Feeding your mind, pt 2 - union edition

Readers,

I am diverging from my favorite/least favorite topic of body image to express my strong support for the striking teachers in Chicago.

credit New York Times

Any one who has spent any amount of time inside an urban public classroom can tell you that teachers and their administrations are severely underpaid.

Any one who has spent a month there can tell you that public school teachers have responsibilities that extend far beyond teaching.  Low-income children, with fewer community resources to address their needs, are not only underprepared for a day of learning, they look to the school to provide them with these resources.

Let me start by explaining what I mean by underprepared: maybe their homes are cramped or loud and they don't get enough sleep.  Or they do not get enough food at home and are hungry during the day.  Some have no one at home who has the time/the ability to help them with their schoolwork.  Or to provide them the discipline to complete it.

Also: the drinking water at the school flows through the building's original lead piping and is not safe to drink.  There is not enough funding for a school psychologist.  Three first-grade classrooms share a single pencil sharpener, and student liaisons must be sent between classes to bring it back and forth.  There is a shortage of all school supplies.  The classrooms are old and ugly and don't get a lot of natural light.

These are a few among a myriad of reasons why a student might easily lose focus.  And they all were huge factors that hindered student learning at the elementary school where I volunteered my time last year.

Now, I'll shift to some problems teachers had to face.  Unmanageable class sizes of students with very different levels of ability.  And almost all these students would benefit from the help, either because of a learning disability, behavioral disorder, or emotional problem, from a social worker.  And an administration, lacking the funding to issue more than six IEPs per classroom, because seven means that the teacher gets a full-time aide.  The teacher had to spend so much time on discipline that her first-graders hated coming to school.

And when she went on a maternity leave, she was replaced with a rookie teacher, fresh from school, who cried every single day in trying to cope with the stress of disciplining/establishing ground rules, teaching, and handling the problems at home for every student of this very difficult class.  As a volunteer with a BA but no background in elementary education/power in the classroom, I could only handle problems as they came up, like a very large-scale game of whack-a-mole.

credit dailykos.com

There is no question in my mind that basing 25% of a teacher's evaluation on the basis of student growth is a misguided and harmful policy.  And of course student growth is measured by standardized testing, whose effectiveness is disproportionately affected by all the factors I listed above.  And extending the school day and school year without providing the support of aides or secondary teachers in the classroom is out of the question.  Urban teachers need smaller classes if they are to successfully get any teaching done.

And to those who are demonizing these striking teachers for taking away two days (and counting) of learning from the students.  These teachers sure ain't getting paid for striking.