Six on History: Schools
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"NO MORE TEACHERS — The crisis in American schools since the pandemic began is an education crisis, but it’s also a labor shortage. A superintendent in Boston taught a fourth-grade class this week because of staffing issues. Some Ohio school districts have cut degree requirements for substitute teachers and increased their pay. Schools are desperate for nurses. Bus drivers are so hard to find that the Departments of Transportation and Education announced this week that states can waive a part of the commercial driver’s license requirement to address the shortage. Michigan schools need more cafeteria workers.
This is the latest facet of the Great Resignation. Workers in low-paying industries like hospitality, and high-stress industries like health care, have moved on to other jobs. Many education jobs fall into both categories on the pay and stress scales.
But in education, at least, these challenges precede the pandemic, said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, in an interview with Nightly. Low pay and resources for teachers — and low wages and limited career pathways for other school workers — have driven them to quit in droves, she said.
Pringle’s NEA has been tracking the teacher shortage for years. A 2016 survey showed just 4.2 percent of college freshmen planned to major in education, the lowest point in 45 years.
And that was before Covid. Layer in pandemic burnout, fear of the virus, mental health challenges, and new teaching models like remote and hybrid learning, and many educators decided to leave the field, Pringle said.
Even so, there was a sense of optimism in schools and among teachers this fall, Jane McAlevey, a senior policy fellow at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center, told Nightly. Of the school districts she works with as a union organizer, primarily large, urban districts, many teachers hoped for a better school year, with vaccines and funding from the Biden administration meant to improve Covid safety in schools.
But when employees showed up this August, especially in the nation’s poorest districts, their buildings lacked essential pandemic tools such as expanded testing programs, HEPA filters, working windows to help with ventilation and functioning water faucets, McAlevey said.
The network of substitute teachers that schools have relied on for years has also frayed, another issue that predates Covid. Amanda von Moos, managing director of Substantial Classrooms, a substitute teacher advocacy group, said the system has not changed in 100 years.
“It’s the original gig economy model,” von Moos said, “characterized by high autonomy and flexibility to decide when and where to work, little to no training or support, a high decree of professional isolation and no guarantee of income or professional growth. It’s chief strength has been keeping costs low.”
Teachers unions across the country have called for a more cautious approach to bringing children back into classrooms, drawing criticism from parents and pundits on both the right and the left.
McAlevey countered that educators agree that in-person learning is a better model. But, she noted, epidemiologists have criticized a vaccine-only approach for reopening society, and that extends to schools, where more testing and mitigation measures are needed, in her view.
"In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Red Square by Diego Rivera. A numberless crowd of faceless men marched with red banners, surrounding a locomotive engine emblazoned with hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization the Soviets wished to transmit during Stalin’s first five-year plan: The achievement was impersonal, technical, unquestionable. The Soviet Union was transforming itself from an agrarian backwater into an industrial power through sheer disciplined understanding of the objective realities of history. Its citizens celebrated the revolution, as Rivera’s painting suggested, even as it molded them into a new kind of people.
But by March 1932, hundreds of thousands of people were already starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Rapid industrialization was financed by destroying traditional agrarian life. The five-year plan had brought “dekulakization,” the deportation of peasants deemed more prosperous than others, and “collectivization,” the appropriation of agrarian land by the state. A result was mass famine: first in Kazakhstan, then in southern Russia and especially in Soviet Ukraine. Soviet leaders were aware in 1932 of what was happening but insisted on requisitions in Ukraine anyway. Grain that people needed to survive was forcibly confiscated and exported. The writer Arthur Koestler, who was living in Soviet Ukraine at the time, recalled propaganda that presented the starving as provocateurs who preferred to see their own bellies bloat rather than accept Soviet achievement.
Ukraine was the most important Soviet republic beyond Russia, and Stalin understood it as wayward and disloyal. When the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine failed to produce the yields that Stalin expected, his response was to blame local party authorities, the Ukrainian people and foreign spies. As foodstuffs were extracted amid famine, it was chiefly Ukrainians who suffered and died — some 3.9 million people in the republic, by the best reckoning, well over 10 percent of the total population. In communications with trusted comrades, Stalin did not conceal that he was directing specific policies against Ukraine. Inhabitants of the republic were banned from leaving it; peasants were prevented from going to the cities to beg; communities that failed to make grain targets were cut off from the rest of the economy; families were deprived of their livestock. Above all, grain from Ukraine was ruthlessly seized, well beyond anything reason could command. Even the seed corn was confiscated.
Last November, five days after the latest Russian memory law emerged from a presidential committee, the American president, Donald Trump, created the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. Its “1776 Report,” published just as Trump’s term came to an end in January, defined its task as the “restoration of American education.” The report responded to the 1619 Project, an attempt to bring the history of slavery closer to the center of national narratives, which this magazine published in 2019. The commission’s report reproduced the structure of Russian memory policy, acknowledging a historical evil and then relativizing it in a shocking manner. Slavery was discussed, but only as one among numerous “challenges to America’s principles,” a list that also included “progressivism” and “identity politics.” Slavery’s practice in America was defined as a “denial of core American principles” and “the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place” — which, the authors contend, “are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country.”
The allusion to “group rights” seems to be a reference to Critical Race Theory: a set of decades-old arguments about how racism works in law and society that has recently become a fixation of Republican politicians. Associated with the U.C.L.A. and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and other African American scholars, Critical Race Theory asks why discrimination did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and recommends critical scrutiny of laws focusing on their consequences rather than upon the avowed intentions of their authors. The 1776 Report fixates upon the related scourge of “identity politics” — a “creed” by which “supposed oppressors” must “atone and even be punished in perpetuity for their sins and those of their ancestors.” These ideas received more attention in the 1776 Report than slavery did.
"One student envisions a watch that tells you when you’re polluting – a sort of eco-nanny on your wrist.
Another suggests that teachers might show up in classrooms, not in person, but as holograms.
At a time of unusual vitriol in society among grown-ups – on abortion, school curricula, election counts, you name it – we wanted to plumb the minds of youth who are becoming aware of the world but still retain an innocence.
What we found is that they harbor plenty of concerns about tomorrow, sure, but they also exude an innate optimism, a sense of delight and possibility. Their visions represent a journey into cybersecurity and space travel, racism and robots.
As you read through their comments, consider what you think will be happening in 2042 and then ask yourself: Am I smarter than a fifth grader?
‘Yes’ to Mars, ‘no’ to pollution: Oregon students imagine a cleaner, kinder world to live in as adults."Once upon a time, there was much unemployment, poverty and homelessness. Leaders tried one thing after another to end these grim conditions. Nothing worked.
In the midst of these bad times, however, a small group of educators, upset over what our youth were learning in high schools decided to take action.
High schools then were dull places. Students listened to teachers, read books, and took exams. Schools were supposed to prepare students for life but much of what they studied they forgot after graduating. Worse yet, what they had learned in school did not prepare them to face the problems of life, think clearly, be creative, or fulfill their civic duties. Complaints to school officials got the same answer repeatedly: little could be done because college entrance requirements determined what had to be taught in high school.
So to give high schools the freedom to try new ways of schooling in a democracy, a small band of reformers convinced the best universities to waive their admission requirements and accept graduates from high schools that designed new programs.
Dozens of schools joined the experiment. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students created new courses and ways of teaching teenagers to become active members of the community and for those who wanted more schooling, still attend college. For eight years, these schools educated students and universities admitted their graduates. And then a war came and the experiment ended. After years passed, few could recall what these schools and colleges did.
Left Voice: Where do you work?
Hala Karim: I am a 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts teacher at Curtis Elementary on the south side of Chicago in the Roseland neighborhood.
Why did you vote for remote classes? What has the coronavirus been like at your school and in the community?
I voted for remote classes for a couple important reasons. The most pressing concern of all is what our COVID data is looking like. Chicago is seeing a huge spike in cases; there are over 11,000 new daily cases in the city limits alone. Cook County, where Chicago is located, is deploying trailers because hospital ICUs are reaching capacity. Data points that would have terrified us a year ago have become completely normalized, thanks to our elected officials’ terrible priorities. Above all, they want parents back at work no matter the cost, so of course, teachers have to be in school to take care of their children.
That’s what we have been breathlessly arguing for over 18 months now. But the other pressing concern that I want to highlight is what schools have looked like since our return. To reiterate what we’ve said again, we all think in-person schooling is best, but we have to have resources, adequate staffing, and hygienic facilities. We don’t have these things. School has not been normal this year. Even before the surge, there has been a big substitute teacher shortage. There aren’t people to cover classes when a staff member is out, so what my admin has done is split classes. This means that they will take one class, split the kids into other classes and have the kids follow another class all day. This increases the number of kids in a congested setting and it also relegates teachers as babysitters. I walk into my building not knowing what to expect everyday. We are all trying to be as flexible as possible, but it can be very chaotic.
And, as I said, we don’t have proper mitigations in place. Our community has only elected to test 0.52% of our students on a weekly basis. A large majority of our students are unvaccinated. There’s no social distancing in our school, and our kids eat maskless in class and at lunch together. Aside from that, less than half of them properly wear their mask the rest of the day, and that number is steadily decreasing as kids become desensitized to living in a pandemic. Further, submitting positive test results is now voluntary, so I suspect that our school is vastly under-reporting the number of positive COVID cases there actually are. As I said, it has been so messy and so tiring. Remote learning is the best option temporarily until these numbers drastically decrease or the city decides to use some of those billions of dollars of relief money to give us resources to test and ensure our schools are safe places to be.
We’ve seen Lori Lightfoot demonizing teachers and the union, as well as locking teachers out of their remote classrooms and threatening to cut pay. What has the backlash been like?
I was awake pretty late the night that we democratically voted to go remote. I signed into my account around midnight, after Jesse Sharkey announced that we would be remote, and I was able to get in. Half an hour later, I saw a Facebook post that announced we were starting to get locked out of accounts. I checked, and lo and behold, I couldn’t access any of my work mail or tools. These are people that can’t fix technology issues for days and weeks, but they were quick to penalize teachers for wanting to stay safe. It’s interesting.
At my school, we began talking in our union chat GroupMe about what we should do. Luckily, my school has an incredible delegate who was ready to give us information in real time and meet with us on Skype to field our concerns. We were instructed by the union to email our admin from our personal accounts our intent to work remotely, which we did. In return, we received an email, one by one, saying that our remote work was not authorized. It turned out to be a boilerplate email that the district instructed admin to send employees. At the end of the day, we received the exact same email when submitting our work documentation.
The lockouts and the threatening emails and the media propaganda are just a few ways the district has been deploying scare tactics to divide us. But it’s day two, and we have had 88% of our union continue to commit to remote. I am reaching out to my colleagues to ensure that they stay remote, too. We are not getting paid at the moment, but hopefully by documenting our work, we have proof that we should be paid. I understand some members’ frustration and perhaps they are in dire situations in which they really need that full paycheck, but for the vast majority of us, we need to stay strong as a union. We walk out together and go back in together, and that’s how we get our safety demands met. The district is counting on playing us against each other, and we just can’t let them.
What has been the response from parents and students?
To be honest, I have been careful about contacting the parents at my school. I know some members faced discipline (later rescinded) for that last year, and I’m just trying to avoid it. But what I do know about the parents at my school is that they are very supportive and understanding. Many of them opted to stay remote last year even after the opportunity was given to them to go hybrid and return in person. But I have seen some pretty nasty comments all over the union’s Instagram page and Facebook page from parents or just random people who think we are lazy and selfish. It’s always the same type of comments. But my comment to them is, if you haven’t been in a classroom this year, I don’t want to hear it.
Students, right before we voted to go remote, could definitely sense something was in the air. First of all, 30% of their fellow students were absent. Many of their teachers were already out with COVID or other illnesses, and they did not have a normal post-break return. They were sent home with packets and asked me if school was being canceled. The lack of consistency and transparency for students has definitely had an emotional effect on them. They deserve much better from the people in power.
What would a safe reopening of schools look like to you? What is needed to keep staff, students and the community safe?
A safe reopening should include a huge increase in unionized staffing, a movement from privatized custodians to custodians represented by CTU (our schools are simply filthy), an increase in student vaccinations which would be greatly accelerated by using our schools as vaccination sites, and a plummet in COVID numbers. Again, the city has billions of dollars in COVID relief to do it, but they’re holding the money hostage or using it to pay their debts. They refuse to work with us.
How can teachers and other workers support you and each other right now?
I do think a mutual aid fund to support some teachers short term might be a great idea. I know our next paychecks are going to suffer a big blow, and we don’t know when or if we will be getting paid. We could also use some positive messaging on social media and all around solidarity."
"Reading, writing and ratios.
An error-laden letter from a Virginia teachers union calling for more protections against the coronavirus has gone viral on Twitter.
Startled by a slew of linguistic gaffes, an Arlington parent took a correction pen to the piece and posted the aftermath online.
“Hey @VEA4Kids, are you going to send out more of these grammar worksheets over break?” the poster quipped derisively. “My kids and I had a great time spotting errors! Did we find them all?”
