A Letter to a Would-Be Teacher from a Veteran Teacher

Do not become a teacher. It’s not too late for you. If you’re in high school and dream of being that supportive guiding educator who’ll make a difference, know that you won’t. If you’re in college and have signed an education major, change it. If you’re registered for your student teaching, drop it while you can still get a refund. I’m invested. I bet tens of thousands of student loan dollars on being a teacher. I moved thousands of miles away from my family and friends for my teaching position. And I am the villain in the drama that is the American educational system. If you enter this profession, you will become the villain, too.

There are a wide variety of occupations you will doubtlessly find more rewarding. Your students won’t want to learn, their parents won’t care until they’re failing your class, and then only a few. Those few will demand to know why you’ve not done your job, why you didn’t find some way to get through to their children. It will not occur to them that they’d bequeathed their apathy to their children. It will not occur to them that they are the single most important factor to their children’s success. They reject any responsibility for children’s success. It is your responsibility and yours alone.

But it’s not only parents who will make you regret your decision, make you feel the fool in the years to come should you enter this profession. The politicians will tell you what you want to hear until they’re in office, but there are far more parents than teachers and the politicians will not hesitate to show you how expendable you are. In politics, fixing a problem is peripheral to finding the least powerful party to blame for it. Don’t believe me? Just watch the news and you’ll see how fast politicians from our current president all the way down to state legislators have sold us out. When they say the time for finger pointing is at an end, that means they’ve already decided who to blame, and for the problems of America’s educational system, that’s teachers. As with the parents, it won’t occur to the politicians and pundits that parents aren’t being held accountable, and it won’t occur to them that the greater society that refuses to provide much of our youth with adequate safety, nutrition, and health care isn’t being held accountable. No, it’s only we teachers who need to be held accountable.

If you would become a teacher, instead become an accountant, or a mathematician, or a plumber, or an electrician. You won’t be accused of being the root any major social problem, and you’ll be better able to pay your bills. You won’t have trouble sleeping at night because you’re frustrated by a system rendered intentionally dense by virtue of its political nature. You’ll get to solve problems, not be pressured to adhere to the latest educational gimmick designed to give the semblance of problem-solving. You probably won’t have to waste hours of your time each week on an ever-increasing avalanche of pointless paperwork, and then get blamed for having less time to actually do your job. No, stay out of teaching.

Teaching isn’t the worst gig in the world right now, despite being society’s scapegoat for all of its educational woes. I make a decent living. Most teachers who have a master’s degree and a few years under their belts make a decent living. You, however, need to think about the future. The Republicans have always been the enemies of teachers, and now the Democrats have decided to sacrifice us to political expediency. The president wants standardized test results used to evaluate teachers. How can the test results be used to evaluate teacher performance when the skills required to pass those tests are acquired over many years, from many different teachers, and often from several different school districts? It’s coming, and you will have to contend with it as tomorrow’s teacher. The president also wants school districts to expand charter school programs, despite their mediocre performance (most have test results and graduation rates comparable to or below the regular public schools in their districts, and that despite the charter schools’ ability to pick and choose their students). But charter schools are seen as hotbeds of innovation, while regular public schools, thanks to the domination of nefarious teachers’ unions, are stifled and mired. That freedom to innovate, of course, comes via their ability to pay non-union salaries and require their teachers to work non-union hours, which accounts for why teachers leave charter schools even faster than they leave regular public schools, and why that magical cure for society’s educational woes has yet to be found. But charter schools do help districts circumnavigate the unions and undermine our ability to collectively bargain. Increased federal funding for charter schools and increased pressure on school districts to expand charters schools is the reality. In the near future, you will have either a charter school position—with its longer hours, lower pay, and lower job security—to look forward to, or you will get a position with a regular public school where ever eroding pay, benefits, and professional autonomy await you.

In this game, I and teachers like me went all in. We’re obliged to stick it out, to fight the losing battle until its bitter end. Some of us will make it to retirement, most will be forced to walk away from their investments and start over from scratch in some other occupation. There’s no good reason for you to become a teacher. The things you dream of accomplishing will come to not. Forces are arrayed against you, and if you enter the profession, they will thwart your efforts. Indeed, society itself will oppose your efforts while blaming you for educations lack of progress. As a teacher, you will be made cynical, your idealism will dry up, and you will struggle against a constant bitterness. If you still have the choice, if you can stay in college a little longer, become something else, something that will pay you well and let you sleep peacefully at night. Do not become a teacher.

Test-Prep Education! Part Deux

A magical, mystical fix-all for America’s still-best-in-the-world higher education system from the lady who replaced America’s primary and secondary education curricula with teaching to the test: …(wait for it)…(wait for it)…(have you guessed what it is yet?)…THAT’S RIGHT, High stakes testing! Please, hold your applause.

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Secretary of Education Margaret “The Testinator” Spellings has set her sights anew on the hallowed halls of American higher learning. With a plan to provide “matching funds” to universities and colleges that begin administering standardized tests and tracking student graduation rates, Spellings vows to wake our institutions from their lazy and slothful slumber. And why shouldn’t we trust her judgment? After all, she did such a wonderful job of correcting the deficiencies of our elementary and high schools and sending them down the right path to improved test-preparation training, why shouldn’t we want the same quality from our universities and colleges?

Of course, were I a university or college president salivating at the thought of those matching funds, I would probably be wise to hold off on any expensive testing plans until I saw the green of Spellings’s cash. Administering standardized tests is grossly expensive, and the more likely the test is to measure actual knowledge beyond test-taking ability, the more expensive it is. The rhetoric that accompanied No Child Left Behind promised funding to offset the additional financial burden states and school districts would bear in administering the federally required tests, but alas, said funding never really materialized.

It is interesting that Spellings, who is part of an administration that likes to privatize (including armed security forces in Iraq), feels it’s the government’s job to rate universities and colleges and compile and keep that record. Aren’t there organizations already doing this? Of course there are—the major accreditation agencies certify whether or not a university or college’s diploma is worth more than the paper it’s printed on, and a number of publications publish rankings of our institutions of higher education (most notably U.S. News and World Report).

Since there are already organizations efficiently and effectively fulfilling some of the major functions of Spellings’s proposed scheme, one is led to examine the charge of higher education’s complacency (read: college graduates are dumber these days; I mean, just compare the average college grad today to intellectual powerhouses like Spellings and W and you’ll see they’re right). My personal, longitudinal observations of higher education (as a nearly continuous college student for the last thirteen years) suggest this is probably inaccurate. But if college grads are less qualified than their earlier counterparts, then we could well argue that the root problem is not watered down curricula, but rather that public institutions of higher education have become so reliant on tuition for their funding that they are being forced to do whatever it takes to keep those tuition dollars coming in.

Frankly, No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a gimmick to promote the privatization of public education. There’s no reason to think this new scheme isn’t meant to justify the diminishment of public colleges and universities.

It’s Official: Torture IS an American Value

I’m awfully glad this has been clarified and we no longer have to ponder the rightness or wrongness of such activity. As a teacher, I’m always looking for new ways to motivate my students, and ten months in a Syrian dungeon ought to do the trick. Of course, some of my students might prefer that to nine months of my lectures and homework. But could they live without MTV?

I digress. I was rather surprised to hear of this Arar fellow being shipped off from New York to a Syrian dungeon where he was tortured into admitting he regularly had tea with Osama and even helped him carry his dialysis machine through mountains of Pakistan—and all on the flimsiest of evidence that he had any connection to terrorism (well, he is Muslim—isn’t that evidence enough?) and no evidence whatever of connection to al-Qaeda. No, I’m not surprised that our government would ship an innocent man off to be tortured baselessly, but that such a mistake would ever see the light of day. One expects at least minimal competence from one’s government—if a mistake’s on paper, you shred it; if it’s a person, you make it look like an accident.

Attorney General Gonzalez—you know, W’s numero uno Latino—claims the U.S. merely deported a foreign national suspected of terrorist ties and that they were assured that Mr. Arar would be treated humanely in the land of his birth. Interestingly, the big red maple leaf on Mr. Arar’s passport failed to tip off U.S. authorities to the fact that Mr. Arar was also a citizen of Canada. So when deciding which country to deport Arar to—a cheap short flight to Canada or a long expensive flight to Syria—they chose Syria because…because…obviously because they thought this guy looked like he needed to get in touch with his roots.

Alberto…G… it’s okay; we already know you’re into the whole torture scene…getting hot over the idea of being roughed up and powerless, or maybe hot over the idea of roughing up someone who’s powerless—we get it. The S&M thing—hey, whatever raises the flag to full mast. However, you don’t have to play dumb and look like a jackass on national television. If the American people thought torturing innocent men was wrong or unchristian, then there’d be a mass outcry for justice and an end to you and your boss’s tactics. There wasn’t and, sadly, won’t be; so buck up, little guy—you no longer have to hide your alternative sexual desires in the closet; take that little light of yours out from under the bushel and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Proudly proclaim to the world that you favor torture, that your boss favors torture, and that the American people favor torture for it is truly an American value.