Teachers at Work Achieving Success in Our Schools
Susan Moore Johnson Basic Books, Inc., Publishers New York 1990
| Privilege to Teach Pg. 45 Many teachers made it clear that they were well aware of the personal price they paid for the privilege to teach – low pay, low status, little structured opportunity for personal growth. This group of teachers tolerated the costs but recalled many of their able colleagues who had considered the price too high and left education for other work. One urban high-school respondent recalled a recent television documentary in which a teacher said plaintively, “I want to teach. Why don’t they let me teach?” She described her own disappointing but quiet compromise with the system:You want so badly to be able to make a change – to change the system, to change the quality. And yet you really feel powerless. What I’ve gotten down to this year is trying to make a difference on a very small, one-to-one basis. Pg. 49 Speaking about their supervisors, teachers often distinguished between what they called educational and administrative values. Although they praised some principals and superintendents for their educational orientation to their jobs, more were described as absorbed in administrative concerns. As one urban high-school teacher explained,There is a radical – and I’m choosing that word carefully – radical dichotomy between the goals, aims, and objectives, educationally speaking of a competent or better classroom teacher and the successful school administrator. Such administrators were said to be more concerned with politics than curriculum, more responsive to pressure than information, more attentive to appearances than realities. They were seldom seen in classrooms and rarely offered educational leadership to the teaching staff. The Salt of the Earth Pg. 56I was supremely naive up to that time. I really believed that the teachers were there to teach, and the parents were there to parent, and the politicians were there to see that the teachers could teach, and the students could learn, and parents could parent.He (the teacher quoted above) described his discovery that “not everybody associated with the school system shares my idealism and my goals . . . not every parent shares my attitudes about what is best for young people, and . . . not every politician tells the truth.” He told of disputes about academic freedom, ” political leverage to maneuver grades,” and administrators’ “questioning the validity of a teacher’s standards in the classroom.” He said, “I really question whether or not I had sacrificed far too much for far too little recognition.” Finally, he decided that he would be sustained by his own sense of accomplishment:It’s like the tree falling in the forest. It does make a sound. I don’t care if anyone’s around to hear it or not. I make a sound – hell, I make a big boom, I think. So I’m going to go back to knocking over trees. The Politics of Space and Supplies Pg. 75 Again and again, teachers told of spending two hundred to five hundred dollars of their own money annually to support their teaching. Gary Stein, who taught second grade in a prosperous district, said that he routinely spentThree to four hundred dollars a year on school supplies, school stickers, little books for rewards . . . I buy materials that the school might not . . There’s a paper-supply place that has a yard sale, and I’ll go there and spend seventy-five to one hundred dollars a whack, buying a model of the digestive system or something like that – thing that just couldn’t be provided that I want to deal with, that I want to teach. Teaching Style Pg. 86 Many other respondents modified their approaches to teaching as student populations changed, but they often did so with ambivalence. A mathematics teacher in a selective urban technical school said:Some of the teachers live in the past where all you had to do was get up and lecture to the kids and they’d learn. But you have to improvise. You have to be an entertainer to compete with what they see on television. It’s really true. You have to be a professional entertainer. Pg. 110 A review of these features of school organizations – the environment, goals, technology, and raw materials – suggests that, if schools are to be effective, they must have adaptive structures, experiment with varied approaches, and prepare for different kinks of outcomes. Theory would lead us to predict that standardized structures, and preplanned practices would enable educators to serve only some students and achieve only some goals, that rationalizing instruction overall would be ill-advised and ineffective. Pg. 134 A teacher reports:If somebody came in here and told me to teach this way or that way, it wouldn’t work – not for good teachers . . . If you want to set a mine field . . . for failure, that’s how you do it. This celebration of autonomy should not be read as a demand for license. Teachers recognized the importance of a coherent program and acknowledged their responsibility to colleagues who would teach their students in subsequent years. Leading as Opposed to Following Pg. 135 (With regard to curriculum) Many teachers resented such prescription and some refused to comply. A public-elementary-school teacher said that he had “played it right by the book” one year and found that he “wasn’t satisfied. I had thought that maybe they had a magical formula here. I did everything that they said to do. Then I said, ‘No way . . . I can do this much better,’ and I have.” He reorganized the sequence of stories, introduced novels, and prepared exercises to promote higher-level thinking skills. He reclaimed his autonomy with little difficulty, but others encountered more constraints. Pg. 136 An English teacher said that her centrally prescribed curriculum was far too comprehensive, but that she had decided not to cover it all: “To me, if I can cover half of it, and they understand half of it fully, I would rather do that than go through one hundred percent and have them understand nothing.” Asked whether such adjustments required approval from above, she said, “I don’t ask. I just do it.” By contrast, a social studies teacher felt very confined by the requirements of the district’s prepackaged curriculum. She compared teaching her American history class, where the program was prescribed, to teaching in her “best” class, Afro-American history, “where you don’t have all those curriculum and objectives to follow’ and she could do “exciting thing.” In the required course,you’re a robot and it’s an assembly-line kind of thing, where you’re not doing anything well. You’re just on some kind of a schedule . . . Trying to cover a whole textbook before the end of the year doesn’t leave you any room to do creative kinds of things. She argued that the prescribed program discouraged creativity among teachers: “You tend to take the safe route out. ‘We’re on chapter twelve today.’ Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.” Pg. 230 Similarly an urban secondary-school teacher observed, “They’ll talk about it: ‘Get the best out of your kids.’ But that’s really not true. They talk. They talk. They talk. But no one’s really doing it.”One elementary-school teacher was optimistic and confident that “people share the same philosophies . . .It’s there, but people aren’t aware of it.” His personal goal was to serve every child: ” I truly believe in my heart that a school should be able to take any child no matter what their home problems are . . . and provide them with a totally safe, separate, and encouraging place.” He hoped that, over time, he might bring others to realize that they, too, shared this purpose. (a teacher) . . recounted an incident in which a politician had “argued the case of a parent whose child was horribly deficient academically” and advocated for her promotion. After the teacher had “provided copious data,” explaining why the student had not passed his course, the politician responded: “What the hell difference does it make anyway?” Money Matters Pg. 305 A veteran teacher recalled that many times he had considered leaving teaching ” because after I got married, the income was less than adequate.” A teacher with five years of experience anticipated coming strains:The truth is, when you grow up, money seems to be, unfortunately, the real reward. It’s enough for me at this point in my life to see a smile on kids’ faces. . . But I just bought a house in the fall, and I know that money is becoming more and more important every day. It’s very scary. I’d like to have a child some day soon. I don’t know if I can afford it.A number of respondents felt demoralized and angered by what their low pay implied – society’s low opinion of their work. Several said that they didn’t think the public understood the demands of their jobs. An elementary-school teacher was tired of patronizing remarks from people who say, “Aren’t teachers wonderful?” but “aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is.” |