It's Almost Impossible To Be A Good Teacher In A Bad School

In 2007 during my battle at a Northwest Side high school, I wrote a paper entitled It’s Almost Impossible To Be A Good Teacher In A Bad School.   It’s too long, but I share part of it here.  There are at least four factors responsible for a bad school.  One is authoritarian leadership overseeing 21^st Century urban youth.  I’ve used allegory to describe an actual meeting one morning at a school named Pitiful.

They Don’t Get No Respect

At Pitiful High School there’s a meeting every morning; consequently, teachers begin their day under threat of reprimand and with no time to reflect.  At these meetings veterans are belittled by administrators and lectured to by neophytes who give repetitive examples of how to conduct generic lessons that supposedly will raise test scores (They didn’t).  Wednesdays were Common Planning Meetings for every teacher in every department.  So, one bright September morning, during a CPT meeting, the department chair  Ms. Please! Just-Do-As-You-Are-Told was summoned over the intercom no less than four times.  Ms. Please! was discussing the common assessment when first summoned; the second summons was to meet the principal, Dr. Queen on the Throne, in room 666.  At this point, Ms Please! Just-Do-As-You-Are-Told was frazzled and frustrated.  About two minutes later, an assistant summoned Ms. Please!  as well as Ms. Too-Old-To-Be-Naïve and Ms. I-Can-Do- Anything (all part of the same CPT team) to room 666 where the meeting was to be reconvened.  The three made their way to the room of gloom, but as they approached, they saw Dr. Queen on the Throne hobbling away.  Ms. I-Can-Do-Anything called out, “Dr. Queen on the Throne! Dr. Queen on the Throne!” A student then called, “Dr. Queen on the Throne!”  Ms. Too-Old-To-Be-Naïve added,”Dr. Queen on the Throne, we’re all here!”  The Queen finally turned around and headed back to 666 where she proceeded to tear into Ms. Please’s ass for not getting there sooner.  Thus the meeting began again with the addition of the principal and another “team” member, Ms. Oh-My-God.  It was pitiful: like reality show contestants about to be eliminated, the teachers tried to impress the Queen by outdoing each other with suggestions, defense of, and criticism for the common assessment they were to work on.  Those educators had nearly 100 years of experience among them, but that morning they turned on each other, snappin’ like turtles.  A room of only five filled with tension and toxins that swirled a disastrous poison.  The stress those teachers felt negatively impacted their students, no doubt.  An educator  made to feel bad is one more reason why it’s almost impossible to be a good teacher in a bad school.

Think Radical Reconstruction

In the hunt for a job, I kept seeing a posting for an English teacher at a charter high school in one of the worst communities in the country:  Englewood.  So, I applied, over and over again.  Finally, an HR person responded and said she didn’t want to waste my time because I fell outside their salary range.  I asked her to state the pay; she did; I accepted and was granted an interview which consisted of teaching a class of sophomores at the end of the day, at the end of a week, which was at the end of a semester, and they had already run off one teacher.

Even though, as a veteran teacher from the projects, I walked into that classroom thinking I was ready.  I informed the class that the lesson was one of self-discovery, taken from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.  However, on that late Friday afternoon, they didn’t give a damn about self-discovery.   The department chair, a young white man in blue jeans, came in  with a lap top and sat focused on it; until at one point he got up and said: “While most of you are working, there are a few of you being disruptive”; then he sat back down and attended the lap top. But I begged his pardon and stated, “NO. MOST OF YOU ARE NOT FOCUSSED.” Then, I asked the chair about their discipline policy. Of course, 90% of discipline is handled by the classroom teacher, yet there was detention. Consequently, I asked the day-to-day sub to go get detention slips. She inquired did I want just one; “NO,” I replied, “ I’LL NEED SIX OR MORE.” That’s when the room quieted and we finished the lesson.  (If I had it to do again, I would spend that hour just getting to know them.  Only at the end would I introduce a more structured approach to self discovery)

Note, the average urban classroom consists of students who get up and walk around for no apparent reason; some who shout out; others who don’t listen, and some who are fearful, so they disrupt: gossiping, hitting, cussin’ & fussin’.  This is the reality. Yet every inner city school changes its name to “college prep” or “academy” and installs a curriculum designed to prepare students to take tests.  In areas plagued by poverty, violence, and broken families, a course of study that reveals talents and the wonders of life should be tried.  Reading, writing, arithmetic, and critical thinking skills can be taught within the wider context of political, cultural,  environmental, and spiritual AWARENESS.

Here is my recurring point:  More choice among equally challenged schools is no choice at all.  And a longer school day of more test preparation is not an improvement.  Think radical restructuring of what we teach and how we teach it.  Think travel; think cyber exploration; think student experimentation, creation, and decision making.  I hear you saying, “ This will never happen, will never work.”  Well, never say never.  Didn’t think you’d see a Black president either, did you? 

A Case for Nonresistance

If I had known then what I know now, my actions would have been heroic, maybe.  Minus the crystal ball, however, my fall was merely the consequence of a fatal flaw: the inclination to fight.  Graduation day in the spring of 2002, I was awarded a doctorate in education.  I cried.  The tears signified a battle I was going to lose.  

Three years after that fateful day, and scores of Friday nights venting with colleagues, I decided to run for teacher representative on the local school council.  My campaign speech was one sentence only: “If you elect me, I’ll convey the truth as I know it.” Well, I won. My first report to the LSC declared: “The school is toxic.  The administration is rehiring retired cronies who are collecting a pension in addition to a salary. Furthermore, the principal keeps a hit list targeting those she dislikes. And, team teaching is a debacle, since special education teachers are paired with “regular” teachers without rhyme, reason, or preparation.  Last but not least, the school is only concerned with appearances. Teachers and staff are required to sing and dance to the same tune in a bad show called No Child Left Behind.  We paint our faces and shuffle our feet.”  It goes without saying; this report put me on the hit list.  I sued the Board of Education: fought the law and the law won.

 I didn’t ponder the repercussions of challenging a principal who had patently and deliberately waited 40 years to be queen on her throne. No, I reacted to the oppressive environment, the meaningless meetings, the show.  I was outraged that higher test scores represented a god to whom we were to pay homage, a god that hijacked 90% of the curriculum. I was moved by the frustration and demoralization of my friends and colleagues, who did what demoralized individuals often do—take their  frustrations out on those less fortunate—the students.  However, 21^st Century youth retaliate.

Inner city students perceive hypocrisy with the acuity of those who have been lied to.  They respond to condescension and contempt with disregard and violence.  Teachers were regularly threatened and assaulted. But more than this, students turned on themselves.  Fights occurred frequently, girls being particularly violent. One day, as a group of young women fought from the first floor to the third. I tried to stop it. Turning a colleague’s sarcastic suggestion into what I regarded as a plausible rationale for a return to sanity, I declared: “Boys don’t like girls who fight,” and was calmly informed, “My nigga like a bitch who’s got his back.” Given this kind of thinking, it’s ridiculous that urban schools main goal is to raise test scores.  Change hearts and minds.

   I wrote letters to Arne Duncan, then CEO of CPS; Michael Scott, the President of CPS; Donald Pittman, acting head of high schools; and Linda Perzchalski, the Area Instructional Officer; I even wrote to Mayor Daley!  I begged them all, “Look at what’s really going on; look at our communities, look at the misogyny; look at the self-hatred, look at the violence and destruction.  Raise consciousness,” I argued,  “and test scores will follow.   Where is the courageous, unselfish leadership that will actually put children first?” I asked. The answer was the Chicago Board of Education is a circulatory system that feeds and protects itself at the expense of those they are supposed to serve.

So, I left that system and began working as an administrator in a new high school run by a charter company.  Guess what? They were even worse.  Teachers were allowed to kick out students for any reason whatsoever; some sending half or more of their classes to in-school-suspension. The long term answer to discipline problems became transferring the worst students to neighboring high schools.  The solution to closing the achievement gap became changing grades and test scores. 

Determined to do better, I brought together teachers, administrators, parents and community.  I proposed an all girls school of performing arts, grades 6-12, on the West Side of Chicago, funded through Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 Program.  But, after much work, my design team discovered our efforts were wasted from the start.  A top official at CPS central office had already selected the curriculum and the school to be established.  That defeat was the beginning of my stupefying search for employment, documented in an earlier blog.

Finally, regarding nonresistance, rather than challenging a bad principal, No Child Left Behind, and Chicago politics, I should have kept my mouth shut.  Yet, that’s the thing about fatal flaws: they are part of your character, what makes you you.  I couldn’t tell my students to fight for what they believe in if I wasn’t willing to fight.  And if I wasn’t willing to fight, who would I be?

The Charter Lie

Having worked in urban private, public, and charter schools, when I saw the news early Monday morning, I shook my head.  California now allows parents to take over failing schools and turn them into charter schools.  OK then.  If the parents are savvy enough to assess staff, policy, and curriculum, and if these parents have the good of all children at heart, not just their own, go right ahead.  If on the other hand, parents are poorly educated, misinformed products of a sick village, like Compton where this controversy is brewing, then they will be pawns of Michelle Rhee and a charter movement where millions of dollars are reallocated by powerful agents looking to advance private agendas.  I’ve seen parents acquiesce to authorities who didn’t care about, and worst, secretly despised their children.  These parents aided bad principals in return for as little as a t-shirt, a turkey, or a piece of pizza and the perception of power.

Schools reflect neighborhoods.  High quality education in wealthy and well to do communities is not just the result of greater resources but also a consequence of the educated people who populate them.  Yes, resources are important, but a child’s achievements are primarily determined at birth.  Can a poor child from a poor family achieve academic and economic success? Absolutely.  Parents who put the child’s welfare first, parents who are nurturing and supportive can have children who  thrive, even in oppressive neighborhoods.  On the other hand, if a child is born to a parent who is very young and lacks sufficient help; a parent who is in jail, on drugs or otherwise defeated by a hard-knock life, then that child brings a world of hurt into a classroom, and if a school has many such children, then that school has a monumental task.  The charter promise to deliver services through people who purport they can do more for these children with less resources is a lie.

Now, there are a few successful public, private, and charter schools in depressed urban areas, and the one thing all these schools have in common is leadership.  These schools have the kind of leader Cornel West describes: one who loves those she leads and serves to save.  This is an answer: smart, confident, loving, courageous leaders who will sacrifice their own comfort for the good of those they lead.  Such leaders may be afforded a chance to serve through a charter, but more than likely an arrogant, insecure manager will direct the course of a charter school and yield the same if not worst results as the existing community school.

The Stupefying Search for Employment

I’ve been unemployed for two years. TWO YEARS!  Friends, family, and acquaintances can’t believe it, neither can I; like my 92 year-old aunt says, “All that education and you can’t find a job, ump, ump, ump.”

Well, this stupefying chase for employment has taught me a few things: 1) A doctorate in education is the ghetto of advanced degrees, and all this chatter about having “high expectations” is just that: talk. 2) It’s not good to be fat and looking for a job. 3) Charter schools are no better than your average community schools and in some cases worst. 4) It’s not good to be old and looking for a job. 5) Black faces in high places don’t mean good things for other Black folks, but I already knew that.

Because I had been doing what I was meant to do for the last twenty years, I’d been on the pollen path: doors opened, friendships were made; I climbed the economic and educational ladder.  But in 2005, I decided to run for teacher representative on the Local School Council and promised to tell the truth as I knew it.  That didn’t do go over too well.  Eventually, I left Chicago Public Schools to work for a charter school.  There I found deep and far reaching deception (changing test scores was part of the lying), the exploitation of cheap labor, and no answers to the nagging problem of educating urban youth. Since I was still in truth telling mode, that job only lasted a year and thus began this long and frustrating search.

In March of 2009, having been unemployed a few months, I was told by a friend to submit a resume to the brand new Jesuit high school being built on the West Side of Chicago.  I did and wham: got an interview to become an assistant principal.  The principal had heard good things about me.  I answered his questions with my usual candor and we clicked.  The next interview was with the faculty.  I had lunch with them, was genuinely interested in their concerns; we clicked.  Then there was the meeting with the head Jesuit.  I candidly answered and asked questions. At one point, the Father rolled his chair ten feet away from me and looked  like he was talking to the devil .  I can’t for the life of me remember what I said. Anyway, one of my former students was  working there and had mentioned I was the catalyst for her and some of  her classmates forming the New Black Panther Party.  Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

Afterward there were interviews in Wisconsin.  One principal of a charter school in Milwaukee told me point blank that it was too expensive to hire me as a high school English teacher  This she admitted when I asked her how I stacked up to other candidates; she gave me some bullshit answer, and I gave her a look that said don’t play with me.  Over time I discovered that salary was indeed a problem; even though I’m willing to work for a less, a lot less.  Cash strapped municipalities and get-a-teacher-cheap charter schools are not able or willing to pay for the great teachers they claim they want.  As witnessed by my application for teacher at a charter school on the South Side of Chicago.  Having seen the position posted many times, having submitted an application each time, and after having confirmed that I’d be willing to work for the salary quoted, I finally got the HR person to arrange an interview.  The interview consisted of teaching a class of sophomores who had run the original teacher way.  To make it more difficult, they had me teaching these folks on a Friday afternoon.  The person observing me was in and out, and when he was in, his head was in his laptop.  I have a whole other entry I’m going to post on this experience, but here I’ll admit at one point I resorted to telling the class to shut up.

Recently, I had a much more humiliating job seeking experience.  One night a friend called and told me that she told a friend of hers about me, and he wanted me to give him a call.  He was a CPS assistant principal, Dr. Young.  I called right away.  We had a good conversation wherein he revealed that he was deciding whether he’d leave CPS and become a principal of a charter high school.  He told me to send him a cover letter and my resume.  This I did right away.  Weeks passed, and again late one night my girl friend called to tell me to call Dr. Young immediately.  I did and he told me to come to an interview 11:30 the next day.  I arrived in a timely fashion and sat there for a span of nearly three hours with other candidates for the position.  When finally granted the interview, I enthusiastically stated my credentials and declared that it was fated I should teach there, for in fact, the now charter high school was then, some 40 years ago, the very first elementary school I attended, located in that fateful housing project my family had escaped.  At this interview Dr. Young, a Black man, and two white men asked me questions. The older and younger white men quite clearly liked me; it was Dr. Young, my friend’s friend, the man who arranged the whole thing who seemed to have a problem, for he was quite standoffish.  Well, again, weeks passed, and Young leaves me a message one evening about a second 9:30 A.M. interview.  I arrive to find me and a young white man have been scheduled for the same time regarding the same position. He keeps us both waiting two hours. They interview the young man first. When it's my turn,  I again happily engage the old white man, and now a young white woman, and Dr. Young spends the interview behind his desk working at a computer.  At the end of the interview, the old white man is clearly glad to have met me again. David Young barely looks my way when informing me that he or his assistant will call to let me know the outcome.  To this day I have not heard from either him or his assistant. 

Well, all this happened more than two years ago! Thank God!! The search ended and is begun again. UMP UMP UMP I'm still fat but not quite as fat as I was.  Still claiming the doctorate but I have a better attitude about it (well I'm working on the attitude). Of course I'm older, but what's the alternative. And I know not to look for Black but friendly faces in high places.  Amen!

 Wednesday, December 1, 2010, I went to a No Child Left Behind meeting at Smyth School in my old neighborhood, 1059 W. 13^th Street.  Back in the day, that neighborhood was a Chicago Housing Authority complex named ABLA; now it’s University Village.  Smyth is the last remaining community school serving CHA residents of that area.  

At that No Child Left Behind meeting, which started on CP time, a woman, Carmella, from Jackson Language Academy, revealed that their selective enrollment, magnet school was slated to become an expanded community school and the Board of Education would spend SEVEN  million dollars to make it so.  The initiative to expand Jackson was started, according to Carmella, by a group of white parents in the University Village Association.  Now, if Jackson Language Academy became a community school, it would have to take neighborhood children; its demographic would change and include generational CHA residents.  Not standing for this, Carmella mobilized 500 parents to stop the Board and the University Village Association. They did! Jackson Language Academy will remain a selective enrollment school, and Smyth students of the CHA housing project will stay where they are, behind. Which just goes to show: the more things change, the more they stay the same; Andrew Jackson School was never welcoming of CHA residents, not thirty years ago, not now.

However, Carmella suggested Smyth get the seven million to expand, but no one is looking to expand Smyth.  So I piggy back off Carmella and suggest Smyth parents mobilize to get the seven million for improvements.  At this point, the principal appears (in sweats) and puts the kabash on that. The principal then asks are there other suggestions for improvement. Knowing big improvements are out of reach, I try for little ones and say, “OK, here are two suggestions for easy improvement: 1) If you can’t start the meeting until 3:45 P.M., don’t advertise that it will start at 3:00 P.M.  2) There is a sign at the main door greeting parents and visitors that says, ‘To Get Respect, You Have To Give It.’ Take it down.”  I declared that respect is nonnegotiable: Everyone gets it.  A small debate follows, and the principal is neither sure of the sign nor of the inappropriateness of its content.  However, he continues to conduct the meeting in keeping with the Board’s talking points:  Their test scores have improved; they’re proud to be an IB school, each child has a lap top (but I didn’t see any children taking home lap tops) they were starting a reading clinic, etc.  At some point in the meeting, Carmella suggests that Smyth start a parent group (and here it is revealed that the same parents who are part of NCLB also sit on the Local School Council), but the principal puts the kabash on that too by determining the only reason for parents to come together is to raise money for the school and Smyth gets plenty of money from the Board and outside sources; he references the brand new fish tanks in the lobby to prove the point. The meeting ends with the raffling off of turkeys.

This story conveys a problem of urban education and school reform.  Local School Councils in poor communities don’t work because poor people can easily be manipulated.  Slogans like “Children First,” “Leave No Child Behind,” and “Raise Expectations” mask problems of generational poverty and its disastrous effects as evidenced by a debate on who deserves respect in a school.  On a recent Oprah episode, Michelle Rhee, Oprah, and her guest declared  that “The Children are not the problem; the adults are.” Look, when a four year old threatens to shoot his teacher that symptom of a sick village is a problem in the classroom and higher test scores don’t answer how we live together in peace and prosperity.