The Miseducation of NYC

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I finished my first year of teaching in NYC.

I’m breathing … recuperating, relaxing, rejoicing, reflecting, all that.

This has been a crazy twelve months. I started the NYC Teaching Fellows Program in June of last year. I still attend classes at Brooklyn College two nights a week, and will continue to do so through August of next year. Since joining the program, many people have asked me about it and whether or not they should apply.

My gut instinct is to tell them to run away screaming. This has been an incredibly taxing year. First year teachers got it hard. First year teachers who are also full-time grad students could very well be certifiably insane.

Maybe I’m being a little dramatic (Me, dramatic? Never), but this year has been one of the hardest of my life. I’m used to 60+ hour weeks. I’m used to being in over my head. I’m used to sacrificing sanity and sleep to make something happen. But if someone had told me a year ago what this year would have held for me … well, I probably would have done it anyway (see above: I am part of that certifiably crazy bunch I mentioned), but I would have been really apprehensive about the whole thing.

I love my job and I love my students. I am excited about teaching and figuring out new ways to present abstract algebra to high school freshmen. I love the days when I’m doing paper work post-tutoring and some boys will come in and use my classroom as a dance space, or some ladies will chat with me about their job or their cat or their new found agnosticism or their “asshole boyfriend” or their trip to the dentist or whatever. I love working with them on school shows. I love seeing my lowest achieving math student impress the hell out of me with his knowledge of the war during an anti-recruitment talk. It was incredible doing youth media work and them REALLY getting it that their stories and voices are important. But the thought of doing it all again next year … wow. I hope (know?) this is June burnout that will be extinguished after swimming at the beach and getting through the fiction books my girlfriend bought me on my shelf.

There was an op-ed in the NY Times a couple weeks ago lauding the rise in qualified teachers in schools serving people of color and the poor. They credit fast-track certification programs like the New York City Teaching Fellows and Teach for America as one main contributors to the trend. I almost laughed outloud! I don’t want to discount the contributions of those like me who have entered these programs and worked their asses off in one of the hardest jobs on the planet. But qualified? We enter the school system after six weeks of training, are given up to 100 students—many of whom are operating (way) below grade level—and they’re like: “Here. Good luck.” Really? Bloomberg and Klein have done a great job on their spin campaign to get the general public to believe that this makes me and those like me qualified.

There are real problems with these alternate certification programs, the lack of sufficient training being only one of them. For both TFA and NYCTF, the teacher retention rates are low. Both programs are advertised as a two-year commitment: as long it takes to get your discounted master degree and reach full certification (an additional year is actually required in NYC to get your permanent, FYI). While NYCTF takes a slightly better approach and markets the program as a career change for working professionals, TFA is explicit about their program being a good in-between step for those attending graduate, law or medical school (they have ties to the universities for their graduates to enter once they’ve completed their commitment). All their talk of closing the achievement gap and setting high expectations changes the minute your two years is up.

One of my colleagues is a TFA person, and I think he’s above average for the bunch. He’s a hard worker and shows up every day ready and goes hard, but he sees his teaching gig as more of a community service sort of thing: “giving back to those less fortunate” before he goes off to “bigger and better things” for himself (in this case medical school). This charitable attitude is hardly what is needed to spark a real movement for change in the public education system. It’s also not doing what the program claims it is setting out to do: putting highly passionated and qualified new teachers in to under-staffed school districts to close the achievement gap in public education. It is throwing under-trained—though, you know, sometimes passionate—people into a room with underserved public school students, closing the door, and saying “problem solved for now” while brushing their hands together and walking away. In two years, after that person leaves, they will have to do the same thing with another 20-something, but no matter. It’s just another education experiment performed on poor people and students of color.

From a union perspective, these programs are also contributing to the deskilling of the work force. Treating teaching as a profession that anyone can do with just a few weeks of training is really ludicrous. This, combined with the mandated high-stakes standardized tests (not to mention increased military recruitment) brought to us by NCLB, has made the classroom a really difficult place to hold up the didactic contract (teachers teach, students learn)—let alone to develop critical-thinking, well-informed people that could actually create a people over profit, sustainable, equitable society. Even as a math teacher, where “teaching to the test” could be seen as less harmful than in more humanities-based classrooms, there is no way I can actually get my students through the material they are tested on in the time allotted, forcing me cover information opposed to teach for understanding. This contributes to the industrial assembly-line education system we’ve been stuck in the past century. It’s affecting my instructional practice even in my newly empowered NYC small school environment (oh boy, that’s another post) that is supposed to be working against that trend.

So … I am in an interesting position at the end of the first year of my fellowship. Knowing and experiencing all the problems of these fast-track certification programs, I am still glad for the opportunity I have to be a fully certified teacher. Some of my colleagues in the program are excellent in the classroom, and it’s a pleasure to work with them. There are some cool things happening as a result of the program for students across the city—there is some gray here. But overall, I think these programs are not the solution to NYC’s and the nation’s public school system and can actually have very detrimental effects.

Oh, and as a last and very troubling note on the miseducation of New York City: the Bloomberg-Klein “NYCTF for principals” Leadership Academy has received five more years of funding. This neo-con business school touted as a training ground for new principals—some of whom have very little experience in the classroom—will continue to spread the Welch business model to small schools opening throughout the city. As an employee of one, I can tell you this is very bad news.

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Filed under Leadership Academy, New York City Teaching Fellows, brooklyn, education, teaching