The New Segregation in Education

In 1954 the United States Supreme Court made a significant decision in the Oliver L. Brown et.al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) et.al. case, which dismantled the legal basis for racial segregation in schools and other public facilities. The Supreme Court declared racial segregation violated the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens equal protection of the laws. Brown v. Board of Education shaped future national and international policies regarding human rights. This decision inspired human rights struggles across the country and around the world.
(http://brownvboard.org/summary/)

Do you have any idea where I am going with this?

What does this have to do with retaining teachers at Program Improvement schools?

Let me tell you a story. Years ago, I began my work at a little PI school in the country. This same year, little did I know, there was a teacher who had just started her work there the year before. At the end of my second year, because the teacher did not yet have tenure in our district, our principal called her into the office and simply "let her go."

For those of you who do not know what this might mean for a teaching professional, in our district, it meant this teacher, who had never been forewarned this decision might occur, was unemployed. The district would never hire her again.

She had worked, perhaps not perfectly, she was, after all, relatively new to the teaching field, under the immense pressures, stress, unrealistic expectations, and scrutiny which exist at a PI school for THREE years, and without even an explanation ( because when you are not tenured the principal does not have to give you one), she was essentially fired.

I have often wondered where she went. Certainly, being "let go" from a district cannot look good on a resume. In addition, I have also wondered if this teacher would still be working in our district had she NOT been working at a PI school.

There is a certain "type" of educator who can fit in at a PI school. Type A's do extremely well, but I have seen them leave, especially when the administrator is as controlling as they are. Brown-nosers do well too ( perhaps, this is how I made it as long as I did). I just did what I was told. All the little teeny tiny things that MUST be done: turning in weekly minutely formatted lesson plans, creating AND keeping pace with an often unrealistic curriculum map ( pacing calendar) in order to be through the curriculum before "the test", teaching strictly from commercially created base program materials ( rarely straying for a glimpse into more engaging, creative, real-world, joyful lessons outside reading, writing, and math), attending meeting after, long excruciating, minute-by-minute-dictated, meeting ( keeping notes on everything which occurred for records---all part of the "monitoring" and "accountability" measures for our school site), putting a smile on my face and saying, " Okay, I'll do that." All the while, thinking, "How will I ever be able to do all that?", tolerating score manipulations by my principal ( so she could make the point that the test for my FIRST GRADERS was not calibrated to the STAR---oh my goodness) [ the scores were moved DOWN not UP], posting standards, schedules, and creating elaborate focus walls, testing, testing, testing to assess learning to "drive instruction" ( even though, to keep up with the pacing calendar, I rarely had time to go back and reteach what the children had failed to grasp), and on it went....

Teachers who are independent minded, creative, and know their craft...do not fair well at a PI school. I rediscovered the independent minded, creative, side of myself during my third year of teaching...and this is when I interviewed for another job in our district for a position at a Non-PI school.

This leads me to the main topic of this particular piece of writing ( you were wondering when I would get there). There is a new segregation in education. Teachers at PI schools are quite aware of the inequities they bear at their school sites. As they speak to their educator-friends at Non-PI schools, they are intelligent enough to ascertain the differences in expectations from administrators and bureaucratic entities. Teachers at Non-PI schools have more freedom and are allowed to be more creative. They are allowed to be professional educators who practice their craft.

Teachers at Non-PI schools, who have never worked at a PI school, often fancy themselves as miracle workers. As they see their high scores, they attribute it largely to themselves, rarely taking a look at the real reasons their students are able to meet the high assessment expectations.

What I heard over and over again in my interviews with educators, was that teachers at Non-PI schools have larger parameters to make their own decisions. They also talked about principals at Non-PI schools, who value their teaching staffs' opinions as professionals, and allowed them to decide what was best for their students. Interviewees spoke of overhearing conversations from teachers at Non-PI schools, panicked because they had two-whole English Language Learners (ELL) in their classes, when the teacher being interviewed had had more than 90% of their students who were ELL, when they had previously worked at a PI school.

One teacher talked about their experience. At a PI school, they had been deemed as less effective because their students continually scored Basic on assessments. When they left their assignment at a PI school and transferred to a Non-PI school, their students' scores skyrocketed, and they were suddenly effective!

Yes! There is a new segregation in education. It is a Have and Have-Not situation among teachers. At Non-Program Improvement schools, teachers are the Haves. They have more freedom, less restrictions, more use of their professional integrity, less bureaucratic scrutiny and administrative controls upon them( there is a formula in education today: high test scores=less administrative and bureaucratic control of teachers), more students whose primary language is English from white collar/middle class homes, and more parental support.

And then there are the Have-Nots. At Program Improvements schools, teachers "Have-not" a less stressful working environment or a larger degree of professional freedom. They "have not" a student population whose first language is the language of instruction, nor do their students come equipped with much of the foundational cultural background knowledge necessary for a wider degree of success in school.

These factors make a huge difference in the way a teacher teaches and a student becomes educated. These factors also make a difference in whether or not a teacher stays at a PI school and sometimes whether a teacher "makes it" in their profession. Because, statistics show students who are ELL, from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and/or are from ethnic minority groups, do not do as well on state tests, and state tests are EVERYTHING in the world of education today. And if a school has a large majority of the above mentioned subgroups, their scores will be lower, they will not make their API and/or AYP, and then the "sanctions" begin, and then intensify, until all joy and laughter disperses from a campus, as it slowly descends into the world of "PI-status", never to be the same.

If the teacher, who I spoke of at the beginning of this blog, had started her work with our district at a Non-PI school, and had been granted the luxurious environment which exists therein, I am quite certain her fate would have been different. So, in the end, this was not an equitable situation for her as a professional. She was judged according to a MUCH higher standard than a new teacher would have been at a Non-PI school.

As I have said before, there are two kinds of teachers who know what it is like to work at a Program Improvement school: those who are still there and those who have left.

My opinion is that there must be a new equality in the world of teaching. There must be a balance in the expectations teachers at PI schools are required to achieve. Who would want to keep their positions at these sites, when there is a world of greater professional freedom and less anxiety at an inter-district Non-PI school five miles away?