Emergency Teacher (14 page)

We made him accept that his bad behavior was his fault. We convinced him that he wasn't completing his work because he was a “bad child;” our message was “try harder,” even though I couldn't shake the feeling that Jovani had tried. His bad behavior was born of frustration. No one had taught him how to read or write. He was smart enough to see that he was years behind his friends academically and too proud to let them make fun of him. But if I said that, and had we began a frank discussion about Jovani's needs, we'd have been forced to admit that his mother had not prepared Jovani and I, as the teacher, had not provided for him. Both Jovani and José R. needed to be in special education class. Jovani looked ashamed and he went home with his mother.

The Bilingual Team met each Tuesday. Ms. Rohan was having the same problems with Jovani and José R., so we devised a plan to request Mrs. G. place them in special education. After school, I rushed over to the team meeting scheduled for that day. I was feeling desperate. We were approaching the twomonth mark and my students had learned almost nothing. The six of us sat around a table snacking on cookies and juice. Mrs. G. ran these meetings with military precision and a typed agenda we rarely veered from.

I jumped in with my own problem. “I'm having a lot of trouble with Jovani,” I said.

“Oh, I think that boy got dropped on his head as a child,” Mrs. G. said, granting that I sent him to her the least. “He's the one I'm most worried about. He should be in special ed so that he would get transferred to another school and not be our problem.”

I glared at her, but she didn't seem to notice or care. The other teachers veered back to their personal conversations as I struggled with what to say next. Clearly, Jovani was a special education student, or he needed to be designated as such. We had several special education classrooms at our school, and I suggested placing him in one.

“The mother has to push for it,” Mrs. G. declared. It was probably illegal that he was in a regular class without more assistance, she said, but as long as no one said anything, we weren't obliged to do anything. “If a parent doesn't advocate for their rights, then the school lets it slide. That's how it works here.”

My face must have fallen because the Venezuelan teacher, who was in her second year teaching, was slapping Ms. Rohan on the back, grinning.

“Welcome to the Philadelphia School District,” she chimed knowingly. “Now you are beginning to see.”

“I'm going to talk to his mom, then,” I replied.

“Don't suggest special education,” Mrs. G. warned. “You're not allowed. You're a school district employee. Your allegiance is with the school.”

Mrs. G. had her reasons for letting things slide. One reason was the timeconsuming, burdensome process of getting José R. and Jovani into a special education class. She was correct—a parent did have to push for special ed placement, because it required dozens of meetings in which the parent, the teacher, Mrs. G., the principal, and a psychologist had to be present. If any one of us didn't show, the rest would be sent home and the meeting rescheduled. How would we do this? I couldn't even get Jovani's mother on the telephone. I didn't have a home phone number for José R.. The process required the teacher to fill out pages of paperwork outlining teaching strategies attempted and failed. Both boys would have to be evaluated several times—by not only a regular psychologist but also a bilingual psychologist. Needless to say, our school didn't have either. Typically, the process took from months to years.

As early as October, Mrs. G. was accusing the other teachers of using her bilingual program as a “dumping ground” for the special education students. She said special ed kids were intentionally misdiagnosed as “limited English ability” and sent into bilingual education classes in her section. At other schools, the reverse happened—immigrants who couldn't speak English were often misdiagnosed as having a disability and sent to the special education teacher. More often than not, both special education and bilingual education were federally funded cash cows that teachers used as dumping grounds for whatever students didn't fit into their classrooms. At our school, the bilingual program was a stronger program, with more teachers (largely because of Mrs. G.'s efforts) so it became the dumping ground.

Throughout the year, at least a dozen students would show up at my classroom door with a note from some teacher in another section who was clearly trying to fob them off on the new young recruit. Some stayed permanently. Others would stay only a few days before Mrs. G. would successfully argue to have them sent back to the third floor. Sometimes the supervisors would strike a deal: You keep such-and-such “bad kid” if we take your “bad kid.”

Really, none of them were bad kids, and they certainly weren't impossible to teach. In fact, they could have been the easiest of all to manage, as they were the type of students who most craved borders. They needed a smaller classroom, with a trained teacher who could give them a daily routine and work that they could succeed at. Was that too much to ask for?

T
he assistant principal at Bartram High School, ten minutes away in West Philadelphia, was shot. The
Inquirer
and the
Philadelphia Daily News
plastered the violence across the front page for days. Fifteenyear-old freshman Eric Coxen had taken a .25-caliber pistol to school as protection from a bully. A scuffle broke out in the hallway, and when the assistant principal, sixty-one-year-old William Burke, intervened, Coxen fired the gun, shooting him in the thigh.

The
Daily News
did an in-depth look at violence in schools, and ran this cover story: WHY THE SCHOOLS ARE STUCK WITH TOO MANY BAD KIDS. The doctored cover photo showed a shadowy figure lurking in a school hallway, and the editorial message was clear: the students were to blame. I felt the opposite. It should've read, WHY THE KIDS ARE STUCK WITH SO MANY BAD SCHOOLS. Bartram High School had 3,120 students. (Julia de Burgos had eight hundred kids.) It wasn't a school—Bartram was a factory.

Then the predictable outcome followed. First, identify a scapegoat. Shortly thereafter Bartram's principal was transferred to another school. Second, pretend to find a quick-fix solution. Seven days later the Philadelphia school board voted unanimously to install walkthrough metal detectors and X-ray machines at every high school. According to the
Daily News
, two metal detectors had arrived at Bartram in August, but no one had bothered to install them.

To the public, these actions gave the appearance that something had been done. However, inside the schools the teachers on the front lines saw the writing on the wall and reacted with their best survival instincts. Teachers began to quit, en masse.

In Philadelphia one hundred new teachers resigned in September—that meant 8 percent of new hires had given up in the first month on the job. By the end of the school year, the percentage of new teachers who had quit rose to 25. Sixty percent of new teachers hired at the time I was, in September 1999, had left the profession entirely within three years.

At Julia de Burgos, the first to leave was the woman who taught English for speakers of other languages—the one who, on my first day, had told me I wouldn't last. She transferred, through a connection, to an administrative position overseeing ESOL programs downtown, even though her departure left us without a program for her to “oversee.” The school district began to pay Ms. Rohan an extra $250 a week to give up her prep period and cover the class until a replacement arrived (who never did).

Then one of the special education teachers departed on a mystery sabbatical. No one knew the reason. She just disappeared. On the third floor another special education class constantly cycled in new victims. The special ed teacher down the hall from my room was transferred after choking a student. (If a student couldn't be expelled after hitting the principal, why should a teacher be fired for choking a student?) I was in the hallway during lunch when Ms. Rohan sidled up to me and nodded toward two armed police officers standing at the doorway of P68, the special education room. They stood casually, feet spread, in their stiff police uniforms. Light streaming through the windows reflected off their shiny black shoes.

The writing teacher left. The school psychologist left. I couldn't keep track. No wonder those veterans were so cold to me that first day. They assumed I'd be gone by now.

The other new teachers were barely hanging on, like the nun on the third floor. She had been overheard saying something less than pious about the students. Then there was Mrs. Soleimanzadeh, a former actress, who was twenty-six and taught seventh-graders, also on the third floor. She was trying as hard as she could, but she had thirty-three students, and she was actually attempting to use the 1982 social studies textbooks we were given—without much success.

The exodus at Julia de Burgos came to a head one Friday afternoon. I was heading off to meet teachers for happy hour at a neighborhood bar, which third-floor team leader Mr. Whitehorne called the weekly meeting of the Pedagogical Society. It was really just a bunch of teachers getting drunk and celebrating forty-eight hours without any students. On my way out the door, the Spanish teacher was hurrying down the empty hallway toward me, his arms loaded with posters and boxes from his classroom. He looked unusually sanguine.

“Ms. Asquith,” he called, gesturing me over with his elbow. “Could you give these keys to the vice principal?” He passed me what looked like classroom keys.

“She's right in her office,” I said, motioning down the empty corridor.

He looked sheepish. “Oh, I don't want to interrupt her. She's with people,” he said. “It's my last day, so have a good year.” And he swiveled and hurried down the hallway. Puzzled, I carried the keys into the vice principal's office. She was leaning back in her chair, laughing with the classroom assistant at a joke.

“The Spanish teacher just gave these keys to me and said it was his last day.”

The vice principal stopped laughing. She stared at me until I put the keys down on her desk. Then she flew forward in her chair and dashed out of her office after him. The click-clack of her heels faded down the corridor. The classroom assistant laughed. “They droppin' like flies.”

I never saw the Spanish teacher again, but around that time an article appeared in the
Inquirer
about the shortage of foreign language teachers in the New Jersey suburbs, where pay was higher and classes were smaller. Maybe he went there. I'd heard that it was especially tough for the Spanish teacher at our school. He saw a different group each period and he couldn't form a bond with his students, making discipline impossible.

For a long time the principal tried to fill the gaps by forcing teachers to substitute, or “cover,” for a class during prep periods. This was the worst thing in the world. Not only were we struggling with our own classes, but now we had our prep period taken away and had to teach during that, too.

In our school, the teacher most affected by this exodus was Ms. Vinitzsky, who ran the in-school suspension room. She took the kids who'd been given a day's suspension or tossed out of class with nowhere to go until 2:43 PM. Or if there was no teacher, she often had to take the entire class. Ms. Vinitzsky was a brassy, tough-talking blonde in her fifties. No matter the time of year, she had a deep tan, a big, sprayed helmet of hair, and a sweater that slipped off her shoulder. She spoke with a strong South Jersey accent. I loved her. Everyone in the school did. She was tender with the kids, but also tough so that she could handle any of them. Even though her room housed a good many of the 2 percent factor, the ones no other teacher could handle, it was always quiet. The kids were always busy doing something. Some days I didn't think the school could have held together without Ms. Vinitzsky.

Our school was struggling from day one. By October we had an additional nine teacher vacancies—meaning that at any point during the day as many as 150 kids arrived at classes with either rotating substitutes or no teachers at all. Mrs. Liss, a nice lady in her sixties who'd been working at the school for forty years, began walking around the main office shaking her head and saying, “I don't know how we're going to open the school each day.”

Unfortunately, what was happening in Julia de Burgos, and in Philadelphia in general, was typical of inner-city schools across the nation. This wasn't the first year cities had struggled with teacher shortages, but the situation was worsening in the late 1990s because the booming economy drew teachers into other fields. In general, teaching suffered from one of the worst turnover rates of all professions. Violent, low-income schools in particular tend to turn over a quarter of their staff each year.

Some tried financial rewards to solve the shortage. The State of Massachusetts offered new teachers a $20,000 bonus to be paid over three years. After the first year, one-third of new teachers had quit. Four out of five reported that the bonus had little or no effect on whether they stayed or left.

In our school system, I would receive an extra $1,500 in the spring as part of the promised sign-on bonus. By the time I'd received it, however, not only had it been whittled down to $750 after taxes, but I couldn't have cared less. I would have paid double that in return for a sense of success with my students.

In Philadelphia, as in most urban school districts, a bonus could hardly compensate for a serious discrepancy in salaries between rich schools and poor schools.

A new teacher's salary in Philadelphia was $30,000, almost twenty-five percent lower than that paid in nearby suburban schools, where teachers earned $38,000. In fact, not even a $20,000 bonus could make up, in the long run, for the salary discrepancy between school districts. In Philadelphia, the median teacher's salary was $51,104; in some suburban schools it was $85,395.

My first paycheck had been a shock. At the
Inquirer
I took home about $650 a week. My teaching pay after taxes was about $367 a week. When applying for the job, I had anticipated a $30,000 annual salary, and for that reason rented a $700-a-month apartment. What I hadn't planned on was that the state, city, and union would take out a total of 40 percent in taxes and fees. After I subtracted the $3,000 in annual tuition I had to pay for required classes at the local university—and not counting all I spent out of pocket for teaching supplies—I estimated my earnings at less than $275 a week. This wasn't a competitive salary for a college graduate, which made me think that, really, solving the teacher shortage wasn't so complicated. The reason schools pay varying salaries is because schools are funded by local property taxes. Hence, in the case of Pennsylvania, the rich towns with the big, expensive housing have a much greater tax base to invest in schools and pay teachers. They jack up the salaries to compete with other schools to attract the best teachers. Naturally, the best teachers would gravitate to the best salaries, leaving behind the worst teachers in the poorest schools. In places like the United Kingdom, schools are funded by the government based on need. In some cases, teachers in poor urban areas could be paid more than their counterparts in suburban schools.

Instead of raising the salaries of teachers in low-income schools to be at least equal to those of neighboring schools, though, cities launched publicity campaigns to boost recruitment. Working in poor urban schools was suddenly considered doing a good thing, or “making a sacrifice.” Teaching poor children was no longer a profession, but charity work.

Around the time I started teaching, the New York City school system spent $8 million to hire a top-notch Madison Avenue advertising company to launch a recruiting campaign. Former New York City Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy had originally asked for $16 million, but the school board shot him down. Posters went up all over the subways challenging people to “make a difference.” These campaigns told new teachers that even without any background or significant training in education, they could “give a child a chance” and “save a life.”

New Yorkers responded. The recruiting office met its quota and hired 8,334 new teachers that year. By the end of the first year, 1,875 of those teachers had quit—24 percent.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, was a voice of reason when she said: “It's not honest to have a glitzy marketing campaign and then have teachers end up disillusioned because they don't get the resources or support or salary they need to do the best job.”

Clearly, inner-city schools didn't have a problem with teacher recruitment. They had a problem with new teacher retention. In
The First Days of School
, Harry and Rosemary Wong calculate that every time a new teacher leaves, a school district and its taxpayers lose $50,000 in lost training, recruitment, and administrative costs. I wondered what the school districts could look like if only they invested half that much in training and supporting the teachers once they were hired.

By October, I needed to call my parents and ask them for a few hundred dollars to help carry my rent, supplies for the students, and occasional Friday-night pitchers of Budweiser. I felt ridiculous asking for money when I had a full-time job, but $350 a week was not enough. Married teachers could lean on their husbands, but single teachers, like thirty-something English teacher Ms. Ortiz, lived in poor neighborhoods and scrimped. Few could afford downtown apartments in Center City unless they lived with boyfriends, as Ms. Soleimanzadeh did.