Tag education funding

Art Schooled

Dusty Leave a comment

This was a bad school year.

It was a bad year for a number of reasons: I taught Freshman English for the first time in seven years, and it was a struggle. My students – nearly all of them – are addicted to their phones and generally unwilling to read, which made every class a struggle. My administration, which has changed – hang on – eight times in the last five years, changed again, and it was both unexpected and unwelcome, as the principal, who was a friend, had to leave the position for health reasons. But before he left, he asked me to take down a Facebook post for political reasons, which was gross, and he wrote me up for cussing at my class (which write-up was justified, because I did – well, I cussed about them in front of them, I didn’t cuss AT them, strictly speaking. But it deserved some kind of sanction.) and for leaving them unsupervised, which was NOT justified as I had just stepped out into the hall and was right outside the door, as teachers are instructed to do when we want to talk to a student individually. He left before the end of the semester, and a district admin filled in until the new principal started with the new semester: and that guy wrote me an email warning that he would write me up if I didn’t keep my classroom door closed and locked at all times. And on top of all that, Toni’s and my personal lives, specifically in relation to our families, was difficult all year, which made every stressor at school just that much harder to deal with.

And then, this spring, the school cut staff because our enrollment is projected to go down: and one of the first ones laid off was my wife, who had been the advanced art teacher at my school for the last three years, teaching an Honors/AP class and the only life drawing class offered in a public high school in Arizona. (We checked.)

That last one. That’s why I’m here writing.

Not because my wife lost her job: that sucks, it came as a shock and it ruined a very manageable system for our family, because it was very convenient for us to work at the same place, and it worked well for her to teach only part-time, and the income she earned on top of mine was enough to cover our expenses. No, I wanted to write about this because my school cut back their art program. Toni wasn’t the only art teacher, but the full-time art teacher (Who, to be entirely fair, had less seniority than Toni, and so Toni should have been offered her position rather than being cut first – but also Toni would have turned it down, because the full-time art teacher position includes teaching two levels of middle school art, which Toni did for three years the first time she worked at my school, and she will not do it again. But also, they should have offered her the position, if we are using the seniority rules that most schools abide by. But I digress.) will only be teaching Art 1, which is the usual survey art class most people get in high school, where you try a little of this and a little of that, and focus on nothing in particular – it’s a bit ADHD, really. Toni’s classes were the ones that really got into some depth, into the specifics of a form of art – drawing and painting, which are Toni’s specialties. And she knows them better than any high school art teacher: because Toni is a specialist, she doesn’t really want to do clay sculpture or weaving or whatever other art forms most high school art teachers include. But Toni’s students learn more about drawing and painting than they will anywhere outside of college – and in some cases, more than they would in college. Toni changes their way of thinking, their way of perceiving the world: it is her intent, and her students have attested to it. It works. She does it. She teaches them not only how to make art, but how to think like an artist.

My point is, our family’s personal situation aside, and my basic dander being ruffled over those buttheads RIFing my wife, my school had a unique art program. And they cut it. First thing. No, second thing; first they cut the Turkish language classes, which in some ways was even more shocking, as the school was founded by Turkish immigrants who were working in tech jobs here in Tucson, and started a STEM charter school with an international focus so that their kids could have a decent place to learn the STEM skills their engineer parents wanted them to have. The original charter for the schools includes a requirement that Turkish always be a language offered to the students. And they cut that too. But with Turkish, there may have been other reasons: the teacher struggled with the job in ways Toni did not, and the Turkish classes were not terribly popular, which Toni’s classes are; and there are two other languages (Spanish and American Sign Language) offered at the school still. So other than simply recognizing that the administration cut back on both languages and art, and they removed two different unique aspects of the school’s programs, I’m going to focus more on the art that they cut.

Because it was stupid to cut it. And damaging, both to the school and the students. I will note, along those lines, that they did also cut our paraprofessionals, who offer one-on-one assistance to our SPED students, and they cut our wonderful counselor/504 coordinator, who offered emotional and educational support to all of our students as well as to our staff. So they made the school worse in several ways, not just through cutting the arts and languages programs.

Now, of course, cuts had to be made: the enrollment is down for next year, and we get paid per student by the state. We’re losing something over 10% of our total student body next year, according to projections. We have always lost some number of students because we are a small charter school (Just so that everyone is clear on this, charter schools are public schools but we don’t have elected school boards and we don’t have a geographically fixed district to draw students from), and students who want to go to schools with larger sports programs or more elective options usually leave: every one of our high school classes (with some exceptions) is smaller than the one below it – we have fewer seniors than juniors, fewer juniors than sophomores, and fewer sophomores than freshmen. That’s expected. The problem is that we are losing students from every grade: and the puzzling thing is, so is every other public school in Tucson. One of the middling public school districts has had to cut millions of dollars from their budgets because so many students are leaving.

So the obvious question is: where are they going? If public schools were shrinking and charter schools were growing, that would make sense; it would show that parents wanted smaller class sizes for their children, and maybe a specific focus like my schools’ STEM identity. If charter schools were shrinking and public schools were growing, that would mean even more students than before wanted more elective options or maybe more varied social life and so on; also, there is definitely a number of students who are not successful at our school and who transfer to other schools hoping for a different outcome. But that goes both ways, as well; we usually get the ones who “get in trouble” and need to be removed from their friend group. And in Arizona, at least in Tucson, ALL public schools, charter and comprehensive, are shrinking.

So where are those students going?

Some are going to private schools. Some – more, I would guess, though I don’t have data – are going to online schools, or homeschooling. Some are probably just dropping out, though they may be lying about that, telling their prior school or the state that they will be homeschooled or attending online school, and then just going out and getting jobs instead.

And that’s where this all starts getting frightening.

Because this shows that public education is dying.

Probably not everywhere, though I highly doubt Arizona is alone in this; we’re just first, because we have pioneered the Republican party’s long, slow erosion of public education in this state, and we have pushed it a little farther and a little faster. Arizona has been in the bottom three for both test scores and teacher compensation for several years; now we are seeing the payoff. Especially when you include the fact that our business-friendly – sorry, make that business-sycophantic – state has cut taxes to the bare minimum and below (A trend exacerbated by the number of “snowbirds,” retired people from cold states who winter in Arizona and sometimes declare residency here and vote here, where they obsessively and virulently oppose all taxes, because they don’t need much from the state in the way of services and damned if they’re going to pay for those friggin locals), while also allowing families to create “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts,” which allow them to pull funding from public schools and spend their tax dollars on their children’s private schooling. So now we can see why private school enrollments are going up: because it is a well-established principle that our capitalist society believes that something you pay for is higher quality than something you get for free, so paying tuition at a private school clearly means their kids are getting a better education.

I mean, maybe not one with advanced art programs.

But now we don’t have that at our charter school, either, so. Might as well send my kids to that big Catholic school. You know they can maintain discipline. And they have a pretty good football team, too.

Those same ESAs help explain online schooling, as well, and I suspect there are at least some parents who take the money and make some idle gesture towards homeschooling – probably while telling their lazy kid to go get a job. Though honestly, I would guess most people who go the homeschooling route, or the drop-out-and-go-to-work route, either don’t know about the ESAs and how to access them or don’t care, and the money probably just stays in the system. What money there is in the system. Which really ain’t enough, even without families pulling it along with their kids, as though the only reason we pay taxes for schools is to educate only our own children.

Funny how those ESAs aren’t offering rebates to childless couples like myself and my wife. It’s almost like it’s intended to harm public schools, not to be “fair” to taxpayers in some way. Oh wait, that’s right: it is.

This is part of the long-term Republican project. You can see it happening faster, and a thousand times clumsier and stupider, in Trump’s attempted destruction of universities, with Harvard currently acting as the breakwater. Public education is bad for Republicans, you see, in a number of ways: first because educated citizens are harder to fool, and when your entire mission statement as a political party is to use cultural wedge issues to get elected, and then bait-and-switch so you can cut regulations and taxes for corporations and the wealthy, you need citizens who are easy to fool, or else you’ll never get re-elected. Secondly, public education tends to teach people how to question, how to reason, and how to research for themselves; all of which makes it harder to gin up a successful level of fear and anger with wedge issues. Someone who can Google competently, for instance, is far less likely to vote for politicians who promise to keep trans athletes out of sports: maybe because the competent Googler could find out just how miniscule is the population of trans athletes in sports, or one could discover that trans athletes do not have a persistent advantage in sports once they start hormone therapy, or that the divisions we have used in sports for the last century or so are not as black and white as the GOP would have us believe, as human biology and sex categories are neither simple nor clear-cut. And lastly, modern education, especially taken to the university level, tends to reduce people’s adherence to dogma, and to increase people’s empathy, not least because universities are where people meet other people who don’t look or talk or act or believe just like them. It’s easy to keep a childhood faith when you live in the same town you grew up in, where everyone goes to the same church every Sunday; it’s much harder when you go to college in a different state, and not only don’t have the exact same denomination of Christianity there, but also start meeting people from other nations, people who are Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Jewish, or atheist. Especially when you learn real science, or history.

Oh: and then there’s the fact that uneducated people make more easily exploitable workers. Right? Because uneducated people in the Appalachians are always going to be coal miners, and uneducated people in the South are always going to be sharecroppers and farmworkers, and uneducated people everywhere are going to cling to the “good” jobs they can get – by which I mean being sexually harassed at Wal-Mart or having to piss in a bottle in an Amazon warehouse – because they know they won’t be able to find anything better. So they’ll absorb wage freezes and benefit cuts, they’ll live with reduced hours and a lack of promotions. They’ll (generally) oppose unions, because they don’t want to see their paycheck go down even as little as unions dues would take; and they’ll immediately and violently turn on darker-skinned immigrants who are “taking our jobs.” All of which serves the desires of corporations and the wealthy, and therefore the primary mission of the Republican party.

So for all of those reasons, the Republican party wants to destroy public education. I am now grown cynical enough to think that the Democratic party is on board with at least some of this project – because this has been going on for decades, and the Democrats haven’t made any of the structural changes that would be necessary to solve the problems, primarily a national school funding scheme and a national curriculum and free college tuition – but at least Democrats want to appear to support education, and so they don’t pull shit like trying to close Harvard or removing evolution from school curriculum.

But they’ll sure as shit agree to cut art. Which is why my wife got cut.

To be clear, the decision to cut the advanced art teacher specifically came from the district administration. As I said above, they have cut everything they could that makes the school a better place for students; because they district administration, unsurprisingly, are Republicans. That’s an assumption, but it’s not exactly a leap, based on every interaction I have ever had with said administrators. But just like when Republicans in Washington cut something – SNAP benefits, for instance – that Democrats support pro forma but not with any sincerity, there is some noise made about opposing the GOP, and then about reversing the cuts; but all they actually do is use those cuts as their own wedge issue, to get Democratic voters to vote for whichever corporate stooge the party wants to install in power, who will then make life easier for their wealthy donors, while making it harder for their poor voters; because even though Joe Biden didn’t create a national minimum wage, or create a national system of health care coverage, or tax the wealthy in any kind of rational way, or cut the military and end all wars and the American network of international political oppression – hey, at least he’s not Donald Trump, amirite?

My friends and I have joked – bitterly, and often humorlessly – that our administration is DOGEing our school: making stupid, short-sighted cuts that are going to do far more damage to the entire endeavor than they are worth in terms of money saved, and with reckless and almost gleeful disregard for the lives they are affecting with those cuts. But while I guess the Democrats in Washington are trying to oppose Elon Musk and the DOGE cuts, I didn’t see any real opposition from any of our administration to the cuts made at our school. Regret, sure; I saw that. Wishes that a way could be found to avoid the cuts, and plenty of blame for those mean ol’ district administrators who actually determined who would be RIFed. But no action. And not that I expect anyone to throw themselves on their sword and quit so that my wife could keep her job – after all, I didn’t do that (though I recognize that such a self-sacrifice would actually be self-defeating in our particular case) – but a friend of mine pointed out that all of the teachers were given a raise this year; not a substantial one, but several hundred dollars – and if you took $500 of that raise from all of the staff members at the school, that would basically cover my wife’s salary. So if my friend the teacher could find that money, I don’t really believe the administration couldn’t. No: they didn’t try.

Because the school administrators didn’t really disagree with cutting the advanced art teacher.

They did not cut the core teachers, of course. They DEFINITELY did not cut the STEM teachers – sorry, the STM teachers, as we do not currently have an Engineering program. They did cut the administration a few years back, when they combined the principal positions at the elementary school and the middle-high into one principal of both schools (another DOGEing, because it was a stupid cut that has caused nothing but inefficiency and problems at both schools), but they didn’t cut it more to meet this most recent budget shortfall. Even though administrators get paid two to four times as much as teachers (and an even greater multiple for my wife, who was part-time, or the paraprofessionals, who were paid less per hour).

They may have regretted RIfing my wife, because she is a wonderful person and a wonderful teacher: but on the inside, they agreed that cutting advanced art was the right thing to do. And cutting the third (and least-popular) foreign language. And cutting the staff who only serve some, but not all, of the students.

Because those cuts make sense, right? I mean, the people who serve the largest number of students are clearly the most valuable. And come on: it’s not like art is that important. We all know what really matters, what schools have to focus on: jobs. And STEM is where the jobs are, the good jobs, the career jobs like computer programmers and software engineers. Aerospace engineers. Mechanical engineers.

You know: the guys who work for Elon Musk.

I could go off on this topic for a very long time. I already have, frequently. Schools should not be focused on jobs: the task of education is to make life better for our students, and thereby to make the world better for all of us; and nobody is actually served by having students go into engineering. Sure, it’s a career; but is it actually a satisfying one? One that would serve to define the identity of our students, over and above any other element, all of which other elements we almost completely ignore? Job preparation, inasmuch as it is an appropriate topic for schools, should not be focused on STEM white collar jobs like engineers or accountants or science teachers or researchers: the real need in this country, and the real area of potential employment, is in the trades. And I would argue our students would be FAR better served by becoming trained mechanics, who would make as much or more as many engineers and scientific researchers – who would go home and read philosophy and compose classical music and act in community theater and, most importantly, PAY ATTENTION TO FUCKING POLITICS IN THIS WILD SHITSTORM OF PRIVATELY FUNDED GASLIGHTING WE PRETEND IS A NATION.

But school shouldn’t be focused on job preparation, not at the K-12 level. We need to do three things: give students the basic tools they need to succeed in ANY serious endeavor in their life, primarily the ability to think critically and to learn on their own anything they have not already learned; teach them to be decent fucking human beings; and expose them to as many different kinds of human activity, as many different modes of thought, as possible. We particularly need to focus on the exactly the ones they will not use at work every day of their lives: because if we teach them nothing but how to work, what will they do during their off hours?

You know what they will do: the same thing most of them do now, the same thing that too many of us do.

Nothing.

We should teach them how to make art (And music, and poetry, and everything else that we include in the “arts”), precisely because it is not the thing they will do 9-5 Monday through Friday throughout their lives. (And also, even at a small charter STEM school, let’s not pretend there are not at least a few students there who WILL make art into the thing they do 9-5, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives; and let’s be clear that the more people we can help move into that kind of life, the better off we will all be.) It is the thing they should do to express themselves in ways they cannot, during their 9-5 jobs, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives. It is the thing they should do to claim time and mental energy for themselves, even when they willingly sacrifice all of their free time, money, and energy to their future children. Because art is one of the most personal things we can do, and everybody needs personal time, and everybody needs personal expression.

Because art is fundamental. It is fundamentally something that makes us human: it defines us as humans, because no other animals make it in quite the way we do. Art allows us to express what is inside us that cannot be expressed, which forces us to find ways to express it: and if no ways exist, it forces us to create ways to express it, because that voice inside cannot be silenced once it is ever allowed to speak. Art makes us more human, because it forces us to think in ways we normally do not, and that adaptable, imaginative projection outside of our habitual thought patterns is our primary survival strategy, our defining trait, whether we are hunting mammoths or trying to survive in the rat race of society. If we intend art to be shared with others, then it forces us to think about how others think, and how we can communicate and affect other humans; and that improves our empathy and our cooperation, and it opposes our desire to exploit and oppress each other, because you can’t exploit and oppress people you see as your equals, as your fellows: as other people who can appreciate art as you do.

That’s why billionaires are never artists.

The job of schools should not be to channel students into specific pathways; that is limiting them, it is oppressing them – it is lessening them. Art expands us: it frees us, and ennobles us. It makes us greater. That’s why students love it, because they are dying to be more than they have been allowed to be: because they want, more than anything, to discover themselves and express themselves.

Are they supposed to do that in chemistry class? In computer programming class? In math?

My school does not understand what the task of a school is. Which means they will fail at their actual task, while they are pursuing, single-mindedly, the wrong task. And they will fail at that, too. And they will never understand why.

Because they, too, are not artists.

(I’ve been listening to this next one for more than thirty years, and always loved it, and never knew what it was about — because I never bent my mind in this particular direction. Now I love it even more. The audio here isn’t the best version, but it goes SO well with the image.)

And this one’s ridiculous, but — necessary. Entirely necessary.

Starting with Ending

Dusty 1 Comment

I was going to start this project with the very beginning: with the meaning of the word “education.” Trying to decide what it even means to educate, to be a teacher, to have a school, and students.

But after the day I had last Monday, I think I should actually start with the ending. Because over the last year, I have seen some of what that ending will look like: and keeping that in mind is, honestly, even more important than fully understanding every aspect of what we are trying to do in education. Because if we don’t remember what we have to do to keep this going, there won’t be any education to understand, at least no public education, no teachers, no students, no school.

I do still plan to go all the way back and try to understand where education comes from and what it really means. I have large plans for this project; writing about education is a thing I have been meaning to do for a long time, a thing that I have done in small pieces for essentially as long as I have been teaching. I want to collect all of those thoughts, and try to make some real sense of them: and end up with something worth doing to try to improve the world where I have worked for better than two decades.

It wasn’t just Monday. Monday honestly wasn’t even that bad; of my six classes, one didn’t meet, leaving me with two prep periods (And maybe that’s the first general prescription for improving education in general: teachers who have heavy loads of writing instruction, specifically — certainly English; much of social studies; advanced language teachers and so on — should have twice the prep time while still being considered full time. For students to learn the intricacies of good writing, teachers need sufficient time to prepare, and especially to offer feedback on student work.); my AP classes were (mostly) good; my Fantasy/Science Fiction elective was great, as usual. It was my regular Sophomore English classes that gave me trouble.

But it was more than how my classes behaved Monday, and that’s the point, and the reason why that day helped me to see the end. I was talking with my good friend, fellow teacher, and carpooling partner about where we think this is going, and this is my opinion: either we’re going to change things to make education work again, and better; or it’s going to collapse. I believe that we can make the changes we need to make to fix this situation; but I also believe that the collapse is more likely.

You can already see elements of it. My school has always had trouble keeping teachers, both because the pay is too low in this state, so even though my school is one of the higher-paying schools in the area, people keep leaving teaching altogether, mostly to go into tech jobs (Which is kind of hilarious because I work at a STEM school, which means we can’t keep teachers teaching STEM to students because the teachers would rather just work in STEM — and so goes the nation), and also because our former principal was a terrible, terrible administrator, who drove people away both intentionally and with bad management. But lately this problem has grown so severe that now we can’t fill positions: last year we lost a social studies teacher, and it took three months to find a replacement, who then quit at the end of the year; we also lost a math teacher after the first semester, who was then replaced for the second semester, but then we lost the replacement math teacher after three months, and there was no replacement, just a long term sub. This year the school hired a math teacher from outside the US (One of the great things about my school is that the community is widely diverse, both staff and students), who unfortunately has not been able to get through the US Immigration rigamarole, despite having a job waiting for them. The long-term sub who took the math position at the end of last year, after the second teacher quit, has been hired permanently to replace the social studies teacher who left; and the school has been unable to find a long-term sub for the currently missing math teacher — so the math department has been covering the classes, filling in on their prep periods. This unfair imposition (which really approaches exploitation) was ended after four weeks of school: only for the math department to be replaced by all the other teachers, being forced to cover classes on our prep periods. So now I’m teaching Algebra 1 every Wednesday morning, instead of preparing for my own ELA classes.

It’s not just my school, of course. This article has many lovely little gems in it. Here are the highlights:

“According to one school administrator, many districts started panicking earlier in the year. While Arizona has suffered a teacher shortage for a while now, districts appear to be facing even more teacher vacancies at the start of the school year in 2022 than in years past.”

Isn’t it strange that when you have a problem and you do nothing to address it, the problem gets worse? The fact that the statewide response has been Do nothing, then panic, explains everything about how Arizona has dealt with this issue. And, of course, how America is dealing and will continue to deal with this issue. Or at least the half of America that hasn’t dealt with the issue.

“In May, a lot of my HR colleagues throughout Arizona were contacting me that they have zero applicants for their teacher jobs,” said Justin Wing with the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association. “They’re worried. Whatever is worse than severe is going to be happening this year.”

“Whatever is worse than severe?” Sir. There are a million words in the English language. Several of them describe a situation that is worse than severe: Dire. Abominable. Deplorable (Oop — not that one…). Abysmal. Execrable. A shitshow.

Or how about “predictable and intentional?”

Why do I say “intentional?” Because here is the crux:

Arizona has one of the highest teacher-to-student ratios in the country, and despite recent raises, Arizona still has one of the lowest average teacher pay, at around $52,000.

The national average for teacher pay is just over $64,000

“When teachers received that 20% in three years, we went from 49th in teacher pay, to 49th in teacher pay,” said Wing. “I do think the main root cause of the teacher shortage is pay.”

This state is loath to pay teachers. Even when they raise the rate, they don’t raise it relative to other states, or to the actual cost of living. The fact that Arizona could raise the teacher pay rate 20% and still not move in the rankings shows just how bad it was before the current governor, Doug Ducey, added the raise to the state budget. (Let’s also note that he cut corporate and top-bracket personal income taxes in the same budget, so. We’ll see how that will all work out. We’ll further note that Governor Ducey is leaving office at the end of this year due to term limits, so the budgetary mess he’s leaving behind? Not his problem.)

Last one from the first article:

In a recent statewide survey of school administrators, two-thirds agree that there are more teacher vacancies this year than ever before. As of June of this year, schools reported more than 2,200 teacher openings, mostly for K-6.

“It’s very concerning,” said Wing. “We can’t leave kids alone in the classroom teaching themselves. Districts have to move administrators or coaches back into the classroom, which means other things are not being supported.”

So here we are: teacher vacancies that can’t be filled, because the root cause of the problem has not been addressed; and the stopgap measure is to put the wrong people in front of the classroom. They would raise class sizes and drop teacher positions entirely, but they already did that. Now they are making those of us who remain work even harder to handle the load. And the state’s newest strategy? Bring in young, inexperienced, underqualified teachers to fill the jobs. But this will, of course, only worsen the problem in the long term, as the state is asking future teachers to become full-time employees before they are ready, before they are fully trained and prepared; and their task will be made even harder by the fact that they will be required to do extra work to cover all the other teachers who have already left. Right now these degree-less teachers have to be in their last year of college, and must be “supervised” by a licensed teacher — verbiage that is supposed to make us think that the licensed teacher is in the room, but of course that’s not what supervision usually looks like with new teachers; usually it means something more like mentoring, with maybe a single weekly meeting and some random check-ins to see how it’s going. When they run through these future teachers, they will expand it to students two years before they earn their degree, and then three years; eventually last year’s high school graduates will be asked to step up and cover a couple of classes. After all, they learned the material, right? They can handle a class or two. (And they’re so much cheaper than fully trained and qualified professionals!)

Or of course we could follow Florida’s lead and believe that, somehow, being a military veteran qualifies you to teach.

This is the path we are on. And it ends when there simply aren’t enough adults to supervise classes, and the students get thrown together into huge masses in gyms and cafeterias, and told essentially to teach themselves. The step after that is when the school just shuts down.

It’s fine: kids can go online, right?

I have no doubt that this is the end goal for those, mainly but not exclusively on the right, who want to end public education and promote stratified private education, which will allow the upper classes to maintain their current stranglehold on economic power and mobility. Education is the great leveler, and the great lifter of those born into poverty; and thus it is the great enemy of the ones on top who want to stay there, and don’t want to share with those below them. And so they yell and scream about indoctrination, and grooming, and thus create livid hatred and distrust of public school teachers: adding social pressure to all of the current pressure.

And at some point, we will collapse under the weight.

But that’s not the really insidious part. You want to know the really insidious part?

It is that public education is locally funded and locally controlled. Which means that, in the most liberal and progressive states, teacher salaries are — well, reasonable, if not fantastic. And education is well-funded and successful.

Which means that people in those states can ignore the problem in the other, redder states. And so they do: because what can people in Massachusetts and Hawaii do about laws and budgets in Mississippi or North Dakota? Their own children are cared for as well as they can be; and that’s the limit of their responsibility. I understand that entirely: I make sure that my students know as much as I can help them learn about English, and I not only don’t care how much math they know, but I actively mock math as a subject. And PE, too, but that’s as it should be.

So I understand NIMBYism.

But consider how that has affected all of the nations in Central and South America, which we have actively exploited and ruined, and then left to their own devices. The problems we created and ignored have returned to us, arriving in our own backyards. As with climate change. And our imperial interventionist tendencies around the world, particularly in oil-rich regions.

And so it will be if we allow education in this country to remain uneven and unequitable from state to state. If we do not all deal with the whole problem, we will all face the consequences.

The two biggest issues facing education today are a lack of funding, combined with ever-increasing workloads as school employees are required to fill in for all of the missing personnel and programs; and the disparate, unequal, and frankly insane system of local funding and local control of schools.

If we fix those now, we can turn this around, still. And it’s one fix: a single, federal source of all funding, of all oversight, of all control. That’s the answer. I know. It’s socialism. Take a deep breath and swallow the medicine: local control of schools is insane and stupid. A nation that has one people — which is, after all, the whole fucking idea of a nation — needs one system of education for everyone, with specific measures to accommodate individual local needs and difficulties. Otherwise it isn’t one nation of one people. Because it isn’t the topic for today, but what is education? The creation and maintenance of a culture. And what is a culture? It is what sets one people apart, what makes them into one people. So if you want this country to be a country, then it needs to have a single, universal, fair, equitable, effective system of education. If we can achieve that, we will have a chance.

If we can’t, then we’re doomed.

http://www.sheina.fr/united-we-stand

Walking Out

Dusty 2 Comments

[Read Part One: Money Talks]

[Read Part Two: But You Get Summers Off]

 

It is fascinating how America views teachers.

In the last week I’ve been told, repeatedly and stridently, that parents support teachers. I’ve also been told that we should be grateful for that support, and we shouldn’t do anything to risk its continuance. That as long as parents support us, everything will be fine.

But I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s really true that teachers have parents’ support, and I certainly don’t think that the support of parents is the most important thing teachers could ever, ever have.

I don’t think everything’s going to be fine. Not unless we are willing to do what is necessary to make things right, right now.

I don’t mean to complain. I want that to be clear. I’m writing this series because I want people to understand, not because I want you to pity me. There are things about my job that I love, and that’s why I still do it; that’s why I defend it as vigorously as I can, because I want to be able to continue doing the things I love, hopefully without also having to do the things I hate, like enforce sexist dress codes and assign meaningless and misleading grades, or give hours and hours of pointless, mind-breaking tests. Or survive on insufficient money, with insufficient funds available for my classroom and my school to allow me to do an adequate job.

If I cannot get the things I need to be happy here in this job, I will quit and move on; I will find another state that pays teachers better, and I will get a job there. But while that solves my problem, there will still be a million students in Arizona who need teachers: and if not me, then who? Shall I give them the same advice that I keep getting thrown in my face, namely, “If you don’t like it, go somewhere else?” Shall all one million Arizona students move with me to California and find school districts there with adequate resources, who pay their teachers a reasonable wage and so don’t have 40-50% turnover and hundreds of unfilled positions? That sounds like a solution, right?

It’s not. Of course not. Just like the other things that get spat at me and my colleagues on Twitter that are not solutions. But they do show how America views teachers: and it is fascinating.

So what should we do? What should teachers do about this funding crisis in Arizona, this decades-long slide into poverty and a broken, underfunded school system? To be specific, for those who haven’t been a part of this conversation up until now, Arizona cut more funding from schools than any other state during the Great Recession: funding went down 36.6% from 2008 to 2015. Some progress was made in the last three years, but the state is still spending almost 20% less now than ten years ago. About half of the new money since 2015 was mandated by a lawsuit brought against the state government by teachers, [NB: If you go to that link, Prop. 123 is the referendum I mention below. Please note where the lawsuit requires $300 million spent on capital improvements annually, and Governor Ducey promised $17 million.] because the legislature failed to follow through with an earlier state supreme court decision in another lawsuit; the first decision was that the state actually needed to fund schools, which apparently they did not want to. They were required to fund capital improvements to sites and facilities, and to provide funding for textbooks and supplies. They were also instructed to increase the funding yearly for inflation. That last part, they stopped doing; and so the teachers sued the second time, and the courts again decided that, according to the state constitution, Arizona does need to actually fund education. Rather than simply increase revenue to cover that expense, the state passed a referendum settling the lawsuit for 70% of what was owed; that money came from sales of state-owned land (Land which is already supposed to be used to fund education, a fact which made a judge rule the Proposition was illegal.). This is the source of the increased funding that our governor, Doug Ducey, has been crowing about for four years; and it still falls short of where we were a decade ago.

So essentially, the state of Arizona is a deadbeat dad: they do anything they can to get out of paying what they owe for their own children; up to and including just not handing over the money, refusing to pay the bill until the courts force the issue – and then grudgingly paying part of it, and demanding credit for what they did pay.

As I said: what should we teachers do about this problem? We are on the front lines, but though we do suffer because of this, in the form of absurdly low pay (Arizona ranks 48th in pay for high school teachers, 50th for elementary school) and insufficient resources to do the job properly, we are not the main victims: that would be the students themselves, who have to make do with not enough, not as much as other states, not as much as they deserve, in everything from school buildings to programs to textbooks to computer resources to good, stable teachers who stick around for more than a few years. We teachers see this, every day; we live this, every day; we try to make up for it, every day.

What should we do to fix it?

According to one fellow I talked with on Twitter, we should talk about walking out, but not actually do it.

“I support the need for more money in education,”

he said.

“I do not support the manner in which teachers are trying to get it. This hurts, kids and families. There is a much better way to accomplish this goal.”

So I asked, “How?” And because I’m a teacher, I added, “Please be specific.”

He replied,

“Here is how. Use this momentum from #RedforEd to force the Governor and legislators to the negotiating table with the threat of a walkout to start the 2018 – 19 school year. Parents will support you, Ducey will be motivated due to election. Kids and families not affected.”

We went back and forth a little more, but this was the gist. I did not say, though it is true, that the #RedforEd movement has been active since February, and so far the governor has refused to negotiate directly with the main group, Arizona Educators United. (By the way: that is not a union. It’s just a group of teachers who decided to do something more than try to make do with what we’re handed by the state.) I did say that I don’t understand why Ducey would feel more pressure to negotiate after the teachers decided to do nothing for four months; my Twitter friend didn’t have an answer other than he wanted us to wait. He wanted teachers to make sure that kids and families were not affected, because that way we would keep parents’ support. (Because his son is a high school junior, and apparently it would be catastrophic if he didn’t have school now.)

I’ve heard this from more than one person: they support the teachers, but not the walkout that the Arizona teachers have planned. They think we should continue threatening the walkout, but not actually do it, because that will hurt students and parents.

That’s right. It will. And that’s the idea.

I don’t want to do that. I want to believe that Americans like their teachers enough to understand what we’re asking for, and why. I’ve tried to make it clear with these blogs, but in case I haven’t, let me say it outright: we want to be able to do our jobs. That’s it. We don’t want to get rich: as everyone under the sun knows, teachers don’t become teachers to get rich. No one expects that. We don’t want someone else to do our job for us, and we don’t want to find a way out of work: that’s not the reason for the walkout. I think, actually, that parents sometimes forget that teachers are not their teenaged children; after all, we spend all of our time together, and the kids often tell their parents how much they like some of us, and how much they hate some of us; I’m sure in their anecdotes, teachers sound like – other teenagers. “My English teacher is so cool, all laid back and stuff. But my science teacher is a total loser. He thinks he’s funny, but he’s so lame!” And teenagers want a day off. Several days off, if possible. Because they’re teenagers: I had one of my students, very sweet girl, when someone mentioned a school district that was canceling classes because of the teacher walkout, say, “I’m so jealous!”

I’m not. I’d rather not be one of those people who have to take the risk, who have to dig in their heels and fight the entire community, simply because the community has ignored and neglected our needs for years and years, and a few years more. I’d really rather be one of the self-righteous people arguing against me, than me.

We don’t want days off, don’t want to get out of work; we want to be able to be successful in the work we are already doing. Teachers aren’t striking for fewer students (though we should) or lighter requirements in terms of preparation or training or testing or evaluations, or anything else related to working conditions: all we want is more money. And not just for ourselves: because Governor Ducey offered teachers a 19% raise over the next three years, and the teachers’ overwhelming response was to vote for the walkout.

Why did the teachers turn down the pay increase? Three reasons: one, we don’t trust the governor and the legislature, who have failed for years to provide legally mandated funding; two, the pay increases extended past the gubernatorial election this fall, and so who knows if the next governor will feel any need to keep Ducey’s promises (And I include the possibility that Ducey will get re-elected and then feel no need to keep his own promises afterwards); and three – and most important – the pay increase was only for teachers, according to the governor’s definition of “teacher.” It did not include teacher’s aides, or secretaries, or counselors, or janitors, or anyone else who is just as vital to education as the teachers are. It didn’t even include those who teach enrichment classes, like elementary school music and PE, because it was only for teachers who had their own roster. It did not include necessary increases to capital spending, where Arizona has cut 84% of funds compared to 2008, money that is needed for facilities and resources. The governor tried to throw money at the teachers – some of us – but he refused to fund education. And the teachers refused to accept the deal.

And yet we get called greedy. We are accused of taking extreme actions that will hurt children, because teachers are walking out across the state today, and classes are being canceled and schools are being closed, and parents have to find something to do with their kids. Wouldn’t it have been more greedy if we ignored what was best for students and schools and just took the payoff?

So let’s talk about the walkout, because I’ve been hearing a lot about it from people on Twitter. Comments like this:

I never said I don’t support the teachers, I do…but this is the wrong way to go about it. The community and parents have been very supportive of our teachers but this walk out only hurts the students and the community. For many students, they’ll have no where to go.

This particular person is insistent that she supports the teachers, in all things, in all ways, except in this one way: she says the walkout will hurt students and families. Because parents will have to take off work in order to watch their kids. That, apparently, is insupportably, unspeakably evil of the teachers to do. She also wants us to do nothing but wait, and know that we have the support of the parents. So long as we don’t walk out, that is.

I’ve also gotten comments like this:

Great example for your students, teachers. Akin to taking ball and going home.

#redforedaz is an evil movement founded by clowns WHO SIGNED CONTRACTS!! And your children are being left without an education! #MondayMotivaton

(Honestly, I’m curious about the hashtag at the end of that one. I’m supposed to be motivated by this? Also, the sheer number of typos in the anti-teacher tweets is both 100% amusing, and 1000% unsurprising. This is my favorite:

#redforedaz is another entitlement programme. Teachers are WELL PAID considering they work only 9 months. Average teachers salary is 35, 000 a year. Teachers are on a 45, 000 a year course! Wow!!! To think, these teachers are teaching you’re kids! #appalling

At least he spelled “appalling” correctly. He made it a thread, too:

Stop making teachers look like the victims. They are still paid whiner!

I believe this man has made his point.)

All right. First, the contract. Teachers do sign contracts, and those contracts determine our pay. It generally doesn’t change over the year, so we know what we’re signing up for – though there are performance bonuses and incentives, also known as merit pay; if my students’ test scores are high enough, my pay goes up, if they are lower, it goes down. If I’m a coach or I spend extra time helping students enter competitions, then I get paid more the better my students do and the more time I spend helping them. And sure, I suppose a teacher working hard and teaching well would be able to earn more thereby; but when my students intentionally tank the test because the schools have tested them to death and they just can’t care any more, or when the students this year aren’t interested in entering competitions, or this year’s volleyball team sucks, then all the good teaching or coaching in the world won’t earn me that money.

More importantly, the contract doesn’t really set working conditions: there’s nothing in there about a budget, or resources. There’s no guarantee that we will have textbooks, or enough paper to make copies for the whole year, and if we don’t, then I have to work harder: find new resources, create new resources, raise funds myself. There’s nothing in the contract about class sizes. So if I agree to take X dollars to teach for the year, and then my school doubles my student load, I have to work twice as much for the same salary. Which, of course, happens all the time. And if enrollment drops and a class loses too many students – especially if it’s an elective – then the class is canceled, and suddenly, my contract signed in the spring is worth less in the fall.

Tell me again about how contracts are binding agreements that I have a responsibility to follow through on.

No: it takes two parties living up to their agreement to make a contract binding. And if nothing else, the state of Arizona has not held up its end of the bargain, for years. I think there is no argument, legal or moral, that says that Arizona teachers can’t walk out on these contracts. I will also note that, unless the walkout lasts so long that the school year gets canceled, most school districts will extend their year for as many days as the walkout cost them; which means the same teachers who walk out will walk back into their classrooms and put in as many days of work as were agreed to, and without any increase in money, as any deal struck will not take effect until next school year at the earliest. And all of the teachers’ plans will be disrupted and delayed too, and our summer will be shorter, too.

So those who are arguing that we signed a contract and we have to live up to it, please understand: we will. We will do more to abide by the agreement than will the other side. If you want to uphold the rule of legal agreements and insist that people keep their word, then look to the state capitol.

I don’t know how much I need to address the direct ad hominem attacks; I’m sorry if the Monday Motivaton guy doesn’t like the leaders of the RedforEd movement, but it really is a grass-roots movement; thousands of teachers have joined voluntarily without any sort of pressure at all. I did, even though I was told I was being suckered by a 23-year-old Socialist, or that I had

“opted to follow a quasi-union led by DNC delivery boys. You sold freedom”

I don’t remember selling freedom. Didn’t get anything from the DNC, either. I’ve seen a couple of digs from teachers at the Republican party, but honestly, they have controlled the state government that shorted education for the last two decades, so they really do own this. But I have not seen the same calls for registering-and-then-voting-the-bums out that have characterized, say, the gun control movement led by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students; these teachers just want our current government to fix this problem, right now, and if the government does so, I think they can wrap up the election in November, since this is a comfortably red state as it is. If they don’t help fix this problem, then they shouldn’t be re-elected, though I haven’t seen any of the RedforEd movement people agitating for replacement candidates: the election is too far away. We want this fixed now.

I also don’t feel the need to argue that we aren’t childish: childish would be throwing eggs at the governor and then trying to steal office supplies to make up for our insufficient pay. Or just quitting: for the guy who said we were taking our ball and going home, wouldn’t that be if all the teachers quit and walked off with our educations? If we’re fighting to get better working conditions so we can continue doing our job, isn’t that very much not “taking our ball and going home?” How about the bad example, is it that? Again, I don’t know how much students are going to absorb the desire to strike; I know that teachers hate the idea completely, and so I doubt many of us are talking it up to kids; I also know that it would be a worse example to set if we let ourselves get abused and devalued, and yet kept busting our asses for insufficient compensation. I have heard students say for years that they don’t ever want to be teachers, based on what they watch us deal with: so I don’t think it is the teachers who are setting a bad example.

But are we hurting them? Are we hurting our students and their families by walking out?

On some level, yes. We are. Some families will struggle to find child care during the strike (Though I know a whole state full of high school students/babysitters who are going to have a lot of free time…). There are students who are taking AP tests who will miss out on some last minute preparation before the tests, which start next week. I presume there are athletes who will lose their coaches, and performers who will miss opportunities, and some experiences that won’t happen because the teachers are not working.

But this is what has done the most harm at the school where I work: the first year I worked there, 2014-2015, there were two teachers who quit at the end of the year, our Spanish teacher and one of our best science teachers. Both because of pay. We also lost a PE teacher and a science/math teacher to budget cuts. The second year, there were six teachers who quit: science, math, art, two social studies, and English. Seven if you count the long-term sub who replaced one of the social studies teachers for half of the year; he got a job in California. They had different reasons for leaving, but pay was a factor for several of them. The school didn’t replace the science teacher. Third year, it was two math teachers and another science teacher – and one of those math teachers was the heart of our school, the best math teacher I’ve ever known, the reason why our STEM school has had such success. They didn’t replace one of the math teachers that year, either. Oh, we also lost our school psychologist. In three years, we’ve had thirteen teaching positions emptied: and I work at a small charter school with a total teaching faculty of 23. We’ve had more than 50% turnover in three years.

How many teachers are we going to lose this year? What are the chances that their replacements will be better? Who is more likely to leave to seek employment elsewhere, the good worker, the smart teacher, the capable employee — or the one who is already entrenched and doesn’t want to leave for fear they won’t be hired anywhere else? That’s not to say the teachers who have stayed at my school are like that – but our turnover rate is not unusual, so I think it’s a fair argument for the state as a whole. A lot of the best teachers are leaving. Even if good teachers replace them, then experience is lost, continuity is lost, relationships are lost. And as budgets continue to be cut, despite the funding increases touted by our governor, class sizes go up and good outcomes become less and less likely. And I don’t mean good outcomes for the teachers: I mean for the students. The students whom we are hurting by walking out.

Hurts pulling off a bandaid, too. But it’s better to do it, and better to do it quick and sudden.

I do know that the walkout will hurt people. Teachers will get fired, faculty members will get into bitter arguments and conflicts; students will lose out on education and some opportunities; parents are going to miss work and have enormous headaches dealing with child care. But when the only alternative is to go on as we’ve been doing, then it isn’t a choice. Parents who argue that their support for the teachers will be lost because of the strike have not been enough to fix the problem, despite their goodwill and support, because the problem is still here. The goal of the strike is to push other people: those who have done nothing but take advantage of the teachers willing to work and keep working without enough pay, those parents who are willing to keep sending their kids to less-than-ideal schools so long as they themselves don’t have to worry about it, and all those people who ignore the serious consequences of an inadequate education system just so long as they don’t have to pay more in taxes. Those are the ones we want to hurt. Those are the ones we want to push to take action, to inflict their ire, perhaps goaded by us, on those who actually merit it: the government, the deadbeats, the people in the state capitol who have let us sink to this level.

I am sorry it will hurt, and I have tried not to be too aggressive or insulting with this series, or with my Tweets. It helped that I am currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird with my 9th grade English class, because I got to read this scene, when Atticus Finch tells his daughter why she can’t haul off and punch anyone who insults her father because he is defending a black man accused of rape.

“Come here, Scout,” said Atticus. I crawled into his lap and tucked my head under his chin. He put his arms around me and rocked me gently. “It’s different this time,” he said. “This time we aren’t fighting the Yankees, we’re fighting our friends. But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home.”

There are a million students in Arizona. There are tens of thousands of teachers. We all live together, and work together. After this fight is over, we will go back to teaching, and they will go back to learning. We will all go back to doing what we can, working together, supporting each other, for the sake of the children, of our students, of our future. Let’s try to remember that, and try not to let this get too vicious. We all need this resolved, in the right way, in the best way: quickly, and well. Please help make that happen. Please help us get what we need to do what we want to do: to teach. To teach as well as we can, for as long as we can.

You say you support the teachers? Are you just going to talk the talk?

Or will you walk the walk?