It has nothing to do with students or classroom management.
I have had many relationships with our public schools: a student, a member of our city’s business community concerned about how our public schools impacted our city, a volunteer for the local education foundation, a parent of public school students, a resident that pays hefty real estate taxes that fund the schools, and, for this past year, a public school teacher.
The first question people usually ask when I tell them I changed careers from practicing law to teacher middle school is “Why?” The very short answer is that I believe our public schools are vital to our community, we have a lack of teachers, and I had the opportunity to be a part of the solution.
Or so I thought. I did not realize how much my role as a teacher would change the way I could interact with my school system. What I quickly discovered is the perniciousness of that frustration other teachers have written about and noted in surveys: the frustration of not being heard.
Before becoming a teacher, I talked with school administrators and spoke before my city’s school board to share my concerns as a resident and a parent. As a “respected” member of the business community, taxpayer and voter, I could arrange meetings with school board members. They at least appeared to take my concerns seriously and to genuinely consider my thoughts on our schools. I would get quick, respectful responses thanking me for taking the time to share with them. Never once was I told that they knew more about education than I did, or that I was being “disrespectful” for sharing my thoughts with them. Administrators were quick and polite with responses to me as a parent questioning some policy or procedure at my child’s school. I would be invited in to discuss any concern I had. They never responded that I did not know what I was talking about, nor did they dismiss my questions by telling that they had been dealing with students longer than I had been a parent, or they had more pressing matters.
But this past year was different. This past year, school administrators and the school board could (would?) no longer hear me. Though I continued to pay the same real estate taxes, and I still have the same children in the same public school system, the status of “teacher” obscured my other roles.
How did this play out? It seemed as soon as I accepted a position teacher, the deferential listening to my concerns, the respectful responses, the careful consideration of what I was saying disappeared. In its place I found a typical response to any concern I raised or question I had — “you are a new teacher, we have been doing this a lot longer and know a lot more.” Perhaps I should have expected this as I was now under them in the school hierarchy. After years of collaborating with others in the workplace as a peer, however, I had forgotten what it was like in bureaucracy where that hierarchy is closely guarded. What I certainly did not expect, and I don’t think I should have expected, was the lack of empathy, the impatience, and especially the animosity from people who (as they reminded me repeatedly) had been a new teacher once.
“Observations” are routine for a new teacher. You can expect administrators to show up to watch you at any time. One such observation for me occurred shortly into the new school year. From my perspective, the lesson went well. I was pleased with the progress my students and I had made together and relieved the observation was not during my most challenging class. I was excited that my students had “performed” better than they had in previous weeks and, when asked to comment on how the lesson went and I, innocently, openly shared these thoughts. It was as if the administrator did not hear; instead he plowed into a litany of every single thing that did not meet his ideal of students’ behavior and my ineffective responses. I attempted to discuss how many students had improved since the beginning of school and what I was doing to address certain behaviors. In response, I was labeled “defensive”, “disrespectful” and “argumentative”. It was pointed out to me exactly how many students were not paying attention, how many students were talking while I was talking, every time a student sneaked a look at their phone, and noted every other instance when the class did not match the model in the administrator’s head. It took 20 minutes. My initial excitement at my class improvement was not only squelched, but I felt embarrassed to have raised it as a positive.
Then the administrator offered his “suggestions”. I made the mistake of asking the purpose of the suggested action, a question I raised because the efficacy of the action was not readily apparent to me. I grievously compounded the faux-pas when I asked the administrator what I should do if the suggested action did not produce the “right” results. Still thinking that this was a dialogue between professional colleagues, I raised the fact that I had actually tried some of his suggestions without success. “How dare you” was unspoken but palatable in his indignant response that seethed with contempt for a lowly teacher -”I have been doing this for 20 years….”. It had already been a challenging day and I was already emotionally and mentally exhausted. By the end of the meeting I was in tears. Tears of exhaustion and utter frustration. Tears are rare for me, and I was surprised at how easily they came to the surface that day. But my frustration, my exhaustion were not heard. Instead, I was labeled “unprofessional”.
This was not the conversation I had envisioned when I walked into the room and I was more demoralized than I had ever been in my years of work in a variety of occupations. Yet, still, this was one administrator. Surely others would want to know and understand the impact of the evaluation. But, when I said to another school administrator that I felt demoralized by this meeting, I was told my feelings were invalid — it was not demoralizing and I had no right to feel that it was..
Although I was dismayed at this first experience with administrators in my role as a teacher, I was not willing to believe that my voice was no longer valid simply because I had taken on this role. I did not pay less in real estate taxes because of the change in role. My education and years of experience that had been respected just months before did not disappear.
My students last year were predominantly African American (a statement amply supported by the data — 75% or more of my students in each class identified as African-American). Our classes were “clustered” based upon previous test scores, and this resulted in predominantly African-American students being on one hallway (mine), while the more racially diverse “honors” classes were on another hallway. This did not go unnoticed by my students. During a discussion Jim Crow and the treatment of African Americans after Reconstruction (I teach history), one of my classes expressed a belief that racism was behind the clustering. I, naively, thought the school administration would want to know this concern. I was wrong. “I AM NOT A RACIST” was the administrator’s angry response when I brought this to his attention. What had I expected? Perhaps concern that a group of students felt discriminated against; perhaps a query as to how this perception may be linked to the unusually numerous (so I was told) behavioral issues that were localized to the clustered hallway; perhaps a discussion as to what we could do together to allay these children’s fears of racism impacting their education.
I tried to have this conversation, but it quickly became obvious that I could not be heard. Had I as a parent shared this concern, I am quite sure I would have received a different response. There would have been expressed concern, probably a pained expression that any student felt this way, and a promise to do whatever it took for his students to know that he loved them all, that he did not have a racist bone in his body.
Throughout the year, other teachers, those in my family and those who just pitied me as the Don Quixote they had once been, cautioned me to “just listen, nod agreeingly, and don’t say anything”. I had a hard time accepting that, although I was the same person, with the same education, same life experience, and now with more knowledge about both the theory and the practice of teaching, my voice could not be heard from within the system. So I kept trying for a while, suffering condemnation and anger at my audacity to question any word from on high. For example, when I asked for help with some behavioral issues in my class, I was told to follow the school policy, which required written referrals. When I did, I was told I wrote an “inordinate” number of referrals at the end of the year, referrals I wrote in accordance with the policy. I questioned what constituted “inordinate”, a reasonable question, I thought. When they could not tell me what they meant by their own comment, I said I thought it was unfair that they give me a negative evaluation if they could not explain how they determined the number of referrals were ‘inordinate” and that I was not sure how I was supposed to “improve” if I did not know what was considered acceptable. The response, “see, this is why we can’t talk to you, you are disrespectful and argumentative.”
Now, I am one week into year two of teaching and I am full of unease. Not because of the work or the environment, or challenging students, or the inordinate number of (unpaid) hours outside the regular workday necessary just to keep up with all the demands.
The unease comes from knowing there will be no year three unless I acknowledge and accept that an essential part of me, my voice, must be lost.
