to have detrimental effects on community self-reliance.
When I was working at Vayla with Jake, we were talking to a high proportion of students who were seeing substitutes as their only teacher for certain subjects and who were seeing 5 to 7 substitutes a week. It's not merely a matter of high turn-over at the end of year.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I have to admit, I'm sick of even calling TFA candidates bright, young, motivated. I mean, yes, most of them are, and also I know you have your wonderful positivity going for you, Sam. But I'm too conscious of the way the valorization of TFA is being used to implement disastrous policies and hurt all teachers, at least those that plan on being around for more than 1 to 2 years. I still see TFA as primarily valuable in its capacity to give people who will go on not to be teachers, but who will hopefully gain perspective and respect on the role of teachers (not just feel justified in whatever they do for the rest of the life because they taught for 1 or 2 years).
When I worked with New Orleans students, they were sick of having TFA teachers- the group I was talking with had a high representation from a failing school who, if I remember correctly, was majority taught by TFA. They had sympathy for these bright young motivated (yes but motivated to what? Very often not teaching as a career) because they could tell they were well intentioned, but the students could see how little the TFA teachers knew the community they taught and how little experience they had with the classroom.
This conversation was in the context of coming up with education solutions students most wanted after a long process of talking to over 500 students about the issues affecting them. One solution was to create programs to help support new teachers in getting better, which I found to be an incredibly gracious response to the situation. That kind of investment in those teachers still assumes a longer term commitment than most TFA kids will ever make. I'm wary less of TFA, but the rhetoric which has coopted it as a way to put forward a model of good teaching that reflects the way we talk about our country as a meritocracy. Attending elite schools, ability to test high and teach tests well, being young, inexperienced, and convinced you are right, being white- all these factors are starting to be way more of the picture of what makes a good teacher than time in the class room and understanding/roots in the community you teach in.
It also strikes me as an interventionist kind of approach, with the narrative constructed as outsiders coming in with privilege and putting it toward the disadvantaged. Anecdotally, I found my black and brown friends who came from low income communities and communities predominantly latin@ and black weren't accepted by TFA when they wanted to bring their education back to their own communities or ones that they would have a better road into than the white middle class pre-law, MBA, poli. sci. kids who were the friends who got the program and had no intention on being primary school teachers.
Hey Robin,
DeleteI think you're spot-on with all your criticism, especially the point you make about how TFA is changing the picture of what makes a good teacher.
I considered for a while whether to focus on the broader impact of 6,800 educators in New Orleans losing their jobs, and what that means for those people and for the city to be replaced with TFA corps members and other out-of-towners. I chose not to in part because that opens up a much larger conversation about public school privatization (which I want to cover more thoroughly in a future post) and because I see TFA not as the problem itself, but as just one manifestation of a much larger complex of problems involving privatization, systemic racism, and a public discourse that blames teachers and unions for the problems of education.
I've also had the chance to spend a little time with some experienced local educators, including leaders from United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO), the local AFT branch down here. Those that I've met and spoken with are not only non-oppositional to TFA members down here, but are actually supportive of corps members that they've gotten to know. There are corps members involved in the union and with local organizing efforts, and who are concerned with the state of education down here in the same ways that local educators are. The corps members that I work with and those that I've met elsewhere really care deeply about their students, and are well aware of how they fit in to the larger context of education in New Orleans.
So I wanted to be cautious of taking an oppositional stance towards TFA in this post, not because I'm not highly critical of the organization and how it fits in to education reform, but because I've had a lot of positive experiences with corps members, suggesting to me that the relationship between TFA and the education system here is not so cut-and-dry.
These are very good insights but I am not clear about one point. I get the impression that you believe that the primary reasons TFA trainees get hired is because charters discriminate against veteran black teachers and place time demands on teachers that veteran teachers could not meet. You also mention that some teachers fired after Katrina found better jobs. These are the reasons you give for the necessity for the TFA "pipeline." That theory places the primary blame on charters for not hiring and retaining veteran black teachers.
ReplyDeleteBut the the only reason there are any teacher openings in New Orleans is because the state contracts to hire 200 TFA trainees every year and, for the last three years, has to to fire 200 veteran black teachers to make way for TFA trainees. If the 200 TFA had not come, the charters would have to hire veteran, certified teachers. They would eventually have to place reasonable demands on teachers or face not having any qualified teachers at all. So TFA teachers play a directly impact veteran teachers careers and lives: and TFA teachers have the power to remedy the injustice by refusing to accept assignments in New Orleans.
There are many veteran teachers already working in charter schools--in fact, the majority of teachers at the largest charter network, Algiers Charter School Association, are veteran teachers. They have the same "no excuses" approach and demand long work-days and Saturday work. So there is nothing inherent in charter schools that precludes hiring veteran teachers. Indeed, most teachers that I knew pre-Katrina worked long days then spent nights and weekends calling parents and preparing lesson plans. And yes, it hurt their families and created great stress in their lives but they chose that calling and accepted the personal costs. True, some no doubt found better salaries elsewhere, but salaries were increase 50% in three years after Katrina and veteran teachers would lose most of their retirement benefits if they did not return to the Orleans system.
I raise this issue because I agree with most of your insights and I am thankful that you share them publicly. But does not every TFA teacher share responsibility for what is happening? If they did not know how they were being used before they arrived, they certainly do now. Do they have any moral obligation to teachers and their families who suffer because of their actions? All the good intentions and good works in the world cannot relieve us of our moral and ethical duties when we are wrong.
Lance Hill
Dr. Hill,
DeleteThanks for adding that perspective. I'm not a member of TFA and none of the teachers I work with were teaching in New Orleans before Katrina, so every point you make was unknown to me at the time that I published this piece.
I've had the opportunity to meet some veteran New Orleans teachers since then and their stories have nuanced my understanding of what's happened in education reform here over the last few years.
It's an interesting question, whether TFA teachers are culpable in what's happening. I think giving them a share of responsibility displaces accountability from the larger forces involved in education reform - TFA, lobbying groups, Congress, the state Legislature, the RSD etc. - and to say that TFA corps members are the ones responsible for peoples' suffering sounds like it might also create more guilt than productive action.
The little organizing experience I've had has taught me that the decision to fight injustice is an internal one, and if it's made out of guilt or an external sense of morality it's not likely to be personally sustainable or analytically sound. A decision made from guilt or moral obligation tends towards the personal goal of guilt-relief or freedom from obligation, and away from the broader goal of rectifying an injustice.
To me, the best that teachers, students, families and current and former public school employees can do is share their stories with TFA members and allow them to reach their own conclusions. If they want to commit to the struggle for a just education system, it should be because they care deeply about the people who've been wronged, not because they want to feel less bad about their role in it.
You asked a moral question and I gave you a strategical organizing answer, but I hope that clears things up. My analysis in this piece was weak on that front as you point out, and it's in part because I wanted to be careful not to individualize a systemic problem and induce guilt, though I think I veered too far in the direction of avoidance. Thanks for the opportunity to explain myself a bit further.
On a personal note, thanks for all the work you do. I really benefitted from the workshop you gave for the New Teachers' Roundtable earlier this year and I continue to put it into practice in my work at school.
Best,
Sam