Chicago. Man, I loved living there. The architecture, the lake, four real distinct seasons, the Cubs, evening summer concerts where you don't need a coat...I really loved being out there. But let me tell you about why we moved back. Teaching there SUCKED. And amidst all the ignorance being flouted about on the internet about the current teachers' strike, I'd like to offer you a narrative through which you might understand these events better.
When Tyson and I moved out there, we didn't have jobs. Around November, I landed a job teaching elementary music in a near South side district. Tyson was cashiering at the grocery store down the street from our apartment and hosting at a restaurant.
Enter Dr. John Gelsemino, a "head hunter" (recruiter) a retired band director, who was paid by principals of CPS to find people like us to work in their buildings. Over a lasagna dinner at a restaurant in Cicero (you can't make this stuff up), he "interviewed" us about our experience and bragged about how wonderful his band was when he was teaching. He got Tyson a job immediately in a West side school whose principal was a big deal in the Greek community (that guy got us a trumpet gig for Good Friday at an Orthodox church, a story I will save for a later post). Tyson's job for the remainder of that year was "building sub." Subs at that time were not required to have a teacher's certificate, and so you had all sorts of people "teaching" and the principals had come to the conclusion that it was safer for the kids to have a permanent class-coverage person than to call the sub center. (Prior to finding my elementary job, I had done a couple sub jobs that were horrific...also too long to post here) Tyson was supposed to work as a sub, then during his prep time, go get the band room ready for the following year. I was promised a job at a high school not far from our apartment.
Here, I need to interject a tidbit of how teacher pay worked in Illinois then (and I don't believe it has changed). Oregon used to have this system, where school funds are directly related to local property taxes. What happens is that high income areas end up with LOTS of money for their schools, fully funded athletics and arts, beautiful newer and updated buildings, and adequate to decent teacher pay and benefits. And smaller, working town or poverty riddled areas have terrible pay, no money for books, building maintenance, etc. This is how amazing schools like New Trier High School and terrible crumbling buildings can exist in the same state. You want to know why kids aren't educated equally? We can't even get the BUILDINGS to look equal. That first year, I made around $27K in that little district, and Tyson made around $32K, but neither of us was paid in the summer. The following school year we were both contracted music teachers for Chicago Public Schools. We were both making around $40K (no masters degrees at that point).
Sidenote: One troll on a news website said something about teachers getting 4 months off. I'd love to know where he got that number because the year Sam was born was the first year I had a summer off and it sure as hell was not 4 months....
Second year here is a rundown of the issues at MY job (listing both mine AND Tyson's experiences would be too much for one post). And keep in mind I worked at one of the schools that was considered "decent":
1) In August, when we started, my room was over 90 degrees plus humidity. No A/C, and no windows that opened. I did have an emergency exit door that led outside, and I put a fan in the open door just to circulate air. I was later reprimanded for that because "leaving the door open can let the rats in." I later found a dead mouse in one of my storage closets.
2) Every teacher was sharing a classroom. Because I was teaching music, I was lucky to only be in one room, but two other teachers used my room during my lunch and prep. Some teachers were assigned as many as three different places to teach. One guy taught math on the auditorium stage, and a special ed teacher had the atrium between the gym and main building.
3) We had an 11-period staggered start schedule. So seniors had period 1-8, with 4th period lunch, juniors 2-9, 5th period lunch, etc etc. Unless you were in sports. All athletes were assigned the 1-8 schedule so it wouldn't interfere with practice. 11th period ended at 5 pm. So if you were a teacher with the 4-11 schedule, the parking lot is full, and kids regularly skipped your last two classes.
4) Our principal told us flat out that "if more than 30% of your students are failing, you're doing something wrong" and corrective action would be taken (reprimand of the teacher in their file). Remember that 10th and 11th period truancy issue? If more than 30% of your kids were skipping class, the remaining 70% HAD to at least get a D, even if they slept through it, or never did any work. By the way, this is how students graduate high school not knowing how to read. It isn't the classroom teachers.
5) 2500 high schoolers in a building designed for 1200 middle schoolers. "Students" (gang bangers) enrolled only because they could deal drugs in the periods where everyone was in the building (4-8) and it was too crowded to monitor the hallways. Federal law requires schools to allow anyone under 21 to enroll, so we had to allow them to register and be in the building. When I think back to the chaos of those crowded hallways, I thank God there was never a fire. For those of you who think vouchers will solve all our bad school problems, the reason we had so many kids enrolled is because each kid came with x amount of dollars from the district, and we were a "safer" building than most. When only one school is acceptable, schools either get overcrowded like this, or all the "good" kids end up concentrated in one place. What do you think happens to everyone else?
6) I don't know if this was an Illinois, CPS, or federal rule, but any student with an IEP or 504 plan could not be expelled. If they brought a gun to school, the most you could do was a 2-week suspension. Dealing crack? 2-week suspension. And the district kept track of who did "the most suspensions" (thank you Arne Duncan).
7) Report cards were never mailed home (too many homeless and transient students), so we had "report card pickup night" something I'd never heard of out here in Oregon or Washington. Parents supposedly came to get the report card at an evening event that also doubled as conference time. Because the teachers were working in the evening, there would be no classes in the morning, and the conference time would count as contract time for that day. All probationary or first year teachers were "asked" to proctor the practice ACT that same morning, so if you were a first year teacher, you worked a 12 hour day with no break, and no pay for half of it. It was assumed that if you didn't fo it, your contract would not be renewed. (I filed a grievance for this particular incident and was denied because I accepted the "compensation" a $5 gift card to Borders in a thank you note)
8) If you took a field trip, you had to take a sick day, or bribe your colleagues to cover for you, with no pay.
9)The four people in the music department had one computer and one phone to share between us. The computer did not have internet access, and there was only one voicemail box to share. The phone was in my office, so I got the fun job of taking messages for everyone. To access email or enter grades, we had to use the student computer lab, and it would take several days because the server was so slow you couldn't get it done in one prep period.
10) I was only allowed to do 2 concerts a year, and no students were allowed to perform at graduation. They didn't want me to teach to the best of my abilities, they wanted someone to churn kids through the 1 year arts graduation requirement.
11) In our contract was a clause that "if a student attacks a teacher, the teacher may defend themself by any means necessary." How regular would the violence have to be for that kind of language to be included?
Now that I've told you all that, here's the context. That was in 2004-2005. The economy was still good. NCLB was in effect, but the "failing schools" and "reforms" hadn't really kicked in yet. For those of you who are teachers out West, think about how far our system has fallen in the last seven years. What I described occurred during the good years. Now put that in context with "merit pay" for student test scores.
This strike isn't all about teacher pay (and I keep wondering where the media gets the $76K figure...are administrators with teacher licenses included in that average? Because THEY make well over 100K a year)--although that is part of it, since they haven't had a cost of living increase in five years. And the main arguments I see against the teachers are these:
a) "Teachers make 75,000 a year and get three months off!" See above for my rebuttal to that. I have never made even close to that, not even after I had my masters degree (which I had to get over the summers....summers off? Please. Summers are when I caught up on all the stuff I didn't have time for during the year. Like inventory and curriculum planning). That salary average is being skewed somehow. And June 24th to August 15th is not three months. It's about 7 weeks. If you add that to spring and winter breaks you get just over two months. And we don't get paid for those.
b) "They're just whining about tests because the bad teachers don't want to be held accountable." See above for that, too. A student disappears for three months and comes back just before the test and my pay and job security is supposed to be based on THAT?
c) "fire them all, the selfish bastards, and replace them with subject matter experts or recent college grads." This is like hiring a journeyman carpenter to come in after a flood and not only fix the rotted wood and drywall, but also could you fix the plumbing while you're at it and buy the materials yourself? And if you don't, I'll get the freelance handyman down he street to do it, after all, he's not union so he'll cost less, and it doesn't really take any knowledge to do the job, hell, I could do it myself!! You only need to watch Renovation Realities or Holmes on Homes to know what a bad idea this is. Yet, we still have programs like Teach For America that basically say the art of teaching requires no skill or training. And we put those poor schmucks into the worst of the worst urban schools. It's "hiring the handyman for rehabbing post-Katrina homes." Sure, they might succeed, but it's going to be a lot more hit and miss than someone who chose to be a professional in that field, and will cost a lot more money because of the inevitable high turnover rate. Show me any job where turnover is high and also has a high success rate. I bet you won't find many, if any at all. Doing something well takes time and effort.
d) "If the union would quit protecting the bad teachers, I'd be more willing to support this." This one really gets me. I've worked in five districts, and I can only name two out of those hundreds of colleagues that I would label "bad" (and one of those was let go even though he'd been working for 6 years and was tenured). I've met a dozen lazy teachers and a handful of mediocre teachers all of whom still manage to do the job competently. When pressed about this subject, I've found that the person making a statement like this has a particular teacher in mind, or went to school in the 60s and 70s before all the training requirements were in place. Think. If you go to school in the United States, you had about 36 teachers from K-12. How many of those were really truly bad? I don't mean the ones you had a personality conflict with, or the effective-but-not-memorable ones, or even the ones who taught a subject you didn't like. I mean the ones who leave kids in the room while they watch soaps in their office. The fact is, those teachers are few and far between, and the union does NOT protect them from being fired. If they get away with it, it's because no one complained or said anything. There is a process, and it is harder than "go clean out your cubicle" but it can be done.
e) "Teachers shouldn't strike because the students need a place to learn. This proves they don't care about the kids." Translation: Teachers fighting for better physical conditions for your kid to learn in is not acceptable because you need the free day care, and since that's inconvenient for you, they should just roll over and take whatever abuse and pay cuts that legislators think is ok.
Oh, and just for the record, Tyson was way more demoralized working for Vancouver than Chicago, because of how poorly teachers were treated by administrators. Chew on that.
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