Brief Update: Please pay attention to what's been happening in the Covina-Valley Unified School District. A strike has apparently been averted, but the fact that health care was the last issue to be resolved is important. Healthcare (district-paid health insurance) is a major inducement for teachers to enter and stay in the profession, and it's also a major expenditure for school districts who provide it.
Covina-Valley was attempting to negotiate a multi-tier system that would have capped spending for dependents of new hires. The union wanted a system that would continue to treat all members equally. The tentative compromise appears to maintain that uniformity, thereby dodging the "divide and conquer" scenario, while employee contributions to dependent coverage will rise for everyone.
Setting veteran workers against new hires is a classic union-busting strategy (see pensions), and it's good to see it fail here. If you are now in contract negotiations (looking at you, LAUSD), stay vigilant.
Now, The War On Teachers: Working Conditions.
In the last two posts I focused on money and how the Enemies of Public Schooling squeeze pay and pensions (and benefits--see above), making the job less attractive. Next up on the teacher hit list is something even more important for many teachers: the conditions under which teachers are required to work.
Working conditions are a major factor in people leaving the profession prematurely and may be THE major factor in teachers thinking about leaving the profession early. I know it was for me.
When I started teaching I knew I wasn't going to get rich. I was only able to do it because I have a spouse who works as not-a-teacher and because of the health care. What I didn't know, what I don't think anyone can know in advance, is how hard a job it is.
Like most new teachers, I'm guessing, I spent my first couple of years trying to figure out what the hell I was doing in the classroom. My first two classes had 48 and 46 students. Most classes were 29 to 37. On top of that I had boring faculty meetings every month and pretty good department meetings periodically. I was also going to school nights to clear my credential and I started a drama club after school. Because I was young.
It was hard, partly because I was doing too much but mostly because every time I got a little better I was determined to do more. I remember the third year being the hardest. I finally knew where the class should be going, but I wasn't yet good enough to get us there. Even so, it felt like progress.
I taught English to ninth graders because I loved it and the veteran teachers... didn't. Class sizes were actually capped in those days at something under thirty students, so that was good. Admin handed me the keys to the dormant theater one day, and the club moved in and started performing on stage. The next year they gave me a drama class. It was actually pretty cool.
It didn't last very long. The California Charter Schools Act passed the legislature in 1992, but I started feeling it around 2000. That's when voters passed Prop 39 requiring school districts to take facilities bought and paid-for by taxpayers and fork them over to charters. The next year we got No Child Left Behind and the beginning of the Big Standardized Test lunacy (h/t Peter Greene @palan57 for BS Test), and that created the conditions for ruthless competition in the student-market.
Principals, the best of whom once were actual educators who protected their staffs from the district's worst ideas now became wholly-owned widgets in the machine. The "failing schools" narrative took over the discourse and test scores became the reason schools even exist.
A lot of the terrible things that have happened in the last twenty years--the reform-a-go-round and know-nothing consultants and ridiculous "Professional Developments," the endless testing and test prepping and test analysis, the constricted curriculum, the bizarre evaluations, and the stupid rules--are responsible for the teacher shortage (yes, there is) and can be traced back to those early days. The turn of the century.
True story: I got a call this week asking if I wanted a long-term sub assignment in spring semester. I politely declined. I'm not a sub. I'm not on any list nor have I ever indicated a desire to be. And it's not all about the money.
It's no mystery why it's become hard to staff schools. Anne Lutz Fernandez bullseyed it in August:
— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022
Teachers are disappearing. And again, it's all part of the plan.
Many observers--some honestly, some not--wonder how we got here. Some of them pretend and argue that it's not really happening at all. But teachers are leaving the classroom. Lots more are deciding to never become teachers in the first place because why would they? The job is being made unsustainable, impossible, and it's not an accident.
A word about rhetoric. I know some people might not be comfortable with the use of war as a metaphor for the ongoing project to privatize public schooling, and I respect that. I mean no disrespect to people who have endured the death and destruction of a shooting war. But war also means an organized effort to stop or defeat something seen as dangerous. This is definitely that.
The War On Teachers should be seen as just that -- a war. But instead of two evenly matched armies facing off across a plot of disputed territory, it's more like a juggler on a unicycle on a highwire being pelted with rocks and feces.
Teachers are often too busy or too exhausted to fight back.
If money is the frontal assault, working conditions are the pincer movement. Degrading teachers' work environment--and students' learning environment--is a multi-dimensional campaign to grind teachers up and run them out of the classroom. Let's take a look at one of the battlefields.
1. class sizes
One of the most consequential components of a teacher's work environment is the size of their classes. It makes the difference between talking to every kid every day--and not. It makes the difference between giving quality feedback and "Good Job!" It's the difference between spotting a kid who's being bullied, a kid who's crying and trying to hide it, a kid who is wearing long sleeves to cover up the bruises, and not spotting it.
Note: A great resource on this subject is Leonie Haimson at https://classsizematters.org/.
And let's stipulate from the outset that yes, anyone who has ever spent time in a classroom teaching kids knows this. But a lot of decisions are being made by people outside the classroom, and they are being made based on expediency, political agendas, and faulty information.
As I said, I started in LAUSD back in the '90s with most of my classes in the thirties and a couple in the forties. That wasn't unusual then, and you did the best you could. There wasn't anybody looking over my shoulder, and there was a general recognition that fewer humans in a room would be better for everyone and that we were only in that particular spot because we had to be.
Then the district hired some more teachers and some legal things happened and more teachers were hired and classes got smaller. Not all of them and not by a lot, but it felt like progress.
Then it got worse. Squeezed funding got squeezed even harder. Enemies of Public Schooling saw an opportunity to make teaching even more difficult when some Big Thinkers got it into their skulls that the number of students in a classroom doesn't really matter. These professional pundits have made a good living saying just that to bosses and politicians who are relieved and happy to hear it. Saves money, don't you know. Someone please save us from the economists.
A lot of the advertising involves running the same flawed studies through the media spin cycle over and over. These analyses suffer from a cornucopia of problems, from the omission of ESL to selection bias to stopping at short-term (one school year) effects to simply lying about results.
The studies compare across nations and cultures, glossing over the idiosyncratic funding and infrastructure features unique to U.S. education systems. The studies concentrate on moderate class sizes and seldom address the class sizes (30-40+) that teachers routinely experience (and try to muddle class size with student-teacher ratio, just for effect). And most important, critics of class size reduction efforts focus almost exclusively on two factors: the relative costs of class size reduction vs other potential actions, and test scores.
For the critics, it's never a question of whether smaller class sizes are better across a whole range of criteria, but whether smaller classes are economically feasible. Talkers talk about whether reducing class size is the best use of funds, which they portray as fixed, and about whether smaller classes result in higher test scores.
From the critics' point of view, test scores are identical to student achievement and the only metric worth recording. Forget about student engagement and long-term student success. And especially forget about teacher retention.
And where you gonna get all those extra teachers anyway? We're in the midst of a teacher shortage, after all. In a circular case of causation malpractice--
"We can't reduce class sizes because we don't have enough teachers!"
"You don't have enough teachers because class sizes are huuuge."
--critics ignore the fact that the shortage of teachers is directly connected to class size.
Or do they? The truth is, not expanding the workforce, a large part of which is unionized and supports progressive policies is some people's argument against smaller classes. Just sayin.
I was an English teacher, and putting aside just the logistical issues of working with each kid every period, and class management issues of having 30 instead of 20 kids in a class, and the added difficulty spotting the really important stuff, there's one other thing that drives veteran teachers out of the business but that new teachers might not think about until they're up to their ears.
Every extra kid means another ten minutes (being conservative) of prep/feedback time outside of class each week--what we used to call "grading papers." So that class just went from 200 minutes of extra time every week (or weekend!) to 300--an extra hour and a half per week. Now multiply times five or six sections and you get an extra 8-9 hours. An extra entire work day. Per week. Extra. You can see class size makes a big difference.
Don't let anybody tell you it doesn't.
Next up: Even More Working Conditions
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