Despite the challenges, despite the toxic policies, despite the outpouring of “I Quit” letters, young future teachers are taking a stand.
Stephanie Rivera describes a new organization called the Young Teachers Collective. They will plow ahead. They will stick with their chosen profession. They are not afraid. They want to teach. They want to have a voice in the national debate about teaching. They want to give each other hope.
Stephanie started a resistance movement as an undergraduate, inspiring other young teachers to persist. Now she is a graduate student at Rutgers, and she believes in teaching and wants to work with others who have the same aspirations.
Here is the website for the Young Teachers Collective.
They say:
The current climate of the education system is not inviting. We constantly see poor reforms implemented by people the most distant from the classroom. We constantly hear “don’t go into teaching.” Regardless, we see the profession as something worth fighting for. In order to win this struggle, we understand the importance of coming together to support each other and lift each other up–even if it’s only through an online community. By creating this collective, we hope to:
Develop political consciousness among our peers that will be entering the education profession.
Develop the tools/skills necessary for young people to organize themselves.
Create a network of support while in college and during the first years of teaching
Provide young teachers with both a sense of hope and tools on how to fight for a better education system.
Advocate and work towards a common vision for the future of education
Strengthen our presence in discussions about education
Create a space to share\suggest resources to build consciousness as well as materials to use in the classroom
In order to do this we plan to engage in the following:
Weekly blog posts by members of YTC discussing an issue of their choice
Host monthly Twitter Chats. Our past chat includes improving teacher education.
Host monthly Google Hangouts
Host webinar workshops
Host workshops and\or discussions on our campuses\in community when possible
IMPORTANCE OF YOUNG AND FUTURE TEACHERS’ VOICES
“While many of us have been inspired by teacher-activists currently in the field, we have come to recognize the importance of creating our own collective voice. The voices of young and future teachers are largely ignored in the education movement. We are often dismissed because we are viewed as not having the experience to truly understand the issues facing public education. However, there is no doubt that our voices are valuable and even necessary in this struggle. We are in the unique position of simultaneously facing issues affecting both students and teachers. At the same time, this position presents different challenges that students and experienced teachers are not aware of. Young and future teachers are the only ones who can really speak to these challenges, which is why it is so important that we speak out and have our voices amplified.”
While it is heartening to see Stephanie Rivera and other future teachers taking action to save the profession they want to enter, there is something terribly sad about the fact that future teachers feel they must act to do so. In what other profession would future professionals feel they must try to save the profession before it is destroyed by malignant outside forces?
Poor bastards. They really think they can make a difference.
This is actually a problem that ‘the left’ should come together to correct. After all, attacks on public education are only one part of a comprehensive neoliberal project to privatize (or at least extend market principles/discipline to) the commons and traditional public services. More specifically, the aim is to extend competition and stringent accountability requirements to all areas of public life.
It seems to me that the ‘authentic left’ (e.g., social democrats and all those to their left) has been rendered powerless over the past few decades due to a general lack of coordination/organization. Neoliberals, for instance, had been planning for decades before they got the opportunity to implement their political program in the ’80s.
Most individual organizations will fail to ‘make a difference’ if they work in isolation. This is especially the case for those groups that aim to challenge monied interests. That being said, the Young Teachers Collective can easily avoid these issues by collaborating with other grassroots organizations striving to attain social justice and integrating the struggles of students/teachers into a larger narrative about socioeconomic inequity.
On a related note, unions should play an integral role in these efforts given the manpower and organizational resources at their disposal. However, they cannot give Democratic candidates a blank check, and would likely be better served by developing a strategy/plan to shift the ideological/intellectual landscape to the left. It’s unreasonable to expect politcians to lead the charge in this area.
Finally, the infusion of young, passionate educators into the profession can also help ensure that the teachers unions take on a more active role in resisting the privatization of education. All of this is easier said then done, of course, but it would be a mistake to give up without a struggle.
They are just another meek shepherd that will be easily bribed by billion dollar wolf foundations with $$$ gorilla cookie. Would be better to have a new name: C.R.A.C(Counter-Reform-Action Collective).
No. Really. Quit. Really. Fully serious. Quit. Don’t even start actually.
So what should a young person interested in pursuing a career in education do to resist the reform movement? I’m about to pursue my M.Ed., so this is of particular interest to me. Maybe I’m naive, but widespread defeatism seems like it will only excerbate the underlying issues.
I’d say that if you want a career in education the thing you need to think about is unions. Your only hope is being in a position where you are vigorously defended and represented by a UNION. (And no, nobody has come up with a slicker idea yet…UNIONS are the only counterbalance to educational minded politicians and Administrators).
If you think a career in education (as a teacher) is possible without that you need to stop what you are doing, right now, this moment, and go enroll in a proper history class that focused on the social history of anywhere in the industrial world.
Now that that is covered, the question become where oh where can one find a place to teach with a robust union? Well, the answer used to be NY, MA, CA….but in all honesty, that’s over. New York (NYSUT) is done. The union busters have for the most part been successful or are on the verge of complete annihilation. They are done. If you haven’t noticed.
So, really though. It’s the last career id recommend. I have loved my time in the classroom (13 years). Some of the best times in my life have been when the lesson plan failed and somehow a learning happened and flourished. It was a beautiful powerful thing. It’s just that all those memories are now memories. It’s no longer possible, really. And it won’t be. Please. Do something else. Please. There is nothing left here. In spite of all the fighting and occasional marginal victories, the privatizers have won and will continue to do so. Even where they haven’t fully achieved their agenda, the culture of teaching has so changed that it is just dead. They have changed the guts of it. There is no longer that moment of closing the door and In spite of everything making a real, pure learning environment. That’s years gone.
Sorry. It’s not defeatist to understand that the war has actually been lost already.
Just read your previous post. You obviously get the union piece. Sounds like you should maybe focus on that as a career instead of the whole teaching thing. There are places in our society that needs smart organizers to establish and strengthen unions. Teachers unions are done and will stay done.
Be informed on the issues: APPR, high- stakes testing, the privatization movement, and the opt out movement. Watch the following videos on YouTube: Building the Machine, and Defying Measurement. Read the CCSS standards for the age/subject area you teach. Go to United Opt Out website. Focus on developing classroom management strategies, and keep the lines of communication w/ parents open…especially anything positive you can share w/them about their children. Seek out professional development opportunities. Seek out experienced colleagues you admire for advice on teaching. And, finally, remain supportive of your students no matter what!
NYSTEACHER,
Thank you for the response. Again, I would point to the success of the neoliberals as a counterexample. After the Great Depression and WWII, classical liberalism was ‘finished’. Hayek, arguably the chief intellectual force in neoliberal thought, was ignored in academicand policy circles. In other words, the scholars that went onto develop neoliberal political philosophy were outsiders. Borrowing from Mirowski, I would suggest that the genuine left finds itself in a similar position today.
The neoliberal drive for privatization and the active construction of new markets is obviously more appealing to special interests than social democracy or socialistic arrangements could ever hope to be, but this doesn’t entail the program is irreversible. Rather, it highlights the need for grassroots activism and cohesion. Moreover, the left likely needs to coalesce around a set of ideas or a common political project.
The NEA is the largest union in the United States, so I can’t see why you’d single out teachers unions as being ‘done’. Private sector unions are in even worse shape.
Matt,
I tend to agree with your assessment and analysis of the neoliberal “program” and how it informs our current discussion. Your critique of the “authentic left” and its disorganization and intellectual scatterbrained (my words there) befuddlement in the face of neoliberal “long-duree”organization is one I absolutely concur with, quite strongly.
Now, about the issue at hand, which is essentially: does a teaching career, one grounded in the principles of that authentic left (the one I wholeheartedly cast my lot with over a decade ago) and one organized via an enlightened labor union, have a future, for the individual worker therein and as a whole?
To this I say no, it does not. My thinking here is based on a read of history. Nowhere has the territory, once public and then privatized, been returned to the public. Name one broad area where the neoliberal, privatizing agenda has taken over and then, via collective “authentic left” sustained action, “deprivatized” and returned that to the public domain. I absolutely agree with you that the function of an authentic left is to build strong, philosophically clean, long term ramparts against privatization and the arguments that allow it, but we must be clear that terrain lost is rarely if ever regained. (I am happily open to be very wrong here!)
Next, my criticism of teachers unions and their being “done.” First off, I can speak most clearly about the situation here in NY. So much ground has been lost that now all that is left are the very last tendons. Right now tenure is in the courts, a hyper-aggressive APPR is likely, and out most basic foundations are in question. This has been, Id say, due to the union leaderships long term (last decade at least) inability to think “tragically” and get in front of the neoliberal agenda intellectually. NYSUT will soon just be a shell organization. Toothless. Most specifically, I would say that teachers unions are DONE because they do not have the ability to regain ground lost. They don’t have the intellectual, organizational, or philosophical power to sustain the fight. I mean this when I say it, there is NO BENCH! Once lost, the ground we are talking about here can be regained ONLY through long term, sustained, in-depth, organization and action….and that is the project of a generation or two. Not something achievable, even under ideal circumstances, in the timespan of a career.
So, if you still decide that this is the career you want, and that you want to be on the front line of pushing back that neoliberal agenda that is, as fast as you can read this sentence, decimating public education, well understand that you are doing something you may not see the results of within your career.
Also don’t forget: we aren’t and shouldn’t be volunteers. We are good at what we do and engaged therein only insofar as we are paid well, respected, and have structures in place to ensure a retirement. If those things aren’t there, it’s not a career you should engage no matter what. We can’t be afraid to say that.
Great idea! I absolutely love teaching, but it has become lifeless, rigid, and sterile. Too much of my time this year is teaching to bizarre standards, gathering data for my ranking, or proctoring a government test. Far, far too much. I watch as my students become more frustrated and disengaged. My passion – math and science – is being reduced to bad Khan videos and test metrics. My friends and colleagues leave for better pay, more opportunities, and more respect in other fields. I admire the new teachers, but I tell my own kids to look at other careers.
I absolutely refuse to allow my interactions with children on a day to day basis to become “lifeless, rigid, and sterile.” I have a few years until I can secure a decent retirement, and I may be kicked to the curb before I make it to the relay line, but I will not sacrifice my time with the children that I have the privilege of teaching to become casualties in the war on public education.
Thank you for your efforts! In our state (Ohio), education has become a parade of endless tests, PARCC, third grade reading, OAA, OGT, end of course in non PARCC. Classrooms are pretty much test prep. Teachers are ordered to abandon regular lesson plans and spend weeks on test prep. The teacher evaluation system is so far removed from reality, few teachers can take it serious. One legislator on the education committee wanted to take away the license of all teachers who did not score well on our ranking system. Another called all public schools “socialism”. This blog mentions NY’s teacher terrible rating system. Ohio is already there with 50% student test scores, student surveys, SLOs. Keep up the good fight.
I’ve been a teacher for 23 years and have taught elementary to college. If you love teaching, one option is to get a Masters or PhD in your field and teach at a private school. If you love kids, open a day care. Find a different career and tutor on the side. There are many ways to go. I remember when teaching high school was fun. I got carte blanche to do what I wanted in my classes. I had great lesson plans and could get creative. Sure, the kids took the regents exam at the end, but it was ok. It was a pretty fair test and even though we had to prep, we all learned a lot – me about teaching and the students about French. I see that coming to an end for most teachers. Not only that but it’s depressing to have to validate yourself to others on a daily basis. It’s a tough fight and the pressures may make many young teachers succumb. It’s hard enough to do just your job without worrying about evaluations, paperwork, union issues, discipline problems, ever-changing waste of time stuff, and all the rest. Gee wizz, teachers can’t even correct their own tests anymore. You’re not trusted and you’re not respected. Evaluation plans and other requirements come down from on high and your autonomy is gone. Not only that, they change from minute to minute – literally. I guess this is something new teachers won’t remember, so they’ll have nothing to compare. I see teachers that have been around for only 3-5 years who are now wanting to quit. It’s a tough situation that doesn’t look to get any better.
I’m glad there will be someone waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces when everything falls apart. They might have to literally reinvent the wheel if all our veteran teachers have retired (or been fired).
Ellen#NotHoldingMyBreath
To all young idealists:
it does not matter how smart, how well organized, how earnest, and how much caring you are, and will be, the greedy privatized corporate can squeeze your stomach, your precious family time, and your ambition down to below zero – Yes, you will be in debt, and your marriage will fall apart.
The smartest solution is to be in control by “superbly smart” supplying the so-called legal advice to corrupted corporate, or “family counselling” advice to corrupted corporate’s spouse, mistresses, and druggy children, with stiffened PRICE. Now, young idealists, with enough cash flow, can teach night school free to all hunger learners with true joy of teaching.
The only way to beat corrupted and privatized corporate is either to be dentist, or lawyer or surgeon (heart, brain, stomach, eyes), because these crooks will pay any price to live longer and to enjoy lap of luxury from looting public pension fund, and public education fund. Back2basic