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DEL.ICIO.USDispatch from NOLA: Andrea Wants To Teach
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Orleans – Teachers displaced in the school system re-do wanted a chance to give their side of the story. About a dozen have come to our hotel. First I talk to a Montessori public preschool teacher with 27 years of experience. She says she couldn’t get a job in New Orleans. She thinks the schools, especially the charters, didn’t want her because she is experienced and commands a higher salary than a young teacher. Also, she says her union background hurt her. She was forced to retire earlier than she had planned so she can keep her health insurance.
Next, I meet a teacher named Andrea. She is young, just five or six years out of college. She teaches physical science at a charter school called Science and Math High.
An interesting sidenote: Before Katrina, Science and Math High was a choice school that worked with students for half a day. The other half-day, students attended a traditional school. This is a new one on me, but that’s what you find in urban districts.
Anyway, Andrea Spreter has concerns about the charter schools. She is leaving Science and Math, in hopes of teaching in the state-run district. She says the charter schools opened fast with mostly young teachers, many froom Teach for America. She believes her school is missing out on the experience veteran teachers bring. She said there are no discipline guidelines, so some infractions go unpunished and then a similar infraction leads to the kid getting kicked out. With no alternative schools, that leaves such kids with no school to attend.
Let me back up a bit. Andrea did not start out at Science and Math. She previously taught at Marion Abramson High School, one of the damaged schools we visited earlier. (She said her classroom survived Katrina, but later it was looted.) This school was not a choice school. It was the school that served the kids who did not seek our or get into magnet schools throughout the city. Andrea loved teaching there. She loved those students. She does not believe in admissions criteria for public schools.
So she is leaving Science and Math and speaking out about problems she sees with charter schools, such as lack of consistent policies, lack of oversight, absence of veteran teachers. She also craves the kind of professional development a school district can offer. I find this interesting, as so many teachers seem to roll their eyes at professional development. For Andrea to take such a view, you might think she went through a traditional teacher’s college, where tradition is often favored over the idea of independently run schools.
She didn’t. Here’s how she says she got into teaching. She is from Ohio and graduated from college, I didn’t catch where. She worked in some sort of nonprofit related to India, which she says was her passion. She didn’t like D.C. though so she moved to New Orleans and got a job bartending.
During a slow shift, she pulled out a book. A patron asked her if she was a book-learnin’ type. He asked her for tutoring and before long she was tutoring many neighborhood residents. She decided to teach. She got a job as a physics teacher on a provisional basis and worked toward her certification. She taught in a school many teachers shun, and she loved it. After Katrina, she went to Texas and worked with Katrina students who were having trouble adapting. She said she spent a lot of time breaking up fights between Katrina and Texas kids.
She returned to New Orleans and got a job at one of the few schools open. The job is just shy of full time, though. She teaches three physical science classes and runs the robotics program. She has no health insurance and no retirement.
Andrea wants to teach physics at a New Orleans high school that is open to all kids. She wants to get paid and she wants benefits. Shouldn’t be too much to ask, should it?
P.S. Thanks to a blog called Quick and the Ed via another one called Let’s Get It Right for alerting me that I had the school name wrong. It is Science and Math, not Math and Science. Also, I changed the word “selective” to “choice” in describing Science and Math in its previous life as it did not require certain test scores or grades for entry. Gomen ne! (And how can we get such a school in metro Atlanta? )
Comments
By SET
June 5, 2006 12:25 PM | Link to this
An interesting personality, Andrea.
She’s 5 or 6 years out of college. We don’t know her degree or college, but if she works as a physics teacher that degree is probably an expensive one.
Now she is working in an environment where she has been breaking up fights - presumably between adolescent males - has no health insurance and no retirement - and I doubt she is making a wage matching her education. She choses assignments in “schools that others shun”. There is no data about what kind of disability insurance her employer provides if she is injured on the job. Worker’s Comp reduces you to poverty. You must have supplemental disability insurance if you work in a field where you have a liklihood of injury. Does her employer provide this?
How does she propose to meet her obligations such as student loans, taxes and wardrobe/housing/auto etc?
Teachers are not supposed to be Mother Theresa - although some of them are saints.
Is there something else going on with this young woman that makes her want to crucify herself?
I have a friend who is a lab science teacher in a local public school. She does not have to break up fights - she is 5’5” and 100 lbs and I think the students are more afraid of her than she of them. She has good benefits and retirement. She was pre-med in college and has a lab science degree from the Univ of Calif. Because of her degree and experience she cannot be easily replaced and can change school districts easily. She can’t be mistreated by her employer, she would leave them and they know it (On occasion she’s told them).
Being a teacher does not require one to work in an unsafe environment for substandard wages.
Working in an unsafe environment for substandard wages requires a crucifixion complex.
Our teachers must demand more for themselves and vote with their feet until they get it. Look at what the Nurses have accomplished for themselves… Teachers deserve more but they must fight for their due. “Fighting” includes not accepting substandard working conditions cheerfully and playing “Saint”.
By Patti Ghezzi
June 5, 2006 01:08 PM | Link to this
Andrea said she currently is without insurance. She wants insurance, which is one reason why she is leaving her charter school in favor of a position in a school run by the state. She has other career options, but she cares about teaching and enjoys working with her students, especially the challenging ones.
Keep in mind, these are trying times because of what local residents refer to as “the storm.”
I would say this teacher is not “cheerfully accepting” substandard working conditions. She is speaking out about them, at risk to her career. And she is leaving her current situation for another one that she thinks will be better for her.
She was definitely an interesting personality, in a way the teacher every school would want because of her commitment. But her willingness to speak openly about problems could strike a little fear in administrators.
By Teacher Teacher
June 5, 2006 01:52 PM | Link to this
Now, Patti, you know very well that in Georgia administrators have very little fear of teachers and could care less what teachers vent. Administrators know that they can make teachers’ professional lives horror stories, and most teachers will not make a peep because of fear of losing their jobs. The AJC remains pretty silent about reporting the problems that administrators encounter in the schools of the metro area, but the AJC prints story after story about various teachers who have scrapes with the law.
For instance, here you have a number of blog topics dealing with NOLA; however, the DeKalb County SPLOST Audit received only tiny attention in the DeKalb area of the Metro Section.
The problem with education rests squarely at the top with administrators who seem to have a rarefied existence beyond the realm of ethical codes and legal statutes and, apparently, beyond the scope of what local news organizations opt to cover.
By Patti Ghezzi
June 5, 2006 02:26 PM | Link to this
I would say the power administrators have to make teachers’ lives “horror stories” is why teachers are often reluctant to speak up, especially with their first and last names. Andrea appeared not to be concerned about it, and I don’t know that she should be. She is a certified high school science teacher who loves working in challenging schools. I doubt she will ever be unemployed.