“Old Teachers Bad! Young TFAers Good!” — Animal Farm

The extent to which Harry Jaffe has turned into one of Michelle Rhee’s biggest cheerleaders is disappointing. Here’s an article which he seems to go along with the fairy tale: Old teachers Bad! Young TFAers good! (Sounds like the refrain in Orwell’s Animal Farm.)

The guy who sometimes cuts my hair is a white native Washingtonian, a bit older than me, I think. He told me he went to Anacostia High in the early 1960′s, when it was beginning to be integrated. He said that it was really chaotic at that time – big fights every day between the white and black kids. So, even 50 years ago, things weren’t so wonderful at Anacostia HS in DC. (BTW – one of the best barbers I’ve ever had in my life.)

Situations where only a handful out of the 25 or so students on the rolls normally show up to class are unfortunately rather common in lots of DC’s neighborhood senior high schools. How does one actually teach empty chairs? Phone calls, etc, from the teacher usually accomplish little. One never gets administrative support. This is not a recent phenomenon. I took over a class some 30 years ago just like that at McKinley Tech. There were classes where a number of students would come to class reeking of reefer, or obviously drunk, and acting very bizarre – and those might be the very students that you, as a teacher, may have finally have persuaded to re-attend class – just once – after numerous phone calls to the house, to the probation officer, to grandma, ….

How is a single teacher going to overcome that sort of situation with a class load of 60 – 150 students, many of them presenting very, very similar problems? Naturally, somebody who attends class less than 20% of the time can’t possibly pass; but if you give the student the F they have worked so hard for, then one will see one’s rating dropped, one will receive threats against one’s life, and one will find out that an administrator changed the grade behind your back in order to save their own hindparts. Or else, the student might take a 2-week ‘credit recovery’ course and end up with an A or B for a full-year or full-semester course.

If the assumption is that it’s always the teacher’s fault, then, why on earth would anybody ever want to become a teacher? And, believe me, young teachers are up against the same exact type of problem. I was a brand-new, wet-behind-the-ears teacher 30 years ago. I don’t know how effective I really was, and unlike Michelle Rhee, I’m not going to make up fairy-tale statistics about my supposed success.

Even at Wilson SHS, literally nothing is done about students who roam the hall all day. It is de facto DCPS policy to do essentially NOTHING about class-cutting because, you guessed it, it’s always the teachers’ fault. Everything. Nothing is the fault of asinine administrative policies that refuse to hold students or their parents accountable for anything whatsoever. Neither parents, students, administrators, nor school boards have had any role whatsoever in causing DCPS to become a mess. Oh, no. It’s all the fault of the teachers – and especially their unions. (Do you notice the tone of sarcasm here?)

If you listen to Rhee or writers like Harry Jaffe, DCPS all went to hell when the teachers got a union and stopped caring. Get rid of the union, and everything will be hunky-dory. Yeah, right. Like everything is wonderful in education in “right-to-work” states like Mississippi, Alabama, and poverty-stricken western Virginia???

What a crock.