In response to the debate in the New York Times “Room for Debate” about the Vergara decision, teacher H.A. Hurley commented on the historical perspective I offered, showing that tenure was part of women teachers’ struggle against the pervasive gender discrimination of superintendents and school boards.
Hurley writes that gender discrimination persisted long into the 20th century. She writes:
“Diane, outlining the history of the need for tenure in teaching was important. For many of us, the abuse of power by administrators of young teachers has not been so long ago. I remember the invasive questions of my marriage plans, pregnancy plans, birth control questions and having to provide answers to personal questions when taking a sick leave day or a personal day. Salary questions were discussed when answering questions related to why a woman worked if the husband worked. One system refused to honor my hyphenated last name, so did a major university in GA. Not that long ago!
“In one school, teachers had to provide all medical diagnosis and medications taken – 1998 in GA. Not long ago! Frightening! No protection!? Many more stories…
We were not able to wear pants, even if we were expected to sit in the floor, restrain BD students, or worked in cold climates.
Administrators were males and almost all teachers were women when I started in the late 1960s. Male Chauvenism was a new diagnosis and many men in authority were outraged and took it out in their female staff.
Job protection from abuse of power by authority was not awarded easily and is still fought in many states – not much has changed.
Michael Petrilli has no idea, about many things. Lots of slap Schtick generalizations, opinions and zip substance. Funny he is not, because Deformers use his airhead comments as gospel.
He operates all cylinders with personal attacks and bias. A scholar he is not and never will be. He reminds me of those administrators I wrote about at the beginning of this comment.
Unions, regs, lawyers and fear were the only reason some of these archaic ways changed. Only long enough to quickly rear their ugly heads with California rulings & more to come.
Frightening is an understatement. Women must speak up and tell their stories. Tenure has its history in gender discrimination.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In 1994, in an interview for a high school teaching position in northern Georgia, I had a male principal ask me what I would do if a male student made advances towards me. He was visibly upset that I was young (I was 26 years old) and, in his estimation, attractive.
In 2007, in an interview for a school counseling position, I had a male principal ask me if I had children because that would influence the time I had available for the job. He quickly added, “I can’t ask you that, can I?” I said, “No, you cannot.”
What do these anecdotes have to do with tenure?
If you had had these experiences while employed, how would tenure have prevented such occurrences, or protected you any more effectively than employment and anti-discrimination laws?
tenure=due process
If Mercedes’ principal had made advances at her and she had refused, he could not then fire her for that reason if she has due process (commonly known as tenure). Without it, he could. Or even if he didn’t make advances, but wanted to and was frustrated that he couldn’t and wanted her out of his sight, due process would protect the academic environment that is the reason she would be there to begin with.
Tim, surely that is not a serious question.
Bob, it surely is a serious question. Maybe I am missing something in the story, but I have no idea how tenure is supposed to protect job applicants from inappropriate or illegal conduct in job interviews.
Due process laws protect teachers from inappropriate conduct throughout their careers.
This recounts the history of Academic Freedom in Higher Ed but the same principle applies to education at every level. It has to do with all the ways teachers can be fired precisely for doing their jobs:
Arthur O. Lovejoy, John Dewey, and the History of the AAUP
It has been disheartening to me, as one who has always identified as a feminist, that other feminist are not speaking out in support of teachers and the teaching profession. I’m unsure as to why this is so. The fact that there is disparate pay between men and women in many fields, I would think that feminists would point to the salary schedules of teachers as an effective way of ensuring that men and women are paid equally for equal work.
I’m hoping that the Vergara case will cause many teachers in California to wake up. I think that many have become comfortable thinking that what other states have faced, would not happen in California. After all, we have been very successful in fighting off other attacks on the teaching profession. However, when I think of the possibility of Marshall Tuck being our next SSPI, it hits home even more that we cannot sit by and let others advocate for us.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Remove due process or dilute it until there is no real means by which teachers can contest firing decisions, and you are left with absolute power. Do we really want a situation in which an unscrupulous principal can fire a teacher because he wants to replace that person with his mistress or with this golfing buddy’s idiot son? Current protections exist for good reasons. I’ll share a story to provide some examples.
Years ago, when I was a young teacher, I took a job at a school where I was given six remedial preps–basically, all the remedial classes in the school. Why? Because the older teachers there didn’t want to have to deal with the remedial kids and had a department chair who would gladly push those classes off onto the new hire. I had a lot of tough, unruly students. This was a challenge.
A few weeks after I started work, the department chairperson invited me to dinner at his house. Then, while his wife was inside preparing dinner and we were outside on his deck talking, he made a pass at me. We were having a great time chatting about literature and life over a cocktail when he got up, came over to me, put his arm around my shoulder and leaned in to try to kiss me. After the awkwardness of trying to disengage from that, I explained to him that I had always been an ardent supporter of LGBT rights but that I was straight and, at any rate, considered it crazy to become romantically involved with one’s boss. My department chairperson was extraordinarily shaken by my rejection of his advances and spent the ensuing weeks in abject terror that I might reveal his secret–his sexual orientation–to others in the small, ultraconservative town we all lived in.
Meanwhile, every teacher at this school, in those days, had a paddle on the chalk tray at the front of the room. We were expected, when children were unruly, to beat them. When, after one incident, I told the principal that I did not believe in corporal punishment, he was FURIOUS. I was told that I would either start paddling kids or lose my job. This principal created no means whatsoever with dealing with excessively unruly students (such as in-school suspension) because he expected each teacher to deal with problems as they occurred by beating children. The physically smaller female teachers were encouraged to go interrupt one of the male teachers and have him do the child beating for them.
These two situations put my job in jeopardy through no fault of my own. I decided to take a job elsewhere, but had I stayed in that school, it’s likely that I would have been fired for not sleeping with my department chairperson, not beating my students, or some combination thereof, and I would have had little recourse.
Gruesome.
I did not think so. Of course, it was entirely inappropriate for this guy to come on to me, but without at all condoning what he did, I understood why it happened. This was a very conservative, small, backwater town in Indiana. The department chairperson was expansive, highly cultured, artistic, literary, and gay. He had, years before, acquiesced to the requirements of his social milieu and was trapped in marriage that wasn’t right for him among people who shared none of his interests in “high culture”–in literature, philosophy, history, the arts. He saw in me someone who was passionate about all these things. My company was water in the desert to him, and he had had, that evening, a couple of drinks and got carried away and made a terrible mistake. I was willing to forgive this and move on but, as I said, the fellow was TERRIFIED that I was going to reveal his “terrible secret.” I saw this as a tragedy, as very, very sad.
A very instructive, if sad and icky, anecdote, Bob.
For me, the most revealing part of it is the convergence of sexual/social repression and threat or use of violence against children.
Hopefully, things have opened up a bit in that backwater town, but the reality is that twisted/sublimated aggression and domination are rampant in the schools, and given the cover of “reform.”
Thanks for adding your story to the explanation of why tenure is so needed, exactly right, to stop absolute power from lodging in the hands of hostile abusive authorities. Tenure helps limit superiors abusing teachers. I too have an abusive story to tell from 43 yrs ago when I began teaching but will save it for another time.
Bob, I have experienced personally and heard from other teachers many stories exactly like this one.
This is a new idea to me, that tenure was a response to gender discrimination and abuse. Thank you for posting. It helps me expand my frame of reference.
I’m so glad that something is finally opening your eyes, Harlan!
Please don’t assume that private schools are any better at following ethical principles and complying with laws. In my state, corporal punishment is illegal in both public and private schools. Nevertheless, I worked at a non-unionized private school where I found out the day that I was first interviewed for the job that they hit kids. I took the job anyways because I thought I could teach them other approaches.
I soon learned that they were authoritarians across the board with children. They pulled kids’ ears a lot –something I had never heard of before but, believe me, it’s not pretty. They often humiliated children and they made wild threats, too. When administrators condone such behaviors, they easily become rampant across classrooms, especially when classes are team taught. I was the only one who worked alone and, when I was not there, they hit my students, including with a ruler, and threatened to kick them out my back door into the alley –all of which my students reported to me when I returned. I confronted the teachers who did it and got into some rather heated arguments.
Many of my students had been subjected to this horrible treatment for years before coming to my class and some would ask me, “Why don’t you hit us?” I’m talking about 5 year olds!
I had no problems with classroom management and I tried to teach them authoritative approaches, which I modeled, but they had no interest in copying me. I ended up reporting the school to the state on several occasions. I had to ask for anonymity, since I was an at-will employee. The school often figured out that I had reported them, but I denied it, because I had no other means of supporting myself and could not afford to lose my job.
Since the administration didn’t see a problem with mistreating kids, when I suspected that any of my students had been abused in their homes, they did not want me to report that to the state –even though I was mandated by law to do so. I filed those reports anyways and had to ask for anonymity then as well. The school figured out it was me then, too, and told this to the parents, but I denied it then, too.
This went on for 10 agonizing years. I stayed there because, soon after I started there, I got this crazy idea that I was put there to protect children.
After that, I became the principal of the school and I made many dramatic changes over the next few years. But the pay was very low and I was offered a job at a school where I could double my salary, so I left.
They replaced me with someone that had previously worked at the school and who I had fired for mistreating children, including pulling childrens’ ears.
BTW, when I left, I warned the state about who had been hired to replace me and her history…
Silly me, I had been up all night before writing my story and forgot to include the point of it.
When I applied for the principal’s position, after 10 years of teaching at that private school with no union protections and no tenure, I was fired BECAUSE I applied for that job.
I went to court over it. I had been making just slightly above minimum wage, so I was very lucky to have had extended family willing to help me get through it, including a relative who was a lawyer that took my case pro bono. I was also very fortunate because the court ultimately reinstated me for wrongful termination with back pay. It could have easily gone the other way, since this is an at-will state, so other teachers might not be so blessed.
Harlan, I am proud of you! It takes courage to say what you said here and it makes me respect you more. Thank you!
Chris in Florida: thank you for giving credit where credit it due.
I would not have used quite the same words, but I am glad you spoke up.
😎
Did you not also know that unions themselves were a response to inhuman working conditions? That without them, we could conceivably return to those same conditions? As Bob reminds us, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As an attractive female working in education starting in the 1970’s, I have my own batch of anecdotes, collected over a thirty-four year career. Sexual harassment was not limited to supervisors, of course, and I dealt with the entire continuum of male co workers, from the superintendent down through the custodians. I/We/Women were counseled to “deal with it like a lady.” To not stir up a fuss. That was our due process. It was a land mine and a nostalgia I don’t miss.
Thank you for taking the time to be informed. I applaud your interest.
Our job, as I see it, is to create for children the sorts of experiences that are transformative, that nurture intrinsic motivation. The best English teachers do a lot of work that requires that the student show individual initiative–that they pursue individual and group research, for example.
When kids are doing research on their own, they will, from time to time, encounter materials that someone somewhere will find objectionable. Suppose that I have a student in a high-school American lit class doing a project on Edgar Allan Poe. Suppose that that student reads, on his or her own, Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and encounters criticism that suggests that the poem is about necrophilia. Or suppose the student is doing a project on William Faulkner and encounters the fact that a character in one of Faulkner’s novels, Sanctuary, is raped with a corn cob. Or suppose that the student is doing research on Walt Whitman and encounters his Calamus poems, which are celebrations of homosexual romantic love, of the male genitalia, and of drug-induced states of consciousness. Any of these things could happen, without my intent and outside my immediate direction. Is there a high-school library that does not have a copy of Leaves of Grass? No collection of poems with “Annabel Lee” in it? I can tell you, for a fact, that ALL the English literature basals contain Andrew Marvell’s classic “To His Coy Mistress,” in which the speaker argues the object of his attraction into bed with these lines:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
Now, if you think for a moment about what the line “then worms shall try /
That long preserv’d virginity” is saying, you will see that it’s a pretty shocking image. But again, the poem is in ALL the English lit basals.
The point is that it’s inevitable that students will encounter, from time to time, IF A TEACHER IS DOING HIS OR HER JOB, materials that someone will find unacceptable or objectionable. Should a teacher lose his or her job because some fundamentalist parent got upset because a student doing a research project read material the parent finds objectionable? Should teachers be forced to vet absolutely everything that their students might read and keep them from pursuing any independent work? Should a teacher in such a situation, where a parent is upset about something a student has read, be given the opportunity to defend himself or herself? Or should a teacher’s job be in jeopardy simply because the parent who got upset happened to be politically influential in the community or a friend or acquaintance of a powerful administrator?
These sorts of situations come up ALL THE TIME. In the best situations, teachers have administrators who will have their backs. But sometimes that is not so, and in those situations, we need due process so that teachers can defend themselves for doing their jobs.
Indeed these type stories have been the story line in many TV shows in the 70s. Like the Waltons and Little House on the Prairie. And that movie in the 90s with Julia Roberts.
I thought we had moved past all this. Just like Sesame Street and Free to Be You and Me had me convinced we were color blind.
I have become disillusioned for sure in the last few years. I think men past the age of 40 were very aware of not making a mis-step in the 90s. I recall one of Deans in the College of Ed where I earned my credentials apologizing several times for calling me “sweetheart” when I went to get his signature to student teach in a magnet school out of area. I guess while some were becoming more conscientious and aware, others were gearing up to get things back to how they used to be. ?
Tenure laws are usually bound up in people’s minds, rightfully so, with discussions about the teacher’s unions and collective bargaining.
However, as a point of information, it might also be useful for people to know that tenure, at least in NY State, preceded the union having bargaining right by many years.
Excepting a few outliers in the Rheeform agenda, isn’t it still pretty much the all/old boys club? Women should be home, silent, pregnant and subordinate. <– Ties in well to the "war against women" portion of teacher reform. The percentage of female to male teachers in k-12 education leans towards women, and of course it does – the hours are lousy, as is the pay, and women are maternal and nurturing.
My neighbor recently told me a similar story of how when she began teaching she was not offered several positions because she was single, and that put a target on her as, heaven forbid, independent, or a harlot, or ripe for marriage/impregnating.
All of this nonsense about removing tenure and due process is a huge step backwards. They've come for the teachers, they've come for the women, they're coming for the kids. They will not be happy until the middle class is gone and the world is subservient to the 1%.
Certainly, the reformers have no skin in this game. This is about money. Period. It involved "other peoples kids" and their children will never be subjected to these reforms.
Yet as I point out again and again and again, the 1% send their kids to the elite, lovely, Dewey-approved private schools where teachers do not receive tenure and work on year-to-year contracts that permit the school to remove them from classrooms at any time.
Of course they are protected by state and federal employment and anti-discrimination laws, just like everyone else in the United States.
On average, how long do personnel stay in the private schools that serve the 1%?
Do their salaries increase over time?
Do they have a de facto seniority/tenure system?
Or, is their staffing similar to TFA?
Teachers at Dewey’s own Chicago Lab School, where the Reptilian Rahm Emanuel sends his kids, are unionized.
Yes, Micheal, at least one of these schools, one affiliated with one of the world’s largest, wealthiest, and most influential research universities, has unionized employees. As you know, almost all of the others do not.
Linda, from my limited experience I would say the staffing situation at these schools looks an awful like what you would see in a well to do suburb. There are actually quite a few young teachers, many of whom do not intend to teach for the rest of their working lives. They generally make less than the public school teachers (this may differ from region to region) and are generally asked to do more (lunch, recess, after school, coaching, etc).
“The percentage of female to male teachers in k-12 education leans towards women, and of course it does – the hours are lousy, as is the pay, and women are maternal and nurturing.”
Leans toward women? Roughly 80% of public school K-12 teachers are women, with significantly higher rates in elementary schools. I find it difficult to believe that tenure is all that’s holding this rate in check.
There is no equity gap in any district that uses “step” salary scales, for example. And quite a few female teachers I know say they chose to teach precisely because it is family friendly–no travel, lots of vacation within the work year, summer vacations that coincide with their kids’, excellent benefits, and so on (I’m aware that there are differences between districts and regions of the country when it comes to this stuff). In New York City, female teachers can take up to a total of four years’ unsalaried leave (but with healthcare) to stay home with newborn children. They are guaranteed to re-enter the same classroom they had before the leave, no questions asked.
I’ve read this thread quickly, but so far I don’t believe I’ve seen an example of how tenure has protected a teacher from outright gender discrimination.
You are not the arbitrator of what is and is not discrimination.
The very fact that you call into question the lived experiences of the people on this thread shows that you are wallowing in your own privilege and refuse to step outside of it to hear what those who don’t share you privilege have to say.
Your constant attempts to silence those you disagree with robs you of any kind of “authority” of any kind in my world. You are a puff of smoke.
And I did not enter teaching because it was “easy” or because I got lots of vacation time (which I don’t) or because I would be free with my kids (I don’t have children).
Your anecdotal and specious arguments are offensive as is most of what you post here.
I’m not intimidated by you and I will not succumb to your verbal bullying and I doubt many others here will either.
I remember a friend telling me when she was first hired to teach in the 1960’s, she was told by her principal she’d have to quit when her pregnancy began to show.
Just a few years ago, we finally negotiated to paid days off instead if sick & personal business days so we didn’t have to provide the district with our reason for not being at work on a given day. Since that time, the IN legislature has reduced our collective bargaining rights to wages & benefits only.
This is why I’m so angered at Democrats who are working to strip teachers of hard fought basic human rights that provide teachers with dignity in the workplace.
Due process protects both the employee & employer by providing a set of procedures.
Democrats are waging a war on women in my opinion.
In my first job in a major metropolitan system I was given an unsatisfactory rating for my first observation. I was hurt and perplexed because I had developed the lesson with my mentor professor who was a nationally prominent scholar and she was working on a research project with me at the time in my classroom and the lesson had been outstanding. I wanted to quit and told the principal so.
The assistant principal came to me and told me not to take it personally because it was a district policy to rate ALL new teachers unsatisfactory in case they wanted to let us go at the end of the year for budgetary reasons. I ended up with a satisfactory rating at the end of the year and achieved tenure a few years later but my principal and superintendent were both fired that year, caught up in a scandal of nepotism and the board selling principal and district jobs to friends and relatives for a cut of their pay. It was sickening.
As union rep for my building I reported an administrator who was in his late 50’s who was sexually harrassing one of our new teachers who was in her 20’s. He was going to her apartment and calling her constantly and he was married himself. He retaliated and I underwent 6 months of constant harassment and misery myself before he was transferred to another school. Tenure was all that saved me then.
While there are good principals like Carol Burris there are far too many who desire power over others and enjoy making people miserable to show that they have that power and an ego to match. I’ve encountered this over and over again in 20 years of teaching and I’ve never seen a principal hesitate to fire a teacher for any reason and often for no reason.
I know successful teachers who challenge an edict and end up transferred to a grade level they have no experience with or all the behaviorally challenged children or they are constantly berated for not fulfilling some unknown duty that the principal hid from them in order to get at them a letter in the file and put on probation.
Even with tenure some principals harass and attack teachers regularly. Without protection it will be a wild west crapshoot if youmare a teacher and good luck finding work midyear or with a trumped up set of letters in your file.
It must be said (no matter how often) that no K-12 teacher has tenure, never has and never will. All we have is due process rights and those due process rights are little more than a sham of kangaroo court proceedings. I know, I’ve been through them.
I totally agree with you. It’s sad that they even want to take away the “kangaroo court.” The only people who are really concerned about all of this are the older teachers. A lot of the younger teachers I work with do not want to hear about the toxic policies in education which will eventually destroy their livelihoods. They are in denial. When I bring up these toxic legislations, I get dirty looks to stop talking.
I am so tired of people saying, “Well, the younger teachers will be okay, because they don’t know any different. It is hard for you because you know things used to be a lot better. They don’t know any different than these toxic policies…” Well, my answer to that is they will all someday be 50 years old, and by ignoring the downfall of their careers right now – – they will never be able to reach retirement. I’ve tried to tell the younger teachers, they better wake up – – and have a back-up plan….but, honestly….I am urged to stop talking with several dirty looks….So, I will finish my career with thankfulness to God that it will soon be over for me – – -and my husband and I would never allow our children to become a teacher. Our daughter is in college studying medicine. Our son is in high school and wants to be a doctor too.
We all know that public education, as we know it, is in its last days. Within 10 years, there will be a lot fewer career educators in schools. Very few teachers will have continuing contracts, and teachers will deal daily with injustices dished out by unfair principals who are permitted to treat teachers like dirt. The only thing that I think will result from all of this is a severe teacher shortage. No one will pay huge amounts of money to go through this abuse. This is exactly what Bill Gates and the rich politicians want to happen. By eliminating the career educator, education will be easily taken over.
The profit machine that rolled over educators, has its equivalent in the insurance companies that rolled over doctors.
We can work hard, do a good job, and contribute to GDP, receive lower wages, face impossible accountability, and pick up taxes for the 1%.
Scorecard:
Oligarchs, Everything
Americans, Nothing
Even when it’s a man, teachers are constantly in the cross-hairs. My husband, who was teaching at a charter school at the time (don’t judge–he needed the job), caught a student viewing pornography on a school computer. He had the student for a total of three weeks, and as he investigated further, he discovered that the student (who was a 7th grader then) had been viewing pornography on school computers for six months.
Within two days of reporting the student to administrators, my husband was fired. The excuse? Failure to supervise the student. No other teacher was disciplined. Neither was the student. My suspicion is that the school didn’t have enough students that year to justify the number of teachers that the school had, so the administration looked for the first person they could justify firing. Since my husband was fired and not laid off, he didn’t qualify for unemployment, so it saved the charter school a ton of money. He was out of work for a year and we are still financially struggling from the effects of that decision.
I try to tell my colleagues this when they talk about the loss of due process being no big thing, because they’re good teachers, so no one will fire them. No one will listen to me. I hope that the denial won’t come back to haunt these teachers.
That is a classic charter story. They do stuff like that all the time. They shaft people and try not to pay unemployment while upper admin makes tons of money
Based on the laws that Republicans propose and the court interpretations of right-wing judges, conservatives like discrimination against women.
Some time ago, U.S. factories, relocating in Mexico, hired women, with the express purpose, of lessening anti-boss actions. Were they right that women are less militant?
The exercise of tyranny is made easy by compliance. A workforce that is 80% female and non-militant—ripe pickens.
I have a friend just out of college who teaches at a school with no union. The administrator loves to tell the staff that he can fire them. He’ll snicker and say, “I can fire you, you know.” As a joke he sometimes places an empty box on the teachers’ desks. Isn’t this a hilarious joke?? This is where we are going with no due process rights. We are ALL going to be working in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. This is not good for children.
I also let Secretary Duncan know via Twitter
, after his praise of the Vergera verdict, that I had a colleague lose her job to secure a job for a board member’s relative. I am sick this week. First the verdict, and then the ad in USA Today with the child being thrown away. But I guess that is what they want, right?
I have a much more recent example of gender discrimination. I was hired to teach at an alternative school in the fall of 1996. I got pregnant that winter, but, unfortunately, I lost my daughter in the spring of 1997 due to extreme prematurity (the baby was 17 weeks early). I got pregnant again that summer and had a healthy baby boy in the spring of 1998.
During this entire experience, the principal at my school was a real chauvinist. He loved to make sexual “jokes” in our daily staff meetings. He several times told me (this was less than a year after I had lost my daughter) that I was too focused on the loss and at least once asked me if I was complaining about a situation because of my pregnancy hormones. He even once tried to fire me, although he changed his mind really quickly (as a pregnant woman, I was a protected class and I think I would have won a lawsuit).
To top it all off, there were only two members of the union at my school. You guessed it–myself and him. He was the building representative, and I didn’t know enough about my rights to complain up the chain of command in the union. To this day, I regret not standing up for myself further, but I was a very young, inexperienced teacher who was teaching in a very tough environment and was the primary wage earner for my little family at the time.
Thank HEAVEN for tenure. Even though I was not tenured myself at that time, the fact that due process was available I think prevented him from truly getting me fired. I think he knew what he was doing was wrong and didn’t dare push me too hard for fear of a lawsuit.
My sister was offered a teaching job in a small town Georgia school district in the early 1980s. She was told that if she was ever seen wearing shorts, even if it wasn’t during school hours, she would be fired. She declined the job offer.
Yes, we are going back to the days that if you wear shorts, you might be fired. Isn’t this all insane? I still think we are seeing our teaching profession downgraded to a service industry. If we cannot output good test scores and a good subjective principal evaluation (in comparison to delivering a good fast food order) we will be terminated, just like a fast food worker would be. The fast food worker cannot do anything about it, and we won’t be able to do anything about it either.
I think the reason we all regularly write on Diane’s blog is that we are all mourning the death of our professions as we know it. It is a very painful process to observe our honorable professions be trampled to death. I especially liked the comparison earlier in the blog that teachers are now experiencing what medical doctors have experienced with the insurance companies. What a powerful comparison! I totally agree…I feel so sorry for what the wicked Obama Care has done to our medical doctors.
Finally, I want everyone to know that I deeply appreciate everyone writing in and sharing. God Bless you for helping me cope to get through my last years of teaching. I love my students, I love to teach, but sadly, it is just not enough anymore to cover the pain and stress I bring to myself and my dear husband and children.
If this comment could have a title it would be “Duties as Assigned.”
1981, Virginia. I apply for a teaching position and during the interview am questioned about my children and my husband’s job. I’m asked what I will do for the school as they are in need of a cheerleader sponsor and a newspaper sponsor. I happily agreed to volunteer to do one or the other. I got the job and the cheerleader sponsorship. After two years of teaching, and sponsoring, I resigned from the cheerleader position. I was the first de-staff that spring despite the fact I was not the most junior faculty. While I did land in another school, it wasn’t my teaching that was valued, but the club or activity I would sponsor.
In my new school I became a soccer coach. After 5 years of coaching, when I tried to resign, I was told I’d get more preps, but if I stayed as coach, I’d have only two. I applied for a transfer to another high school, and again volunteered to be a club sponsor to make my application more attractive. It’s 1993 before administration was finally told they could not hire specifically for coaching positions when considering a teacher. So while a policy was implemented that restricts new hires from being forced to take coaching, club sponsorships, or other activities, the practice is still alive and well. Except for being on “continuous contract,” Virginia’s name for tenure, and due process, I twice nearly lost my job because I became unwilling to always be a coach or sponsor some activity, not because I was a bad teacher.
As both a teacher and Assistant Principal in the New York City public schools during a career of twenty three years, I can say that I was able to to the work to get rid of incompetent teachers even if they were tenured. The bigger problem I faced was a system which increasingly rewarded cheating to make a school appear to be making progress on the one hand, and high handed principals who were given too much power and virtually no supervision or oversight. The Vergara decision will do nothing to alleviate the increasingly difficult working conditions in high poverty schools
The scenarios above sound familiar to me and to many more teachers. Why do you think these Deformers are so motivated and moving with a vengeance to ‘stick it to’ teachers? The failr and professional treatment of teachers, female and male, has not changed much or long enough – in fact things have gotten much worse than they ever were.
We used to fight ‘good ‘old boys’ who would only change their ways when unions and legal regs hovered above them. African American teachers had and still have their own battles, alongside the women’s movement, gay staff are still reluctant to be open on the job…all these years later, after we have thought we as a society have come so far.
Teachers were harassed and fired for ‘Moral Turpitude’ for living together, pregnant out of wedlock, interracial dating or marriage, drinking, smoking, working a second job, going to grad school, an endless list. It is still as bazaar as requiring virginity. I know, you are beginning to wonder if I have lost my marbles. No, still very lucid and sharing the obserdity of teaching requirements few talk about. Who in the HE** OWNS US?
Once Due Process is removed, all gloves are off and we are Game to every pathological power nut. The writing is on the wall. The Deformers have made it absolutely clear…they cannot stand a highly qualified, experienced teacher. PERIOD! They don’t respect us and want us to disappear.
What about that message we don’t understand? It is insane, sick and unbelievable!
Right now, we must fight like HELL! Like we have never fought before. They play dirty, unfair, lie with statistics, buy anyone and try to intimidate all of us.
We are smarter than that! We just don’t have the money behind us. Come to think of it…that appears to be EVERYTHING!
I only shared a couple of my personal scenarios and many of you shared heartbreaking experiences, too. Unbelievable experiences in 2014! One thing I have learned, I had only two options: be a victim or walk like I was dragging big harry b***s when I needed to. I also carried a tape recorder in specific situations. I was not about to be a victim! It has served me well.
We must not let the new unethical, power crazy, uncivilized, undereducated Deformers destroy public education, keep us from properly educating children and keep us from doing the right thing for kids. We are on the Right side of the issues!
I do not plan for any of us to go back into any closet – where all caring, loving and decent people are! We fought too long and too hard…and we should never give up.
Let’s Roll!