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Wednesday, January 11, 2023

The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions - Instruments of Torture

To review: The project to destroy authentic public schooling is a war fought on many battlefronts. Essential to the project is the war on teachers.

The Enemies of Public Schooling have lots of strategies for make the teaching work space unworkable. Suppressing teacher pay and attacking pensions, pretending class size doesn't matter (or pretending you've already addressed it),  endless testing.

The aim is to degrade teachers' work environment--and students' learning environment--in a multi-dimensional campaign to grind teachers up and run them out of the classroom. No teachers, no schools.

I wish I could say that attacks on teacher pay and pensions were the only issues driving teachers out or discouraging aspirants from becoming teachers in the first place. Or that huge classes and ceaseless testing were the only working conditions weaponized in the war on teachers. I wish that these were the only features in our work environment grinding teachers down and driving them out of the business, but in fact there are many, many days when other elements are even more destructive.

Some of this stuff doesn't fit perfectly into the category of deliberate attack. Much of it is the result of neglect and lack of imagination combined with an administrative structure obsessed with authoritarian hierarchies. Whether as a result of action or inaction, direct attack or simply neglect, much of the war on teachers is waged through the de-professionalization, even infantilization of teaching. 

From scripted lessons to stupid rules, teachers who are experts in their fields are demeaned and ignored, setting them on a course toward burnout and early departure. Destroy the teachers, destroy the schools. 

Stragety.

I'm sure every teacher has their own list of things that drive them crazy about their job (feel free to add your own in the comments!). 

However, in every case it's the awareness that "things don't have to be this way" that makes them a part of the war on teachers. These working conditions are not inevitable nor are they acts of nature. They are choices made by bosses carrying out the choices of bigger bosses. And it's the deliberate, aggressive disregard for teachers' experience and expertise that makes these instruments of torture so effective.

Nevertheless, the results--degraded working conditions and a shortage of teachers qualified and willing to endure them--are the same.

First let's take a ride on the reform-a-go-round, that carousel of "Hey! I've got an idea!" snake oil that consultants sell ceaselessly and education bureaucrats buy, swallow, and then throw up all over teachers in some dumbass new PD that interrupts the string of old PD reruns. 

The only thing worse than sitting through the same stupid blood-borne pathogen PD you've sat through every September since 1998 is sitting through a brand new stupid PD where "experts" who don't know a roll book from a jelly roll hand out all the answers--brand new! answers to replace last year's answers--often recited from scripts memorized during retreats and delivered with a sickening excess of zippiness.

The whole exercise saps the strength of even the bubbliest newbies and eventually coats everyone in cynicism. You're sitting there thinking about the thousand problems with which you could really use some help, and you can only experience the same cycle of ill-conceived ideas presented as solutions so many times before ceasing to take the whole charade seriously. Especially as, year after year, you watch the initial administrative enthusiasm disappear as the latest miracle cure is poorly implemented, terminated prematurely, and fades into oblivion. Pretty soon it becomes clear: that's the game plan.

I've been through whole language, phonics, and reciprocal teaching PDs. I've been through Open Court, READ 180, sustained silent reading, reading circles, independent book study, context clues, journaling, and I'm sure lots of approaches I can't even remember. Every one of them was delivered as if the "method" was a brand new discovery, and as though each one wasn't connected to all the others and all the others not named. It was ridiculous and everybody knew it and everyone had to pretend it wasn't. 

And I've left out Lucy Calkins because I just watched that battle from afar. I've also left off "science of reading" because I don't know what it is and I don't understand how it's different or why it has to replace anything. Such is the nature of the reading wars.

Note: Just for kicks, I googled "methods of teaching reading" and was introduced to "the" 4, "the" 6, "the" 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12 methods of teaching reading. That's enough for a whole semester of PDs!

So that's just the bouncing ball of teaching reading. Maybe some of you have had PDs on Carol Dweck and growth mindset. Maybe you've been subjected to Kagan cooperative learning structures. 

Maybe you've sat through (probably one) training on restorative justice. Maybe it was trauma-informed teaching, special needs students, differentiation of instruction, classroom management, student engagement, culturally responsive teaching. 

Every teacher I've ever known could benefit from an in-depth training in any one of these areas--I know I would have--but do we get that? I sure didn't. It was invariably a one-off check-the-box presentation by a district consultant or out-of-classroom coach who found out that morning that they were conducting the professional development. And virtually every one of the presentations ended with the question of what to do next and a promise to follow up. Needless to say, there wasn't any. 

The reform-a-go-round is a circle, built of one miracle cure replacing another until you get right back to where you started. There is never any follow-up, no consummation, no progress. It is debilitating, and it is a powerful weapon in the war on teachers.

Wow, that was a lot. Must be twenty-five years of wasted Tuesdays coming out. Restraint, beginning... NOW.


SecondDis    ru  p    t  ions.  

It's hard enough to get kids to focus.

It's hard to get anyone to focus in this 2023 world.

It's hard to string thoughts together in a logical sequence.

It's hard to do a lesson that starts where you left off yesterday and ends up where you need to stop for today.

Now add in announcements, late students, bathroom breaks, visits from "the office," trips to "the office,"--phone calls about attendance? For the love of god, email me!--tech glitches, fire drills, shake drills, fire false alarms, and you have dis    ru  p     t ions. Now it's harder than hard. 

These are the institutional disruptions. This doesn't even count the hungry kid or bored kid or crying kid or fighting kid or kid just having a bad day. The kids are easy. Well, not easy, but they're the reason you're there in the first place. Having kids called out of your class for pictures one at a time is not.

I was significantly more tired at the end of each day, each week just owing to the constant Dis    ru  p    t  ions. The pummeling may not have been intentional, but it took its toll. And again, operating in this careless way is a choice. It's a choice to make somebody's job easier while letting teachers and their students pay the price. 


Third, Active Shooter Drills. This one is in the "neglect and lack of imagination" category, but the failure to address gun violence in schools is another part of the war on teachers--and on students, staff and schools themselves. It's the shooting part of the war. 

Active Shooter Drills send students and teachers huddling in corners--away from the windows!--and remind everybody that they could die at any moment. Now back to complete sentences!

Where I taught, students were sadly familiar with gunfire and they knew the futility of putting a desk between yourself and a gun. The drills were a reminder that school was nothing special. They were also a reminder that the people in charge had no good ideas and didn't care enough to come up with any. So we did the drills--over and over until they were no longer taken seriously. 

And what's worse than active shooter drills? Active shooters. We had a couple where I worked. But think of Oakland. Uvalde. I think of the teacher in Virginia shot by her six-year-old student. I think of students having guns because practically everybody has guns. Answer? More drills. Wonder if parents and their kids and teachers and their kids think that's an adequate response. 


Fourth, Stupid rules

I was lucky to be inoculated against some of the dumb rules  simply because of seniority, and maybe union representation, and probably National Boards. I like to think my bosses were just too embarrassed or incompetent to make them stick. In any event, I was able to get away with ignoring a lot of them. That's not the case for everyone. And it isn't so easy in today's world of test scores and constant monitoring and micromanagement. Too bad.

A lot of the dumbest rules come from from the top, from the boss's bosses or from some stupid principaling program that teaches as its first lesson that teachers are all troublemakers and slackers and the only way to handle them is to show them who's boss. Make them do whatever you want the way you want, and you establish your authority, so the pitch goes. "How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?"

I always smelled the fear of a pretender worried about being found out. Lots of administrators are in charge of people who know much more about the job than they do, and the only way to counteract that is to be boss, when important stuff is happening but especially when the activity is meaningless. 

That's how we get to dress codes for teachers with rules for shoes and tattoos and jeans and even hair, rules that dictate no gum, and print out all your grades and I even heard about no sitting. Do not talk to any student in the hallway and Only speak directly with a student privately in the hallway. You even have stupid rules to make your students follow stupid rules: Backpacks must be stored on the backs of desk chairs, brain breaks every fifteen minutes

After I retired, the new principal where I had taught decided that everyone would come to campus for PDs in advance of the beginning of the school year. The school was just preparing to open after COVID closings, and they had a few days of prep scheduled. When everybody got there, they got a schedule and were sent to their rooms for professional developments--via zoom! I kid you not. "We could have zoomed from home!" my unlucky pals complained. Ah, but then he wouldn't have had the pleasure of making you do something stupid. 

I taught in what's called a span school and we had k-5 on one campus and 6-12 on an adjacent campus. Each campus had its own sign-in and life went on. We got a new boss one year and he decided he would have all the sign-ins at the elementary campus. It only took an extra ten minutes, and it seems like a small thing, but that's the point. He got to show us who was boss. Stupid rule.

And don't even get me started on scripted lessons synchronized among rooms so that they're portable--a student can leave my class and walk into Ms. Moran's and be on the same page! 

Has anyone ever been directed to "touch the poster"? We had posters of standards and objectives and--no kidding--we were supposed to walk up and actually touch them periodically throughout the period. If we happened to have an administrator observing, it was one of the things they knew to look for because it was one of the boxes they had to check. A kid could be on fire and they might miss it. But the poster...

Stupid rules are make-work for bureaucrats, signifiers of authority for administrators, and instruments of torture for teachers. 


Fifth, Idiot Evaluators.

The same people charged with enforcing stupid rules are the people who get to tell you whether you're doing a good job. what a racket.

I used to have a post-it on my desk just for myself. It read, "The answer to 90% of life's questions is 'because they're idiots.'" When it comes to education bosses--especially those tasked with evaluating you on something they've never done in a subject they've long forgotten, the number is closer to 100%.

As a tenured teacher with a fairly strong union, I had the advantage of performing the dog and pony show once or twice every couple of years, taking my eval and going back to teaching. Others, probationary teachers for example, and especially those in pilot schools with elect-to-work agreements that allow for nonrenewal and release, do not have that advantage. 

For everybody, however, the prospect of having someone who doesn't understand your job judge you according to a set of criteria that sometimes are at best peripheral to serving the kids, is maddening.


Sixth, Cameras in classrooms.

If there's a better expression of the contempt with which school bosses regard their students and staffs than cameras in classrooms, I don't know what it would be. The mistrust, the assumption of incompetence, the notion that teachers must be coerced into doing their jobs, all are revealed in this latest shiny object.

For students, even though their privacy has for years been sold by school officials, the enterprise is now juiced up with science fantasy as districts are investigating facial recognition software to augment to their systems. What could possibly go wrong? "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."


To conclude, the war on teachers is a multi-dimensional campaign to grind teachers up and run them out of the classroom. It is deliberate, the result of specific choices. It is waged through neglect, lack of imagination, and direct attack and bolstered by a hierarchical power structure based on mistrust and that results in leaders who resist collaboration and shared decision making. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Working conditions like those discussed here--along with a variety of others that have impacted thousands of teachers--may seem less consequential than overriding concerns like teacher pay and pensions, or workload attached to excessive class sizes, but in the day-to-day these working conditions compound the destructive effects on teachers' work lives and careers and remind us that we are not valued. In fact we are degraded and disregarded as teaching is de-professionalized. This leads many to leave the profession as soon as possible, and discourages others from entering the classroom altogether. And one more time...



Thanks for hanging in with me these past few weeks. Again, I'd love to hear about your own experiences in the war on teachers. There's lots left, like poor ventilation, no heat or air conditioning, 20 minute lunches, bathroom breaks, covering classes, etcetera etcetera etcetera. And I didn't even get COVID re-openings and phantom safety measures. Feel free to comment anonymously if that's better for you. 

Next time we'll broaden the focus to include attacks on the institution of public schooling itself--you know: charters, vouchers, funding, school board takeovers, those crazy CRT book banners--that type of thing. Until then...



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