Teacher resignations: Cries in the dark. Is there anybody listening?

"Is there anybody listening?
Is there anyone that sees what's going on?
Read between the lines,
criticize the words they're selling.
Think for yourself and feel the walls...
become sand beneath your feet. "

                             (Queensryche, "Anybody Listening")

I may have misspoken.

“First” came Gerald Conti, I wrote.  Not quite.  Oh, to be sure, Mr. Conti’s eloquent viral resignation letter may have touched off the current jag of public awareness and outcry, but he was not the first.  Not even recently.

I stand eloquently corrected, courtesy of a message from Mr. Stephen Round himself.  Who is he?  Well, if you don't know, then read on.  I did not know either, and I cannot believe, now, that I didn't.

On September 5, 2012, Boston-area teacher Adam Kirk Edgerton’s resignation essay was picked up by The Huffington Post, drawing nearly 5,000 Facebook “shares” and hundreds of comments.  Edgerton wrote that he was “tired of feeling powerless,” and that schools had an unacceptable “standardized test fixation,” comments that predated by the better part of a year those penned, posted and uttered by those public resignees about whom I have erstwhile written: Conti, Rubenstein, Knauth, Brissette.

Select excerpts:

“I quit because the system is demeaning. It's a structure that consumes everyone in it, from the top to the bottom. I didn't quit because of a single school -- I quit because of the pattern of inanity that is replicated throughout the whole country.”

 “No matter how much we regulate, we will always have to trust our teachers to be our surrogate parents, to take our children for an hour or six a day, to protect them, and to mold them into better people. Teachers matter more than superintendants [sic], more than senators, and more than businessmen. They make us who we are. Teachers are the ones who make the day-to-day decisions for the future of our entire nation, and we must start trusting them again.”

I should be clear that I do not agree with, nor do I necessarily endorse, all of the specific details, claims and suggestions in Mr. Edgerton’s essay, nor do I even necessarily embrace what I perceive to be his general ethos. Since, however, my purpose is to trace historical antecedents to the current Teacher Rebellion, those disagreements are not germane to the issue at hand. Edgerton, like others, including myself, is celebrating teachers finally finding their voice (and, more specifically, not letting unions fight our battles for us):

So what is the answer? Unions? Hardly. We can't allow union leaders to absorb teachers, to use them as a platform on which to stand. Our union leaders have failed us. Union politics have contributed to us getting to this point by forcing administrators to deal with them rather than teachers directly. They teach us that we cannot speak for ourselves; they teach us powerlessness. Union leaders are too often mere mouthpieces skimming off teachers' paychecks.

A few months later, in December 2012, a Rhode Island teacher named Stephen Round posted a six-minute Youtube resignation video: “I would rather leave my secure, $70,000 job, with benefits, and tutor in Connecticut for free than be part of a system that is diametrically opposed to everything I believe education should be,” Round intones. His video has been viewed close to half a million times, just short of the number of views that Ellie Rubenstein’s video has racked up, thus far, anyway.

The Huffington Post picked up Round’s resignation as well (HuffPo is considerably more on the ball than I am, it seems), and it drew over 17,000 Facebook “likes,” 1,100 Facebook “shares” and over six hundred comments.

I never knew. Lesson learned: Research your sh*t, mate.

The softspoken Mr. Round (who looks not unlike a cross between Ian Holm and Kevin Spacey) was a second-grade teacher, so his concerns were very K-5 specific. As a parent with two children in that grade range, I listened attentively. Again, I cannot say that I agree with or support with every minute detail of what he said, but this is not about the minutiae. This is about daring to speak out, be heard, and to place principle before pragmatics, despite the possible personal cost.

On January 1st, 2013, motivational/inspirational speaker (she calls herself an “educator/author/student advocate”)  Terry Preuss, NBCT, posted the first installment of a 12-part video response to Stephen Round’s video on Youtube. I will admit right now that I’ve only watched part(s), and read synopses of the rest. I will say that for the record, I’m not a huge fan of, nor am I inclined to trust, evangelistic, Anthony Robbins/Donald Trump-esque personality brands in education. I find them off-putting, and I tend to associate them with people “selling something” (in Preuss’s case, perhaps, her book(s) and her consultant/speaking fees).

I’m also not a huge fan of using NBCT as an honorary title. It’s not – it’s a title that is bought, at great expense and inconvenience, but bought nonetheless. Perhaps I will blog about my scorn for National Board Certification for teachers some other time.

I say this to assure my readers that I do not hold up the subjects of my essays as idols for worship. I recognize their flaws (I have some myself) and I do not necessarily agree with every word out of their mouths. To require one to do so before showing any kind of support would be the grossest form of perfectionist fallacy. And still I say that despite those personally discomfiting superficial indicators, I am appreciative of Ms. Preuss's efforts, all of their efforts, to publicize the plight of both students and teachers in the factories that our schools are becoming.

For two months, I’ve been painting this as a “movement.” Well, the movement’s roots go run a little deeper than I thought. Gerald Conti was not the first hot iron to strike, but when one reads articles, news stories and blog posts about him (even my own) the sense one distinctly comes away with is that he was the trailblazer.

How is it that as a people so collectively in a tizzy over the pathetic state of our education system that no one bothered to place his gesture into a larger context (myself included -- I'm rather embarrassed, actually)? Did people not even remember? Has the current culture of rapid fire news-reporting made us so myopic and attention-deficit-disordered as a thinking people that we can no longer connect the dots? I read a lot on Mr. Conti, before, during and after the first piece I wrote on him. In none of the pieces I read are the names Adam Kirk Edgerton, Stephen Round or Terry Preuss mentioned.  Not once.

This suggests that the media, the news programs, and the blogosphere all continue to see these incidents as anomalies, unrelated, unworthy of connection, not part of any pattern or trend.  I hope they're wrong.

But, maybe they’re right. Maybe there is no movement. Maybe our interest was piqued just long enough to comment on the situation before moving on to who’s leaving American Idol, or what soda pop Beyonce is peddling. (On a side note, it gives me a strange little spark of glee that my spell-checker rejects the name “Beyonce.”) Maybe, like a biological organism, our society is building up a tolerance, a resistance, and eventually, an immunity to news of teacher unrest. And soon, it won’t bother us at all.

I should point out that while the first installment of Terry Preuss’s Ken Burns-esque 12-video opus has been seen 1,000 times (a trifling figure compared to Stephen Round’s and Ellie Rubenstein’s combined 1,000,000 views) her subsequent videos have been viewed only 112, 73, 77, 41, 154, 41, 31, 33, 44, 25, and 35 times. Two recent (May 2013) videos on teacher empowerment have fewer than 10 views each. To be truthful, even I couldn’t quite motivate myself to watch the whole thing, and if you've read my recent posts, you know I'm fairly mercenary when it comes to this topic. Maybe it was her presentation; maybe it was the overall length. Maybe I’m just sick of it all.

Maybe we all are. Oh, that's not good...

So what is it that draws and holds the public’s interest? What spurs them on to action? I’m not entirely sure I understand completely. What is the key to viral success? (No, seriously, I want to know… 10,000 views is nice, and thank you for that, Dear Readers, but I want that next order of magnitude…)

And is viral success only virus-deep? Is it better for 100 people who really care to view something, or for 100,000 people to view it from the bandwagon out of a collective-frenzy of prurient interest that is quickly sated by the viewing and then cast off like a molt?

Does anybody have any thoughts on how to get the message across in a way that will actually do some good? I still believe that massive public resignations, protests, strikes, etc… will send the message, but with Teacher Education programs and TFA spitting out young, hungry, progressive-hearted teachers by the thousands (who cost much less than the people who would be resigning) who are ready and willing to drink the Kool-Aid,  I’m not sure anymore that that’s sufficient motivation.

By the way, for some excellent reasons why TFA (Teach For America) is NOT the savior of public education, take some time and read Julián Vásquez Heilig’s blog, “Cloaking Inequity.”

If not, then consider these sage words by Adam Kirk Edgerton:

Alternative certification programs, such as Teach for America, suggest that education schools are empty, facile and meaningless, at least for the classroom teacher. I don't begrudge TFA, since it helps many children escape poverty, but its existence magnifies a view of teachers as interchangeable parts, as cogs in our machine. I have no moral high ground on the issue of turnover, since I quit after three years, but policy-makers are increasingly devaluing graduate school programs that train teachers to teach -- to innovate. After all, why spend money on training teachers for a whole year, for a career, when we can pump in a stream of idealistic young people for much less money? Why teach teachers to question the machinery whirling around them?

Well, what does it matter if teachers “question the machinery whirling around them” if, when they resign in noble, principled protest, no one really notices?

I’m more than just A.S.K.ing… I really want to know.

Are teachers (inadvertently) helping drive the nails in their own coffins?

"They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data in their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death"
                                      (Roger Waters, "Amused to Death")

I was reading Diane Ravitch’s blog this morning, and I came across a post from yesterday (5/30/13), in which Diane quoted a 4th grade teacher who pleaded “Where is the real support for our children?” I’m picturing this teacher with arms extended heavenward, head thrown back (I’m certain rain was pouring down as well, I’m thinking Andy Dufresne, after escaping from Shawshank). Or possibly James T. Kirk yelling “Khaaaaaan! Khaaaaan!”  Or, remember the old lady from the Wendy's commercial asking "Where's the beef?"

Or maybe Mel Gibson’s William Wallace yelling “Freedom!” in that brief moment between his evisceration and his execution.  Ah, yes, that’s the metaphor I was looking for…

Anyway, it’s a very important, very valid, question.  And upon first quick read, I nodded my head along with the 4th grade teacher's letter, saying, “Right on!”

But a very astute poster, writing under the screen name “Ms. Cartwheel Librarian” (there has got to be a story there…) made an observation, singling out one of the sentences in the teacher’s page long commentary, and in the process reminding me to always check the premises of an argument.  This teacher lamented the condition of modern public education, but in the process of doing so, de facto endorsed (or at least condoned) NCLB/RttT’s purported validity as a barometer of school success:

[The 4th grade teacher wrote:] “The principal is a competent and supportive school leader who is simply navigating the academic culture that has developed since NCLB and high stakes testing began.”

[Ms. Cartwheel Librarian commented, after citing the above sentence specifically:] I’m sorry, but we really need to dive in and face the cognitive dissonance inherent in that sentence before we can ever begin to dig out of this mess. Anyone who “simply navigates” their way through this – and moreover forces his underlings to do the same thing – is not “supportive” and not really even “competent”, except to the same extent Adolph Eichmann was “competent” in keeping the trains running on schedule. Every cog in the machine that participates rather than resisting is part of the problem, and the further up the food chain you are, the less excuse you have for “I was only following orders”. This principal needs to be supporting your right – in fact, your duty – to teach science and social studies – not undermining your efforts to do so.

This is a very unpopular sentiment, Ms. Librarian. You don’t blame the victims! You don’t fault teachers for helping to corrupt the system that they so desperately are trying to fix. Most teachers I know would be OUTRAGED at the very notion that they are part of the problem. But – and I hate to say it – Ms. Librarian may well have valid point.

An aside: I try to make it a point in my posts not to attack teachers; I love teachers, and feel that teachers are, more often than not, victims, almost as much as the students, even. However, part of me believes that when teachers participate in the evil without fighting it in an obvious, forceful and meaningful way, their inaction contributes to, and therefore makes them part of, the problem. Acquiescence is justified in many ways, but it is almost always, in my experience, achieved by administrators at the (proverbial) barrel of a (proverbial) gun. The threat of punitive action, that show of force, is usually enough to force teachers to fall in line. I cannot completely begrudge teachers their choice in that situation. Not many people sign up for martyrdom. This was the operating principle behind Nazi success as well, as Ms. Librarian suggests. But in my quieter moments (yes, I have those) it really pisses me off sometimes. This post is the closest I ever expect to get to attacking teachers, but I need to do it, lest my blog turn too partisan and my credibility be shot. In the words of the estimable poet Mr. Robert Zimmerman, "I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get stoned!"

You’re thinking I’ve lost my mind. How dare I blame teachers for all of our schools’ ills?

Well, for one thing, I'm not.  It's not an all-or-nothing thing.  That's typical of the kind of extremist rhetoric that is part of the problem. It's a matter of degrees, shades of gray.  Maybe even more than 50 of them.

I understand the resistance to the idea. The last half of my 19 years teaching secondary school I felt like that, like I could make a difference, fix the system, shield my students from the coming sh*tstorm, and truth be told, if I could find a system that would pay me what I’m worth (nobody’s hiring above step 3-5 these days, it seems… see my essay on the “Golden Handcuffs” for more on that) I might still be in the game. It’s hard when they literally dangle your livelihood in front of you… “Stay with us and make $60, $70, $80K, plus benefits; or go out there and try your luck as an adjunct college professor, making $20K, $30K if you’re lucky, with no benefits…” A lot of teachers, most I’d guess, would stay put and keep their mouths shut, “play the game.”

I’ve had many teachers tell me that they know what’s going on, but what can they do but focus on “their own four classroom walls?” Comes a time for some people when that’s just not good enough, the crimes are too atrocious to be a part of. Guess what happens if all teachers retreat to their own four walls? The top-down, test-driven, corporate-governmental bureaucracy is given free rein to run roughshod over all, with no resistance. What was it that Martin Niemöller wrote about German intellectuals during the Nazi rise to power? Remember that poem?

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

The simple, sad fact is that teachers that stay, even if they think they’re doing good, even if in their hearts they remain true, even if they think they’re fighting the system in their own little way, MANY (if not MOST) are at least in SOME small way allowing the system to continue as it is simply by continuing to participate in it, and therefore contribute, in however small a way to the problem. Their continued participation confers validity.  And it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Something has to change. It’s not a question of “giving up,” it’s an issue of taking the battle to the next level.

Also, in regards to the desire for teachers to stay and “do the very best [they] can,” consider the words of Gandalf the Grey (think of the "ring" as the NCLB/RttT mandates) to Frodo about trying to best an enemy with his own weapon:

Frodo: Take it!
Gandalf: No, Frodo.
Frodo: You must take it!
Gandalf: You cannot offer me this ring!
Frodo: I’m giving it to you!
Gandalf: Don’t… tempt me Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo. I would use this ring from a desire to do good… But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.

I’m not saying it can’t be done… but I think we’ve gotten to a point where a principled and public walkout will be more effective and proactive than teachers soldiering on as always… that’s what teachers have been doing for the last generation, soldiering on nobly, and it certainly has not halted the top-down bureaucratic madness, has not made teachers’ lives better, has not made students’ lives better; why assume that it will stop anytime soon without more drastic action?

Lastly, consider this: I don’t know if you’ve read Atlas Shrugged (it is a bit of a hyperbolic commentary on America, but if you suspend your disbelief for 1,100 pages, and endure a lot of long speeches, there is a takeaway that’s worth the effort) — the sentiment of wanting to hang in there, the inner conflict, the mixed feelings, the desire to stay, to do good: these are exactly what drove Dagny Taggart (the main character) to stay as long in her job as she did. Consider her personal journey, and see if it doesn’t map neatly onto that of every frustrated teacher who has watched corporate and governmental interests appropriate all that used to be educator-driven in education. I don’t begrudge ANY teacher his or her sentiments, because they were once mine, and to a certain extent, still are. I’m just presenting an alternative.  A noble alternative, I feel.

I will say that it's a terrible dilemma that teachers get caught in... to a certain very small extent I do grudgingly agree with the "teachers are part of the problem" argument; after all, when it comes down to it, they are the footsoldiers in the very war against them. But I also believe that many teachers stay in the game, like Dagny Taggart, becuase they think they can fight the Powers That Be. And some can, and do, I guess. New teachers who act independently are denied tenure (been there, done that), and often by the time they've made it through 2 or 3 or 5 years, to get their tenure, they've drunk enough of the Kool-Aid to be complacent de facto conspirators, even if in their own hearts and in behind-closed-doors gripe sessions with other educators (whose words and "true" feelings never see the light of day, of course) they claim to maintain their ideals. Experienced teachers are disciplined, receive forced transfers, and are otherwise shamed into compliance.  Frankly, I'm seeing a lot more positive political movement courtesy of the ones who have left the game, the ones who are making a stink, the ones who are opening - not closing - their mouths.

The public, viral, resignations of the last month or two are very Atlas Shrugged (and I'm not a Rand mouthpiece per se, just a reader who calls I like I see it; I just think it's an extremely apt good metaphor) in a good way:

Ellie Rubenstein: read here;
Julie Brissette:  read here;
Kathleen Knauth: read here;
Gerald Conti: read here.

We need more, and higher profile, and more than just New York State (which is corrupt as hell anyway) and Chicagoland (ditto, from what I hear tell).

Teachers of the world, I share your feelings. I really do…I am SOOOOOOOOOO conflicted about this. And I would not ask my former colleagues to lay down their livelihoods until and unless they were ready to make that investment. (I don’t call it a sacrifice. When you sacrifice, by definition, you lose value.) A former colleague of mine recently expressed to me exactly what I suspect most teachers are feeling in this regard:

“I completely agree that we need to take a united stand. However, we are nowhere NEAR united, and I am currently the sole breadwinner in my family of 5. So.....I'm not going to be the one leading this foray.”

I get it, I really do! And it tears me up inside.

My response, however, to those administrators, those bureaucrats, those THUGS, who would make me and my colleague feel that way, is that of Hank Rearden, another central character of Atlas, speaking to his would-be oppressors with the serenity of a Gandhi, and the steely purpose of a man who knows his mission:

Hank:  If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition—which you cannot force—that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there—I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine—I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me—use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action.

And this exchange, between Dagny Taggart, who finally is moved to victoriously quit her post (a. Pardon the split infinitive, and b. No, it's not an oxymoron), and Francisco D'Anconia, a friend who helps her see the light:

Dagny:  It seems monstrously wrong to surrender the world to the looters, and monstrously wrong to live under their rule. I can neither give up nor go back. I can neither exist without work nor work as a serf. I had always thought that any sort of battle was proper, anything, except renunciation. I'm not sure we're right to quit, you and I, when we should have fought them. But there is no way to fight. It's surrender, if we leave—and surrender, if we remain. I don't know what is right any longer.

Francisco:  Check your premises, Dagny. Contradictions don't exist. 

I think Francisco is right, as was dear Ms. Librarian.  Deep within all of our conflicts there is a premise that needs checking, an unfounded assumption that by definition, by deduction, must be wrong.  Ms. Cartwheel librarian called it "cognitive dissonance."  Call it what you want.  Are we brave enough to check ourselves (before we wreck ourselves)?

Or maybe I just like to stir up sh*t more than most people do.

What do you think? I’m just A.S.K.ing…

"I was proud to say I was a teacher." Past tense.

"Huddled in the safety of a pseudo silk kimono
A morning mare rides, in the starless shutters of my eyes
The spirit of a misplaced childhood is rising to speak his mind
To this orphan of heartbreak, disillusioned and scarred
A refugee..."
                                               ("Pseudo Silk Kimono," from Misplaced Childhood, by Marillion)

“I was proud to say that I was a teacher.”  Please note the use of the past tense in that sentence. I was proud.

First, Gerald Conti’s retirement letter went viral (I’d like to think my little blog helped a little).  Conti, who for the time being, teaches in the high-performing Westhill School District, just outside of Detroitesque Syracuse, NY, posted his letter on his personal facebook page, and for a short while, it stayed in the local community.  A very short while. The rest, as they say, is history. 

And just as Mr. Conti was fading from news headlines a few weeks later, another public resignation shocked the teaching world, at least here in New York State – this time, a principal.  Kathleen Knauth’s retirement letter was shorter and sweeter, but packed just as much of a punch.  It did not have the same viral impact, confined largely to New York State (and my humble blog).  This surprised me, since the Frustrated Teacher is so commonplace an archetype as to be practically a cliche, but an administrator breaking ranks with Management to speak truth to power? That blew me away.

A subsequent public resignation from a School Board member, Julie Brissette, also in Upstate New York, drew almost no news attention outside of Syracuse’s city newspaper, the Post Standard.  I thought, perhaps, that what I had hoped would be a movement of principled acts, of Gandhi-esque gestures, of gentle, humble, almost plaintive middle fingers at the educational powers that be who are destroying the most important of our domestic institutions, public education, was dwindling into nothingness.  The starter engaged, the engine almost turned over, but the motor never roared like it should have.

Not yet, anyway.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  So what's a 10-minute youtube video worth?

Enter Ellie Rubenstein, a teacher from Illinois (Finally, one who’s not from New York! I was beginning to think it was just New Yorkers who were pissed off about all this!)  A few days ago, Rubenstein posted a 10-minute long video to youtube (watch it here) that has drawn, at this point, almost 400,000 views.

An excerpt: 

Over the past 15 years, I've experienced the depressing, gradual downfall and misdirection of communication that has slowly eaten away at my love of teaching. The emphasis in education has shifted from fostering academic and personal growth in both students and teachers to demanding uniformity and conformity.  Raising students' test scores on standardized tests is now the only goal, and in order to achieve it the creativity, flexibility and spontaneity that create authentic learning environments have been eliminated. Everything I love about teaching is extinct.  Curriculum is mandated, minutes spent teaching subjects are audited, schedules are dictated by administrators. The classroom teacher is no longer trusted or in control of what, when or how she teaches.

Eventually, if it is heard enough times, it will believed by the people who need most to hear it.  Let's all listen:

Julie Brissette:  I no longer choose to spend my valuable free time representing a community that, it appears, puts private agendas ahead of the children.

Kathleen Knauth:  This is not the purpose of public education and I believe [these educational reforms are] destructive in many ways to the children and to the teachers, and to education as a whole.

Gerald Conti:  I am not leaving my profession[;] in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists.

Ellie Rubenstein:  Everything I love about teaching is extinct.

Don’t anyone dare accuse these educators of “giving up” on students, the spiteful insult defensively hurled most often at educators such as these, who have made this hard choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are not giving up on students; they simply no longer wish to be part of a system that is actively damaging them. They recognize that their enemy is too great to defeat from within the system, and as long as they stay and obey, they are inadvertently helping to perpetuate the problem, even as they try their best to shield students from it.

If this is your first awareness or inkling of this issue, please take a few moments to look back in time two months to the letter that got it all started, at my earlier blog posts on Gerald Conti and Kathleen Knauth (click the names for links to the articles).

We recently celebrated Memorial Day, in which we pause to remember those fallen in defense of this great nation. Let us also remember that , in their own way, teachers serve this great nation too. And when one falls, we should notice, and we should understand why. It’s a different kind of battlefield, but it’s a very real fight.

And it’s one worth winning.

Thank you, Ellie, Kathleen, Julie, Gerald.

Education needs Bravehearts

"Sometimes I feel like a man in the wilderness
I'm a lonely soldier off to war
Sent away to die - never quite knowing why
Sometimes it makes no sense at all"

                                      ("Man in the Wilderness," Styx)

The Internet is buzzing with articles accusing, rightly so, President Barack Obama of being somewhat two-faced in his education policymaking.

In 2011, Obama said the following at a Town Hall meeting: 

Too often what we’ve been doing is using [standardized] tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we’ve said is let’s find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let’s apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let’s figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let’s make sure that that’s not the only way we’re judging whether a school is doing well.

But Race to the Top is exactly that – a program where schools literally bend over backwards, often breaking themselves in the process, to reinvent themselves in the federal government’s image, to win a small piece of the federal money allotted to the program.  The amounts, in many cases, really aren’t that much, and could be achieved with increases in efficiency, or simply better capital management.  In Syracuse, for example, the amount was something like $1.8 million, or a fraction of one percent of the annual budget.  For that, the district’s high schools have been transformed into gulags of never-ending bureaucratic hell (rigid and forced adherence to Common Core, regularly submitted lesson plans of excruciating detail that must demonstrate alignment to Common Core, hours upon hours of mind-numbing and soul-crushing “professional development,” submission to a teacher-evaluation process that is as inane as it is useless, and worst of all, the knowledge that all of the changes simply serve to create extra work for the teachers while actually doing nothing to enhance the educational experiences of the children).

In fact, while still an employee of the Syracuse City Schools, I drafted a proposal that would  restore the vocational education component to high school education and create a hybrid externship/work-study program for students electing a vocational pathway that would have netted the schools almost exactly the same amount of money that they were killing themselves to win from the Race to the Top program (through a very creative revenue stream I worked into the proposal).  The proposal was received approvingly in general principle by the city mayor, although she expressed concerns about logistics and liability issues (having students working on an externship basis at actual work sites around the city).  I saw this as a very promising non-endorsement endorsement (sort of like a non-answer answer), and interpreted it as encouragement to keep working on it.

But at the district, the proposal fell with a thud, despite a very high level of support from the rank-and-file (teachers).  Why?

Because the gold standard of NCLB and Race to the Top is a 100% standardized test passing rate, and all students completing a full battery of college-preparatory coursework, by hook or by crook. If students are receiving vocational training and job skills training, they are likely not participating in the college-prep academic track, and that would hurt the schools’ “numbers.” And standardized tests are the barometer of all this.

Recently, Tom Pauken wrote the following:

When the No Child Left Behind Legislation was signed by President George W. Bush 11 years ago, it required that by the end of 2013-2014 school year, “all students… will meet or exceed the State’s proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments.”

If you find it absurd that we can make all our students above average with the stroke of the presidential pen, you’re not alone. The 100 percent proficiency goal of NCLB is now widely acknowledged to be a pipe dream. Recent trends indicate that schools are not even headed in the right direction; and, in much of the press, the 100 percent proficiency goal has become something of the punch line of a joke. Meanwhile, in a move that tacitly acknowledges the unworkability of the current law, the Department of Education is granting NCLB waivers to states which will make it easier for them to skirt the requirements.

A policy isn’t much of a policy if, as soon as passing it, you start to issue waivers on-demand to opt out from it.  What’s the point?  Besides which, the very notion of 100% college-readiness is insulting to the very real (and LARGE) segment of the student population who are simply not college bound.  What’s worse, teachers stand to be punished for failing to raise their students’ performance (on the often meaningless test batteries) to the desired level.

Valerie Strauss, in an article in today’s online Washington Post, wrote the following:

In his [2012] State of the Union address …, [Obama] said that he wanted teachers to “stop teaching to the test.” He also said that teachers should teach with “creativity and passion.” And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren’t doing a good job. To “reward the best” and “fire the worst,” states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must.

Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to “stop teaching to the test,” but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President’s advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed.

Why does President Obama think that teachers can “stop teaching to the test” when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

How incredibly insulting.

As I wrote in my 2010 proposal to the Syracuse City School District:

It is very important that we come to realize that: a.) a university is not for everyone; b.) an “education” means different things to different people; c.) there is a long tradition of blue-collar pride in this area that academic elitism inadvertently snubs, to our detriment, we believe; and d.) a GED is not a bar to college.

Look, full disclosure here:  Personally, I’m a bit of an academic elitist snob from way back.  My dad is a Princeton man, I went to Cornell, and all four of my parents/step-parents are or were teachers or professors.  If I could afford to just be a graduate student for the rest of my life, I’d seriously consider it, flitting from one Masters or Doctoral program to another like an insatiable butterfly supping on the nectar of academia. 

But the reality is that as Americans, we value diversity, and “diversity” necessarily implies a variety, not just of races, colors and creeds, but of interests, skills, avocations, professions and life paths.  How dare we as educators tell a student who enjoys working with automobiles that her career path isn’t good enough? Or a 17-year old student who does home construction work in the family business, and has since he was 14 or 15, and has real skill?  Or the girl who just wants to do hair?  Or the budding artist?

True story: I once had an 18-year-old student in a 9th grade English class. (Think about that for a second.) The student, an English-language learner, was taking the course for the third time.  He was not only in my English 9 class, but also in my after-school Algebra support class; he was, as I recall, also in 9th grade Algebra for the second or third time.  He hated school. This boy also happened to be a recent father.  (Judge not, lest ye veer off-topic.)  He had problems with truancy, and, if rumor had it right, a fondness for the sweet leaf.  On the surface, he appeared the very prototype of an administrator’s nightmare student – truant, using drugs, impossibly behind on his graduation requirements.  But here’s the thing:  He had been, for at least two or three years, helping out in a family member’s roofing business. I had a conversation about this with him once; he really liked the work, and was (if he was to be believed, and I had no reason to doubt him) really good at it.  But the perspective of the school, district, state and federal government was that his blue-collar desires were anathema to the mission of all schools, and so he was forced to sit in 7-10 hours a day of classes he did not want or need to pursue the career path he had already begun, a path where his marketable skills could earn him a substantial living so he could take care of his infant child and get his life moving forward.

Now what the hell is wrong with that?

Hell, we’re ready enough to send 18-year-olds to other countries to die trying to build their countries up from the rubble; why the ever-loving f*ck don’t we love our children enough to keep them here, alive, and let them train them in the areas of their interest to do the very same thing in our own country?

So we sacrifice our students’ futures, we sacrifice our teachers’ well-being (and sanity, and good will – remember Gerald Conti and Kathleen Knauth?).  Why?  For a few dollars more from the educational crack dealers we call by any of their various names – NCLB, Race to the Top, Common Core – like Satan, they go by many monikers, and bear a pleasing countenance to those primed and ready to receive them.

Wow, that got dark all of a sudden.  Dial it back a notch.

Schools’ behavior in this regard reminds me of a quote from the movie Braveheart.  (Don’t dis, it’s a great flick, haters be gone!)  Try reading it, but replace “England” and “English” with “public education” and “administrators,” and replace “[King Edward the] Longshanks” with “Race to the Top,” and replace “Craig” with “Obama.”  Humor me, just try it:

William Wallace: I will invade England and defeat the English on their own ground.
Craig: [laughs] Invade? That's impossible.
William Wallace: Why? Why is that impossible? You're so concerned with squabbling for the scraps from Longshanks’ table that you've missed your God-given right to something better. There is a difference between us. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it.

I am William Wallace, and my weapon is a blog, not a broadsword.  You think I’m over-dramatizing my point?  Maybe I am, but that doesn’t make me wrong! 

I dunno, I’m just A.S.K.ing…

First Gerald Conti, now principled principal Kathleen Knauth calls it quits - John Galt claims another educator

Last month, I wrote:

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957.  In it she described an alternate America in which people of integrity in education, art, letters, and especially industry, are becoming increasingly forced by the government to act against their own best interests, in the name of serving other masters - the collective, the State, the amorphous entity known as the "common good."  Bit by bit, the great minds of America realize that the vocations, professions, lifestyles that they love and cherish are being ruined by oppressive and meddlesome rights-denying bureaucracy that, more often than not, doesn't really understand the nature of what it's meddling with.  In the end, these great minds decide (are persuaded, actually, by a mysterious figure named John Galt) to "go on strike," and one by one, over a period of time, they vanish from the world, their factories, industries, mines, foundries and establishments abandoned or destroyed by their own hand.  The nation is sent into a panic, both at the trend, and at the fact that so many of the "prime movers" of what Rand called "the motor of the world" have simply vanished -- ceased utterly to be productive, by choice -- daring the country to try and survive without them.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Gerald Conti’s decision to leave the teaching profession early:

"After writing all of this," he writes in his conclusion to [his] two-page letter, "I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.  For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, 'Words Matter' and 'Ideas Matter'. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean."

His retirement letter, which went viral, sparked what I hoped would be a national outrage.  It almost did, and maybe that outrage is still there, slowly simmering.  My own blog post got hundreds of hits - thank you, fearless readers! -  in a very short time, but that has slowed down greatly (625 reads of my article in the past month, but just 13 over the past week.)  I also see less of Mr. Conti’s name in the news blotters and aggregators.

What I do see a lot more of is Common Core-fueled angst, plus a healthy dose of frustration at  onerous (and by most accounts, idiotic) teacher evaluation procedures.  This is a heartening sign, perhaps.
 
What I mean is simply this:  The Gerald Conti outrage was a grass-roots outrage. The words of support for Mr. Conti  that I read on blogs and newsposts all last month were largely from the community at large – laypersons.  Sure, there was a healthy sprinkling of teachers and former teachers in the mix, but the majority seemed clearly to be just plain old folks sharing their sentiments and (mostly) supporting Mr. Conti’s decision.  However, now that the focus has turned very specifically from Gerald Conti as a human-interest story to the more technical issues of education standards, assessment and evaluation, and teacher personnel management, I am starting to see more educators whip out their virtual pens and rattle their sabers in protest, publicly, and THAT is a welcome sign.

The fear that educators so often feel that forces them to swallow the Kool-Aid and “play the game” (see my thoughts on the ties that bind teachers’ mouths and minds here and here) seems to finally be being overcome by the patent absurdity of the system in which we find ourselves.

Maybe more educators will begin putting their money where their mouths are.  Case in point, the latest publicized exemplar, reported by WGRZ-2 in Buffalo, of a principled departure and a poison pen retirement letter – this time, by a principal:

Principal Kathleen Knauth says the new state standards for teacher evaluations have drastically changed her role as an educator for the worse. That is why she is leaving Hillview Elementary [in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo], where she has been the principal for ten years, at the end of this school year:

"Everything is so fundamentally against my belief system that I had to make a change," she says. Knauth says the new statewide teacher evaluation process changed her job description so much, she decided to retire early.  "I really miss being a principal instead of being a typist and a statistician," says Knauth.

Her letter is shorter and sweeter than Gerald Conti’s letter, but I can’t help but think that it could potentially have more impact, coming from an administrator, who are traditionally assigned the role of defending the school and the district, and even going down with the ship, if need be.  Here is page one of the letter; read the full letter here:

In Ayn Rand's not-so-fictional America, the nation could not survive with its greatest minds and producers "on strike."  How many teachers will have to leave before anyone really notices?  (Edit: I just added a new post, 6/1/2013, on that very issue here.)  What do you think?  Is this part of a growing trend?  Will a “Tipping Point” be finally reached?  Does anyone else out there feel the same?  I dunno (but I sure hope so), I’m just A.S.K.ing…

Oh, Those Golden Handcuffs

When I left my last school district, making well over $70,000 (those of you in California reading this will say “so what,” but in upstate New York, a house that would cost $500,000-$600,000 in the suburban San Francisco Bay Area where I used to live and teach only costs $125,000-$225,000), I found it nigh impossible to reestablish with a school district.

My resume looked pretty good – 18 years teaching secondary school and college, three teaching credentials (English, Spanish, ESL), experience being  a department chair (three times), a program manager (twice), and a curriculum designer (twice), oodles of experience with the school accreditation process (four cycles), a fair amount of committee work, and some educational technology experience to boot.  My references were excellent – a small stack of emphatically supportive letters from various people at different levels stretching back 24 months or so.

Then an interviewer in 2011 told me, mid-interview, that there was a problem with my experience.  They simply would not agree to pay anyone in accordance with their experience, citing the ample supply of eager teachers who would work for much, much less.  In my case, that meant that if they were going to offer me a job (which they did not, because I ended the interview) it would be at a salary of perhaps $43,000 instead of $73,000.

Vivek Wadhwa, a blogger and “top linkedin.com influencer,” also a Fellow at the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, wrote an inspiring article just today (4/25/13) on how industry de-values experience and expertise at its own peril.  An excerpt:

True, some older workers become complacent as they age. They become set in their ways, stop learning new technologies, and believe they are entitled to the high wages they earned at their peak. Their careers stagnate for a valid reason. But these are the exception rather than the rule. Whether it is in computer programming or entrepreneurship, older workers have many advantages—they still are the guru’s [sic].

This entry immediately followed, and was a direct sequel to, a post Wadhwa had written on 4/22/13, on the rampant ageism in the tech industry.  An excerpt:

It may be wrong, but look at this from the point of view of the employer. Why would any company pay a computer programmer with out-of-date skills a salary of say $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate — who has no skills — for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: They will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage.” The older worker likely has a family and needs to leave the office by 6 p.m. The young can easily pull all-nighters.

What the tech industry often forgets is that with age comes wisdom. Older workers are usually better at following direction, mentoring, and leading. They tend to be more pragmatic and loyal...

The two essays, both absolute must-reads, are two sides of the coin of the realm in the modern world of work – expediency over expertise; malleability over maturity; deference over dynamism.  Employers want people cheap, who will do the job, loyally and faithfully even to a fault, and not get in the way of management’s mission.  And the fact is (and we can admit this as an empirical truth) older folks are less likely to have the kinds of flexibility required of that type of management style.

The redactio ad absurdum at the end of this slippery slope is a scene right out of Ayn Rand’s Anthem:

You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you. For the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men, better than you can know it in your unworthy little minds. And if you are not needed by your brother men, there is no reason for you to burden the earth with your bodies…

...Thus must all men live until they are forty. At forty, they are worn out. At forty, they are sent to the Home of the Useless, where the Old Ones live. The Old Ones do not work, for the State takes care of them. They sit in the sun in summer and they sit by the fire in winter. They do not speak often, for they are weary. The Old Ones know that they are soon to die. When a miracle happens and some live to be forty-five, they are the Ancient Ones, and children stare at them when passing by the Home of the Useless.  (ch. 1)

Hyperbole? Perhaps.  But bit by bit, older teachers are being forced out in a war of attrition, either for financial reasons, philosophical reasons, or a combination of the two – refer to the saga of Gerald Conti for a refresher course on how principles (as well as principals!) are driving many teachers to abandon the career that many have lovingly dedicated their lives to – and once forced out, it is increasingly difficult for them to find purchase in another teaching position.  They’re just too expensive, and expertise has so little value anymore.

Not only do older teachers cost more (most schools use a salary schedule), but instead of being respected, the changing climate of America public education puts modern progressive mores in direct conflict with the values of most teachers 45+, which has the net effect of stigmatizing older teachers and their experience. I have had numerous hiring committees and district administrators tell me that it's simply not worth it to hire an experienced teacher, unless s/he can be paid a starting teacher price. Younger teachers are more malleable, more eager to please, and more willing to drink the Kool-Aid. There also seems to be a pervasive feeling that older, more experienced teachers, when they try to share their experiences with younger faculty – especially when and if their views diverge, as is more and more the case these days – are somehow hegemonic in asserting their wisdom and experience, as if that somehow invalidates the energy and youthful missionary zeal of younger teachers. It is incredibly divisive, and there seems to be an us vs. them, at least in public school systems I've looked at lately, especially in the current educational climate.

I used to mock professional athletes when they would “hold out,” demanding to be paid “what they’re worth.”  Now I kind of get it.

But here’s a final thought, a sort of counterpoint:  I’m teaching college now, as an adjunct on two campuses.  I’m waiting to hear if I made it through to the third round of interviews for a tenure-track position at one of them.  If I get the job, I will be ecstatic.  It does not bother me that the salary will likely be $20,000-$25,000 less than I would get as a high school teacher.  This is not all about money… there are more ways than just money to value an employee, and to demonstrate that value through a supportive and collegial environment and a teacher-friendly atmosphere.  More and more, public schools have neither.  (My college is, thankfully, an embarrassment of riches in this regard.)  At this point, I don’t know if an offer of $75,000 would be sufficient to bring me back, even though my family desperately needs the benefits, the health care, and the stability.
 
Gerald Conti is leaving the career that he loves after 28 years; I’m guessing his salary is far more than mine was when I left my last school district on "Salary Step 19."  He could hang on for two more years and become more fully vested in his retirement plan, netting him a significant bump in future disbursements.  He is choosing not to.  He is lucky to have the financial stability to be able to make that principled decision.  A lot of veteran teachers do not – they are chained to their job by the very real threat of not being able to find another one, at least not one that pays anything close to what they’re worth, locked in place by the Golden Handcuffs.

What is the key to unlock the Golden Handcuffs?  I dunno.  I’m just A.S.K.ing…

What Lots of Teachers Think but THIS Teacher Is Not Afraid to Say

I'm afraid this is a very angry post, though not without purpose, and hope. I've removed most of the profanity from my earlier draft.  That's as close as I'll get to "nice."

A video is circulating around the internet right now called "What Lots of Teachers Think But Are Afraid To Say."  It is a sweetly and very reasonably narrated short piece that gently pleads for parents to recognize the realities of modern public education, and come to the table more informed and aware. Sounds good to me.  "Please, educate yourselves; have a voice on an issue..." the narrator intones.  Much of what she says sounds good to me, in a general sense.  She is, in my opinion, not angry, not urgent, not insistent enough. (One of the advantages of the high ground is that it's great for raining down arrows.) But  she's right about one thing: many teachers are afraid to say these things to to anyone other than a fellow teacher.

Actually... a few of us aren't scared to say it; teachers just need to be prepared to face the consequences. If you do say these things, administrators will not want you at their school. They don't want teachers to be honest with them; they CERTAINLY do not want teachers to be honest with parents, and as teachers, we are regularly instructed not to be honest with our students.

Teachers have to be prepared to put it all on the line. If you get transferred to a less desirable school out of spite? Bring it on, bitches. If you get canned? Bring it on, bitches. If enough teachers just learn to say, "Bring it on, bitches," or choose to do what Gerald Conti did, eventually, with patience, time, and sheer numbers, eventually, teachers will win the day.

Parents with children in the schools, many of them, anyway, will understand. They may even appreciate it.  There's a lot of anti-teacher rhetoric among government, district/state level administration and certain for-profit educational publishers, but it's subtle, insidious. The really visceral anti-teacher rhetoric is coming from pundits and certain highly vocal (often anonymously, of course) swaths of a grossly uninformed general public, both of which can be safely ignored. And the Pearsons, Common Cores, Say Yeses, etc.... of the world would not dare ratchet up their subtle anti-teacher rhetoric to the level of actually calling teachers out in an obvious public way. A principled assault by teachers against the system that is screwing them over can ONLY result in victory for teachers if their commitment doesn't flag.

But the first time teachers start to waver in fear (of their job, or whatever), the first time they swallow the "you've got to pick your battles" Kool-Aid, the first time they surrender one IOTA of their sacred charge to the cadre of rent-a-morons charged with gradually making teachers and and their livelihood obsolete -- that's when all hope is lost. Teachers cannot just close their classroom doors, pretend that their four walls are all that matter, bite the pillow, and pray that it ends soon.

OR ELSE IT WILL NOT.

Gerald Conti shrugged...

[Updated August, 2017]

Westhill High School, just outside of Syracuse, NY, is one of the top schools in one of the top school districts in Upstate New York.  And just this week (this post was initially published on April 4, 2013), one of its veteran teachers publicized his retirement letter, touching off a nearly viral outpouring of sympathy, empathy and, dare I hope it, outrage.  No, not outrage that he was leaving, just two years shy of the full retirement benefits that a 30-year tenure would bring.  Outrage at the direction public education is going.

Could this be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back?  I sure hope so.

I've been complaining about the same stuff for 15 years (read my statement of philosophy).  Behind closed doors, colleagues would listen, nod their heads, "Yeah, man, that sucks, someone should do something."  I've never been one to keep my mouth shut about things like this, so I often would do something, or say something, and then, curiously, all of the sympathetic support, the righteous anger, the steely resolve, would vanish in a puff of fear-for-one's-job.  I never knew when to shut up (if you know me, you're nodding your head), so I was occasionally, uh, "denied tenure," I think is the polite way to say it. I could never "play the game," as I was often told to do in hushed tones by my colleagues.

But Mr. Conti, he did it right.  Read his letter here.  Not in a huff or in a fury, like the Weasley twins quitting Hogwarts, but in quiet, resigned (no pun intended) sigh of disgust tinged with profound sorrow.  His letter is not Twisted Sister's rageful "You're gonna burn in hell..."; rather, it's Metallica's matter-of-fact "I dub thee 'unforgiven.'"  He simply decided it was time for him to go.

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957.  In it she described an alternate America in which people of integrity in education, art, letters, and especially industry, are becoming increasingly forced by the government to act against their own best interests, in the name of serving other masters - the collective, the State, the amorphous entity known as the "common good."  Bit by bit, the great minds of America realize that the vocations, professions, lifestyles that they love and cherish are being ruined by oppressive and meddlesome rights-denying bureaucracy that, more often than not, doesn't really understand the nature of what it's meddling with.  In the end, these great minds decide (are persuaded, actually, you'll have to read to learn more) to "go on strike," and one by one, over a period of time, they vanish from the world, their factories, industries, mines, foundries and establishments abandoned or destroyed by their own hand.  The nation is sent into a panic, both at the trend, and at the fact that so many of the "prime movers" of what Rand called "the motor of the world" have simply vanished - ceased utterly to be productive, by choice - daring the country to try and survive without them. 

They are right. It can't.

When I read Mr. Conti's letter, I felt that sense of righteous rebellion, mixed with a twinge of sadness.  I sense the spirit of those in Rand's novel, who, realizing that their spirit is being taken away from them, decide to withhold all access to that spirit from the bureaucratic vampires, moochers and looters (some of Rand's favorite words), to give them nothing to feed on.  Lacking sustenance, maybe they would starve.

I'm guessing it was not Mr. Conti's deliberate and specific purpose to send that particular message to the Board of Education at Westhill.  Maybe Atlas Shrugged never crossed his mind.  (Maybe he's never even read it.)  Maybe, like The Prisoner, he just wanted to escape.  Either way, his personal integrity shines like a beacon for all to see. But will anyone follow?

"After writing all of this," he writes in his conclusion to the two-page letter, "I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.  For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, 'Words Matter' and 'Ideas Matter'. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean."

I've had so many colleagues tell me privately, "I really should switch careers," "This isn't what it used to be," "I don't know why I put up with this," "This isn't worth it!" and "This is just so damn depressing!"  But they stay.  Is there honor in suffering?  Is there glory in that kind of woeful sacrifice?  (Maybe it's a religious thing? Self-flagellation?)  Or is it better to send this simple message?   "No, not anymore."