Teaching doesn't count.

Teaching Doesn't Count

I hadn't taken any education courses in college. But to obtain the license, I needed only a bachelor's degree. I had never taught before, and that did not matter, either. The Board of Education fingerprinted me, but never asked for personal or professional references.

I later learned from an examiner who was an assistant principal at my school that I could have made five grammar or spelling mistakes and still passed the written exam.

I got the elementary-ed license, but no help finding a job. Despite the critical shortage of teachers, the Board of Education didn't maintain a central clearinghouse where vacancies were listed.

I want haunting on my own. I discovered that I'd have no trouble getting a position teaching junior high math, even though I had never had to demonstrate proficiency in the subject. At Walt Whitman, an assistant principal interviewed me for about five minutes, four days before students were to return to school. I'd run a homeroom, patrol the hallways and auditorium four periods a week, and teach math to five classes of eighth graders. My salary would be $23,000--about $3,000 less than a first-year city garbage hauler would earn.

I was armed only with a 19-hour, three-day training session given by the Board of Education two weeks before. "Don't lend anything to a student, even a pen, without getting an IOU--an umbrella, a Nintendo tape, a mirror," our trainer, a veteran junior high teacher, had told me and my class of 31 fellow recruits.

Our trainer also had some per one-liners. If a student says, "Drop dead," we could retort: "You don't listen to everything I say, and I won't listen to everything you say." If a student says, "___ you," we reply: "I don't want to, and I doubt you could."

My early days in school, which I thought would be consumed with teaching, instead were devouted by discipline problems. One day early in the year, the students in one class rattled their desks whenever I turned to the blackboard; another day, two boys from my bottom class threw a Super Ball around the room.

Even when I wasn't trying to cope with major disruptions, I had to confront the incessant talking and disrespect of many students--to me and to each other. The first few weeks of school, I considered a period successful if I was able to teach 10 minutes out of the 43.

When I tested the authority of the eighth-grade dean by sending him a student who had violently rattled a desk whenever I turned to write on the board, the dean wrote back, "This is not a discipline problem. Please readmit to class."

Those who can't teach, teach

"There are three things you need to survive in this school system," an assistant principal told me one afternoon. "Not just at this school, but anywhere."

I expected him to say good teaching, good planning, and a love of the kids.

"Clean bulleting boards, impeccable paperwork, and a tidy classroom," he said. "Oh, and one more thing. Discipline. If you've got that, you've got it down."

"You mean when it gets right down to it, you don't really have to teach that well?" I asked. The assistant principal shrugged.

This wasn't official policy at Walt Whitman. It wasn't even this man's view of what makes a good teacher. But it was pragmatic reality. Among the 63,726 teachers in city schools, there are mediocre teachers who hold on to their jobs as long as they master the administrative details. Teachers are rated once a year, on their punctuality, control of their classes, their preparation, and housekeeping. Only two ratings are used--satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory ratings are extremely rare, so there is virtually no differentation between mediocre and superb teachers.

I got a satisfactory rating for my work last year. But even if I had been given an unsatisfactory rating, I could have applied to other schools.

If I had been a tenured teacher--a licensed teacher with at least three years' experience--it would have been more difficult to get rid of me. Last year, the Board of Education fired just 20 tenured teachers.

For terrific teachers, there are few rewards from the board or the Whitman administration. sometimes a letter commending good work is put in a teacher's personnel file, but that's rare. Some teachers are asked to ist on advisory panels and are paid modest stipends, but these extracurricular tasks require extra work. A few teachers are rewarded by being pulled out of the classroom several periods a week to serve as mentors for other teachers. But the school system makes no monetary distinction between terrific teachers and mediocre ones.

Paperwork responsibilities were enormous. A teacher's homeroom attendance must be recorded in three places, and one of them, the red roll book, is so sacred it is collected every few months and audited by the Board of Education.

Because they might make mistakes, Whitman students taking standardized tests are not allowed to prepare the biographical portion of their answer sheets; their homeroom teachers must do it for them. This means that every time a standardized test is given--last year, there were four for the eighth graders--teachers must blacken thousands of little circles on dozens of answer sheets.

Those who can't learn, graduate

The music director raised his hand, the electric piano started, and several hundred students who had filed into the auditorium began learning the school song. It was the first rehearsal for the 1989 eighth-grade graduation from Walt Whitman Intermediate School in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

I scanned the rows of students. Scattered about were several dozen who didn't know their times tables, couldn't write a simple essay, or couldn't understand a short passage in an elementary textbook. Yet, in less than two months, they would be adorned in caps and gowns and graduated to high school. I felt like I was watching a heinous lie.

And yet, I, too, was perpetuating the lie. I was going to pass students in math who hadn't come close to mastering the curriculum. "Think, before you fail a student, whether he will be well-served by another year here," the Whitman principal, Claude Winfield, told us at a faculty conference near the end of the year. "Are you doing a service to your colleagues who will have to teach that student next year? Are you doing a service to the student who will have to tell himself he's a failure?"

Id didn't matter whether kids failed my math class anyway. At our school and most other intermediate schools in the city, kids who would turn 15 by summer's end would be graduated to high school, regardless of their grades or their test scores.

My pupil, my enemy

I am still stunned by how little teachers are trusted by the school administration. I had to post a time card each morning and each afternoon, and I had to stay in school until the dismissal bell rang, even after I was done teaching for the day. I could not get tests mimeographed or order my yearly allotment of supplies without a supervisor's approval.

Chalk was handed out a box at a time. And "out of order" signs were taped to the copying machines even when they worked; teachers were not permitted to use them. Materials for students were rationed even more stringently. For the first three weeks of the year, we were not allowed to distribute textbooks. Yet we were also limited to one class set--35 copies--of any worksheett. If I needed worksheets for more than one class, I had to forbid the students from writing on them and retrieved them for my next class. A supervisor had to sign off on anything I wanted to have copied.

For all the talk of accountability I had heard as an education reporter, I found a system where excellence is rarely rewarded and incompetence is rarely punished or helped. Even a simple thank you is rarely uttered by an administrator to a teacher. Great teachers usually are great because they care to be great, not because the system demands it. Lazy teachers are allowed to stay that way. A tenured teacher who minds his kids and his paperwork is rarely dismissed, even if little teaching goes on in his or her classroom. By the same token, teachers who want and need good words rarely get them.

Ultimately, I saw a system that often does not have the time nor the inclination to care about the kids inside it. Most of my eighth graders, for instance, never got even a five-minute block of time with a guidance counselor to help map out their future or to discuss which of the city's 117 high schools might be appropriate for them. Since I didn't understand the verbose and tedious high school directory, I couldn't help the kids much myself.

And, unless they're participating in a special program, kids may not stay after school. Without special permission in writing from a supervisor, they may not enter school early, either. Although the need for security was real, I felt sometimes like I was working in an institution that considered its client--the kids--to be dangerous intruders.

Emily Sachar is a reporter at Newsday. [C] Newsday/Emily Sachar. 1990. Reprinted with permission.