Emergency Teacher Page 4

  “Can I really teach without any experience?” I asked Eppy, the recruiter for the Philadelphia School District. Most districts require new teachers to have graduated with a bachelor’s degree in education from a four-year college. Additionally, aspiring teachers had to log at least forty hours in the classroom training alongside a real teacher.

  Eppy waved my concerns away. “Believe me, we need you more than you need us,” he said.

  I had no direct experience in a classroom, but had always dreamed of being a teacher. I took several education classes my first year at Boston University, but I eventually switched to journalism because the classroom seemed too confining at such a young age. I wanted to go out and learn about the world first, and journalism was a vehicle to travel, meet new people, and explore different subjects. Immediately after college I moved to Chile for one year to write for a newspaper. Upon my return I was accepted into the Inquirer’s two-year internship program where I gravitated to education and wrote of stories about testing, school life, and teachers’ programs. For two years I volunteered in the Big Brother/Big Sister program of Philadelphia and for the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club. I thought I would be better in high school, teaching maybe English, science, or history. I was imagining the famous teacher movies: Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, and Lean on Me.

  “The real need is in the middle schools,” he was saying. “I was a middle school teacher.” Eppy was overly friendly, like a salesman. He never stopped grinning and looking relaxed, even as he constantly interrupted our meeting to take phone calls that always seemed to involve an emergency.

  We spent about two hours together on that first day, and by the end Eppy convinced me to take middle school. He warned me to hurry with my application forms, though, because it was already July.

  “It’s not the eleventh hour, Christina. It’s quarter to twelve.”

  I had a million things to get: a criminal-record check, a doctor’s physical, and a form from the FBI saying I had no reported history of child abuse in Pennsylvania. And I needed to enroll in a certification program at a university. After years writing about education, interviewing principals, reading about the troubles of urban schools, and pleading to see a real classroom in action, I was excited that I’d finally be able to uncover how schools really work.

  At twenty-five, I was full of determination to change the world and make a difference. A year as an inner-city teacher would be a chance to help children in need. Why were inner-city schools failing? Maybe I’d find the solutions, perhaps even write about it afterward. But I’d worry about that part later. I hadn’t been in middle school in more than a decade. I didn’t even know any twelve-year-olds. The school district wasn’t really going to let me do this ... were they?

  While I waited for Eppy to process my application I devoted all of July to training myself to be a teacher. I read The First Days of School, by Harry and Rosemary Wong. Rather than comforting me, it opened my eyes to how much I didn’t know. What was a lesson plan? How did I decorate a classroom? How did I discipline a child? How would I get parents involved?

  I pored over teaching books that explained concepts like name charts, pencil-sharpening procedures, and positive reinforcement. I learned all kinds of new details about preteens that I had long forgotten, such as the most important thing a child wants on the first day is security. Transition frightens them, and teachers should explain every small detail, such as how to pronounce the teacher’s name and classroom locations and schedules.

  I scribbled down tips for myself: “Don’t mark X on the answers that are wrong, just mark C on the answers that are correct.” “Never, ever raise your voice.” “Teach a new vocabulary word each day, and call it, ‘Word of the Day.’” The most important thing was to “plan and plan extra.”

  My boyfriend, Pete, helped. He was tall, handsome, outdoorsy, and the only person who supported my dream to teach. He was in his first year of residency at a local hospital, but before medical school, Pete had taught for a year in New York City. He was encouraging and gave me solid advice, such as “never kick a student out of class to be disciplined. That sends the message that you aren’t the authority. Handle all your own discipline.” Together, we reviewed his old lesson plans.

  “Just remember that you’re in charge. The most important thing is discipline,” he said. “You gotta sit them down first, then teach.”

  He told me not to smile until Thanksgiving, either. “There are two different types of teachers—the ruler-cracker and loving pushover. Who are you going to be?” He explained that, in his school, the female teacher across the hall from him was soft and fuzzy, and won over the kids with warmth. Her class was always chaotic, but the students covered her desk with gifts at Christmas. They listened because they loved her.

  Pete was the opposite, a real “hard-ass” teacher who demanded quiet and didn’t let the kids get away with anything. When a fight broke out in the hallway one morning, he’d jumped in and put a red-faced boy in a headlock, pushing the kid’s chin into the floor. The rest of the students saw this and knew not to mess with him. He never let the slightest infraction slide. That may sound harsh, he said, but these kids craved borders. My strictness would pay off, and I’d be glad, he promised. For example, he recalled a day in the spring when he conducted a physics experiment. He was able to leave half his class unattended while he and several other students went to another floor to study velocity. His students behaved. Other teachers saw this and marveled at his control. He bragged for ten minutes about it. When he reminisced about teaching, he grew nostalgic.

  “This will be the best thing you’ve ever done,” he said, giving me a hug.

  Then he gave me a piece of advice.

  “Never enter a showdown you can’t win,” he said.

  “A showdown?” I asked.

  He nodded. That night he demonstrated a judo move in which I was to grab his wrist, wrap it around in a circular orbit, and grip him in a headlock. This could nail someone in three seconds, regardless of weight. I tried it a few times, but it didn’t really work when I did it.

  “Just in case,” Pete said.

  My family was much less supportive.

  “Are you crazy?” said Jon, my brother, a twenty-seven-year-old stockbroker who lived in a mini-mansion in the New York suburbs. “Don’t you know what happened to Jonathan Levin? Is that what you want to happen to you?” he asked.

  Jonathan Levin was the wealthy son of then Time Warner chair Gerald Levin. He had eschewed his family fortune and fame to become a beloved English teacher in an underprivileged school in the Bronx. In 1997, two of his students arrived high on drugs at his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment, robbed him, and shot him to death.

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said uncertainly.

  “Why do you have to do that? Do what your friends are doing,” he said.

  Most of my friends were setting off for well-paying jobs with Internet start-ups or glamorous new magazines or in bureaus of the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. Why didn’t I want to do that, too? I didn’t know. I wanted to “make a difference in a child’s life,” as the Philadelphia Department of Education recruitment posters promised. I felt like the failing inner-city schools were an injustice that I should stand against, not only with words, but with real action, especially these days, as the economy boomed and people in their twenties were becoming Internet millionaires overnight. In the newspaper the other day, I read that some rich Wall Street guy rang up a $200,000 tab at a restaurant and left the waiter a $40,000 tip. Yet, in the same city there were children who lacked textbooks. Something was wrong with this. Once inside the schools, I would understand the problems and then find solutions. I could take those solutions to politicians and make a change in schools across the nation.

  “Go into advertising, real estate, finance,” Jon was saying. “You’re crazy. It’s the ghetto. It’s dangerous.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t articulate my beliefs, and I couldn’t stand up to my brother. He filled the silence.

  “Oh, man, wait until Dad hears this one,” he laughed. “Dude, I’m going to earn your annual salary in one day.”

  As the summer drew to a close, the Philadelphia schools still needed to recruit hundreds of warm bodies. It offered $1,500 sign-up bonuses. A few hundred more signed on, and a couple hundred additional bodies joined in September and October. Like me, they would be too late for the one-week induction seminar, so they received no training at all. I didn’t want to imagine the kind of unqualified, uninterested teacher who would take the job at the last minute just for the sign-up bonus.

  By the time school started, more than eleven hundred random people—one in ten teachers—had wandered off the street and been handed classroom keys. They were directed to the most troubled schools, and when September started they stood in front of their classrooms. They had no educational experience, no guidance, no instruction, and scant support. Like me, many had no clue how to teach.

  It may seem unbelievable that someone could simply walk off the street and into a classroom, but in Philadelphia and many urban districts, this was exactly what was happening.

  The thriving economy of the late 1990s drew potential teachers and college graduates into other, higher-paying jobs. This occurred just as birth patterns gave rise to a massive increase in student enrollment. At the same time, an aging workforce meant that scores of teachers were retiring. This perfect storm in the education employment world led to one of the periods of greatest demand for new teachers in thirty years. An estimated seven million new teachers would have to be hired between 1997 and 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

  In 1999, Philadelphia was the fifth largest public school district in the nation, with 210,247 s
tudents, twelve thousand teachers, more than two hundred schools, and a $1.6 billion annual budget. Like most big urban areas, the school system had turned abysmal in the 1970s—correlating with the disappearance of big industry and white flight to the suburbs—and hasn’t turned around since. These days, 78 percent of eleventh-graders couldn’t even complete basic-level work in any major subject, according to scores on the SAT-9, the city’s standardized test.

  City officials had been trying for decades—without success—to turn the system around. The latest trend strove to make schools run like businesses, an approach that was gaining in popularity in urban districts across the country. In the spring of my year teaching, the school board fired its school superintendent and replaced him with a “chief executive officer,” using a business title to indicate their intention to bring corporate-style accountability to a public system. Plans were afoot to turn dozens of schools over to for-profit companies. Voucher programs, in which children use public money to attend private schools, were also being pushed by the governor’s office. So were merit pay, teacher accountability measures, and teacher recruitment.

  Missing from this list were proposals to improve teacher recruitment and training. The city was desperately trying to recruit hundreds of warm bodies, and yet leaving us to prepare for the job without guidance.

  To meet demand, schools hired “emergency certified” or “alternative certified people.” These were candidates who didn’t have a university degree from a college of education; neither did they have a major in the field in which they planned to teach, such as chemistry, math, or English. They also didn’t have to take any state or school district teacher exams. In the case of Philadelphia, all teachers typically had to take the Praxis exam, designed by the Educational Testing Service. It’s a battery of tests to assess prospective teachers’ basic knowledge of math, reading, and writing. Emergency certified teachers would not have to take that test until after three years on the job.

  By 2000, forty-five states and Washington D.C. allowed for emergency certified teachers, and their ranks were growing. In Texas, one in four new teachers was emergency certified. In Detroit—the city with the greatest numbers—one in three teachers was uncertified. In poor rural and inner-city schools, their numbers are even greater.

  Many people opposed the idea of emergency certification, pointing out that the equivalent in medicine would be to solve a hospital’s doctor shortage by doing away with medical school and board examinations. Yet others said that looser standards allowed people to change careers and go into teaching without having to go back to school for three years. In these instances, schools benefited from diversifying their teaching ranks with successful professionals, such as scientists, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, and writers. One popular national program, Troops to Teachers, gave former military commanders emergency certifications to become teachers and eventually school leaders. Teach for America was another popular national program that recruited college graduates, placed them in underprivileged school districts, assisted them in getting their emergency certifications, and ran training courses. It also acted as a support for new teachers in their first year.

  These programs gave between one to six weeks of summer training, but new teachers like me, who applied directly to the school district, often received less. I would receive only a few days. Supposedly that was enough to take on a classroom of the city’s toughest-to-teach children.

  In 2003, a Philadelphia think tank found otherwise. When Philadelphia’s emergency certified teachers finally did take the basic licensure tests—the Praxis exam—the think tank uncovered: “Less than half of the emergency certified teachers passed the basic mathematics test.” Only two-thirds passed the reading. Only 60 percent passed the writing.

  “Their inexperience makes classroom management a problem,” stated the report titled “Once and for All” by the “Learning from Philadelphia’s School Reform Project.” In math, science, and bilingual classrooms—the areas that were the hardest to find teachers for—half of all new teachers were uncertified. This meant a child in Philadelphia’s public schools had less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math teacher who could do basic math.

  The report concluded: “The data makes clear that students in Philadelphia have not been able to count on getting a teacher who has mastered basic academic skills.”

  “I was just about to call you,” Eppy said. “You’re scheduled to come in on Thursday, September 9. Bring all your things, and then hopefully we’ll process you to start by the following Monday.”

  That was a week after school starts! “I thought I was ready to go,” I said.

  I’d been sitting on a completed application for at least a month now. Meanwhile, thirty-three kids would show up to an empty classroom—all because of a delay in processing? I had also heard from another new teacher that the school district was running a one-week induction program for new recruits, which I had missed because Eppy hadn’t told me about it.

  Eppy encouraged me to calmate, Spanish for “relax”. “You’re a Type A personality, Christina. You need to relax or you’ll never make it through the first year teaching.”

  On September 2 Julia de Burgos held a welcome-back day for all the teachers, and I decided to turn up despite my lack of a formal assignment. I felt uncomfortable, but Mrs. Jimenez looked pleased to see me. She probably knew I hadn’t been hired yet, but we both acted as though I had so I wouldn’t miss anything. Everyone hugged and talked about summer vacation and about children. The library had elegant architecture, with sixteen-foot-high ceilings, original wood trim, and grand windows and wooden tables. I saw teachers had hung student projects on the walls. Mrs. Jimenez told me the teachers were divided into six Small Learning Communities, like teams, and mine would be the TV/Communications Team, also called the Bilingual Team. I found a seat at their table.

  There were seven other teachers, all from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, all in their thirties and forties. They wore lots of gold jewelry and had long, painted fingernails. They spoke in Spanish to one another. They spoke English to me.

  We played some get-to-know-one-another exercises, in which we interviewed the teacher next to us, and then we each had to stand up and say one nice thing about the person we spoke to.

  “Christina learned Spanish in high school and then lived in Chile for a year after college,” said Marjorie Soto, the English to Speakers of Other Languages teacher next to me. Everyone smiled.

  A woman entered and everyone fell silent. For a few minutes she stacked and restacked the papers on the podium, as though relishing her ability to command silence. A few wisps of short, grayish brown hair clung to her forehead, and her conservative business suit hung unevenly off her round frame. She had thin grayish lips and wore large, thick eyeglasses. Silently, she passed around her resume and a mission statement that said, “All ye who enter here prepare to succeed. Failure is not an Option.”

  Her resume said she was a career school administrator but for a brief stint of teaching in the 1970s. This was her first job as principal. The teachers began to gossip about her in Spanish: Assigned at the last minute, she was the school’s third principal in four years. She was a gringa, in a school whose students were 85 percent Hispanic and 15 percent African American. And she did not speak Spanish. Judging by the stiff body language of the teachers at my table, the principal was not going to be popular.

  “It’s hard to believe, but only two weeks ago the superintendent of schools called me himself. I was on the beach on vacation with my family at the time. He asked if I would be willing to be principal here.”

  She laughed a little to herself. “Two weeks is hardly enough time to prepare an entire school for a new year. I’ve been working hard each day from 5 AM until 6 PM. I am committed to moving this school up.”

  She walked from behind the card catalog in a sweeping manner, as though on stage in a grand theater. Her words sharpened.

  “We have nowhere to go but up,” she began. “Julia de Burgos is one of the worst middle schools in all of Philadelphia. It has the lowest test scores of any other middle school. Student attendance is 70 percent. Teacher attendance is not much higher.”