A Troubled Teacher Telling Tales Out of School

Strikes end, attitudes change more slowly. Teachers, perhaps almost by nature, do not like bureaucracy. They have little stomach for the kinds of activities that tend to preoccupy out-of-classroom personnel--administrators, coordinators, “mentor” teachers, mandated-program directors and a host of others--in our schools.

On every hand I hear them complaining that the system has become so over administered as to be unworkable. Many see the decline of the U.S. public school, once the glory of a nation, as directly related to an overwhelming proliferation of non-classroom-teaching positions on our school campuses. Many others, “trapped” in teaching and unprepared for elsewhere, see the school system in a state of collapse and their own situations as hopeless. Still others, old enough to remember a time when teaching was respected--because the school system performed respectably--exist in a state of general dismay which, at best, manifests itself in a feeling of exhaustion.

They see every out-of-classroom position filled by someone whose agenda often relates only indirectly, at best, to what they consider the basic mission of the schools: classroom teaching. Rather than supporting the classroom, too many official observers tend to operate at odds with teaching--and learning--by superimposing themselves in burdensome ways on the classroom. More often than not, the added adults create ever more irrelevant paper work for increasingly distracted teachers.

When the classroom teacher in the American schoolhouse became less important than non-teaching adults on campus, the game was lost. From that moment it became unclear who the real educational authority was on campus. In the child’s mind it had always been the teacher. Not the administration, but the teacher. Teaching was important; the administration was just there--unless the child had to be punished by the principal. In those old days, the job of educating got done.

When the teacher became a secondary figure among campus adults, the job became almost impossible because it had been made unbearably burdensome. Too often, even the most experienced teacher has had to wage near-war to fend off incursions by administrators and other non-teaching personnel. Hired to “observe” teachers, these classroom escapees, as they are called, wind up doing mischief to the education process. Many of them were not the best teachers in their own classroom days.

Teachers say that the overall failure to hold the brightest and the best of their ranks comes from a refusal by the finest educators to put up with the nonsense that parades under the banner of classroom observation and assistance these days.

What is, by turns, bemusing, amazing and finally dismaying about all this is the smothering way new teachers are observed, “assisted,” tutored, trained--you name it. We are treating our new teachers like not-too-bright kids who can’t quite be trusted to enter a classroom in September and reappear there every school day till June, learning--often by making their own mistakes--how to perform the most important task that any society can assign.

Some teachers are surprised that the kids don’t just walk out of the system. But, then, here in Los Angeles where I teach, about 42% of them have done exactly that by high school--and most of the rest have long since taken a spiritual hike. Why not, indeed, when they continuously receive a message that the important person placed before them as a teacher really isn’t--at least, not just yet? Every time an adult enters a classroom and sits in the back taking notes, the kids know they have a teacher who is somehow not to be trusted as such. If all of the out-of-classroom personnel we have currently involved in “assisting” are so accomplished, then why not keep them in the classroom, in that critical arena where they can best perform, working with the most important constituency: students? A return to the classroom by good teachers would help to reduce the size of California classes, now laboring under the largest student-teacher ratios in the nation.

But the bureaucracy that weighs heavily on the schools seems incapable of such vision, the same bureaucracy that seems incapable of managing the billions of taxpayer dollars that somehow keep on coming.

Why haven’t we spent the money on hiring the best teachers available? Then we wouldn’t have to hire an army of observers, evaluating assistant principals, in-service specialists and any number of other vaguely defined administrators, quasi-administrators and coordinators to “assist” them.

I wonder whether a hospital would hire mentors to come into the operating room to teach the professional doctor how to perform an operation.

The workable solutions, aside from increased teacher pay, may be the hardest to apply, at least in this district: Eliminate the bewildering array of out-of-classroom positions on campus and reduce class size. Until those answers are put in place, there will be little post-strike progress in cleaning up the management mess that tries to pass for California public education.