Six on Schools: NY Times Offers Dumb Endorsement; Stress, hostility rising in American high schools in Trump era;
philip panaritis
The Times thinks the warm body rule is "a reasonable attempt to let these schools avoid the weak state teacher education system that has long been criticized for churning out graduates who are unprepared to manage the classroom." Their support for this is a decade-old "report" by Arthur Levine, and even if that report were the gospel truth, that does not shore up the logic of saying, "I'm pretty sure the surgeons at this hospital aren't very good, so the obvious solution is for me to grab some guy off the street to take out my spleen instead."
The Times also commiserates with charter hiring problems.
New York’s high-performing charter schools have long complained that rules requiring them to hire state-certified teachers make it difficult to find high-quality applicants in high-demand specialties like math, science and special education. They tell of sorting through hundreds of candidates to fill a few positions, only to find that the strongest candidates have no interest in working in the low-income communities where charters are typically located."
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"This is true for us: in our careers as contingent faculty members teaching writing courses, we have held adjunct positions at a range of institutions, including a community college, an Ivy League university, a rabbinical school, a labor college, a fashion institute, and a large research university. We have each cobbled together a living by working at multiple campuses, and the loss of even one of these positions would mean an inability to make ends meet—a likelihood, given that adjuncts are often offered teaching jobs only on a semester-by-semester basis, with no guarantee of continuous employment. Today, being an adjunct is no longer a stop-gap or part-time opportunity for working professionals interested in sharing their expertise. Instead, it has become the status quo. The AAUP reports that more than 50 percent of professors now serve in part-time positions.
While more and more educators feel a moral obligation to explicitly address current patterns in American politics, the reality is that contingent faculty are often afraid of facilitating these conversations because of the risk that complaints from students who might disagree with their assessments will cost them their jobs. There’s increasing discussion of protecting safe spaces for students, but no one is talking about creating safe spaces for contingent faculty to foster and facilitate challenging conversations.
With the economic stakes so high, our concerns about job security naturally impact the choices we make in the classroom. As the AAUP describes, “The free exchange of ideas may be hampered by the fear of dismissal for unpopular utterances, so students may be deprived of the debate essential to citizenship.” The classroom is an ideal site for these debates; a space where students develop habits of critical inquiry by engaging in conversation with a diverse cohort of peers. As educators, it is our job to create a space for these conversations to be productive, but with job security for higher education faculty at an all-time low, doing so is increasingly fraught."
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