Dear Union Leaders

By:  Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. General Manager BATs

 

As you know unions are under attack.  They are being accused of not being there for the children, of having their own personal interests at heart, of making deals, and selling out the public. 

 

            BATs have responded with a #unionstrong campaign.  We want to show everyone what unions have done for the students in the past, through the various protections that have been put in place for the teachers. 

 -        You have fought for class-size restrictions so that the students can have a productive learning environment.

 

-        You have fought for due process, or “tenure” so that teachers can speak out for what is right and be a voice for the students with less fear of negative effects on their personal employment.

 

-        You have fought for our pensions in an effort to attract qualified and competent professionals to education.

 

-        You have paved the way for so many teachers to be able to get support, extra training, and professional development so that we may continue our quest to educate children to the best of our ability.

 

-        You have fought for safe and proper working conditions that translates into a better learning environment for our students.

 

-        You have bargained for full-time nurses in our buildings.

 

-        You provide grants to help support multi-faceted learning opportunities.

 

-        You play an active role in the community and provide opportunities for teachers to get involved and build the strength of our neighborhoods.

 

-        You have recognized that we are the last stand protecting students when their parents are not with them.  You have seen that we will put our children first and you have helped us honor our youth.

 

 

It is hard to make the public see how the decisions that have been made in the past have actually been for the benefit of their children.  But we, as teachers, called for these with their interest at heart. 

 

So, please understand, that while BATs are #unionstrong, and we believe in the basic tenets behind unions and their purpose, we will still stand for our  students and we will fight for their rights and for what we feel is best for them, even against you. We will work within our  locals to make changes.  We will fight to change the leadership when we  feel the children are being ignored. We will listen and join with the voices of parents as we unite to fight our common enemies.  Join us, for wherever you go, BATs will be watching, 

 

Make No Mistake About It: When You Attack Public Workers Unions, You Attack New York’s Black Middle Class
By: Dr Mark Naison


During my forty plus years as a scholar, teacher, coach and community organizer, I have had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time in the outer boroughs, not only in neighborhoods adjoining Manhattan, but in places where the Manhattan skyline sometimes looks like a distant universe. Whether it was through conducting oral histories, coaching basketball and baseball games, doing workshops in schools or advising community organizations on how to better reach neighborhood youth, I can say, with confidence that I am spent time in every single neighborhood in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and in large portions of Queens and Staten Island

When I visit these neighborhoods, I can’t help but take note of the age and quality of the housing stock, the variety of stores in local business district, the atmosphere in the streets, and the demographic distribution of the population, not only in terms of race, but occupation.

I have learned many things from these visits, but one of the things that leaps at me is the size of the City’s Black middle class and the its almost complete physical separation from the majority white upper class that sets the tone, and has the power in Michael Bloomberg’s New York.

There are three large cooperative housing developments in New York City that I visit regularly that are majority Black and majority middle class—Rochdale Village in Queens, Starrett City in Brooklyn, and Co-Op City in the Bronx. Located at the very outskirts of each borough, more than ten miles from Manhattan- they are self contained communities with their own shopping centers, schools and ball fields. While they are not without problems, and have only a small number of white families left, for the most part they are safe, well kept communities which are good places to raise families and which, though they are far from Manhattan have excellent shopping, decent public services, and vibrant churches and community organizations.

There is one other thing about these communities, other than their racial composition that distinguishes them from most Manhattan neighborhoods and that is where the people who live in them work. Overwhelmingly, the people in these communities are civil servants or people who work in health care. They are teachers, transit workers, police officers, prison guards, nurses and nurses aids, bus drivers, and clerks and administrators in city agencies. Literally, they are the people who make New York City run.

 And almost all of them are members of unions- the UFT, the PBA, the Transport Workers Union, DC 37, Local 1199. The people here – the older generation- are the ones who unionized
New York City’s health care industry in the 60’s and 70’s and helped those workers move into the middle class; they are the ones who led the Transit Strike in 2005, and they are the ones who stand to lose most if Andrew Cuomo’s budget goes through without a millionaire’s tax and
If Michael Bloomberg gets to lay off teachers without consideration of seniority.

Make no mistake about it, Cuomo and Bloomberg may think they are being “color blind” when they fire government workers and undermine the power of public sector unions, but the consequences of their policies are anything but.

Their budget proposals, if implemented, will have a direct and devastating impact on the New York’s large and vibrant Black middle class whose hard work all New Yorker’s benefit from, and will be felt with special harshness in Starrett City, Rochdale Village, and Co-Op City

Do Cuomo and Bloomberg, and their acolytes on the editorial board of New York newspapers know or care that this will happen? Probably not. After all, most of them have never been to the three housing developments I have mentioned, much less spoken to people who live there
This is Segregation, New York Style, in the year 2011.

And another good reason to stand up for unions and accept no attacks on collective bargaining rights in the City of New York

HISD’s New Literacy Plan Sabotages Bilingual Education

By LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ

 

Not a single Spanish book was purchased for an essential reading program in an $8.5 million spending spree by Houston Independent School District for the district’s new literacy program, according to district bilingual education staff member who chose to remain anonymous.
Per state law, TEC Sec. 29.055, bilingual education program must provide “for learning basic skills in the primary language of the students enrolled in the program and for carefully structure and sequenced mastery of English language skills.”

According to Scholastic trainers, Superintendent Terry Grier pointedly chose not to buy any Spanish books for the K-3 bilingual reading program. To the contrary, all regular education classes (K-3) are getting new books and full classroom and school-wide leveled libraries.

A few hundred books were purchased for kindergarten and first grades in bilingual education, but none for an essential guided reading program. (Teachers use “leveled” books, or books according to a student’s reading level, to help advance their fluency and comprehension levels through a specific type of instruction called guided reading.)

State and federal laws require that appropriate resources are allocated to bilingual education to carry out the program effectively. Teachers and schools are advised by the district to use an outdated resource that is not aligned to STAAR, named TESOROS, for bilingual students, or to purchase their own materials.

Currently, there are 40,000 students in the bilingual education program in HISD, which accounts for 20 percent of the student population. Of the 104, 689 students in HISD’s elementary schools, half of these students are enrolled in bilingual education. The program’s goal is to ensure that students build literacy in Spanish, and transfer those skills to a solid understanding of English, written and verbal, by the time they exit the program.

Is this Grier’s not-so-subtle way of degrading bilingual education, by draining classrooms of much-needed resources? Without a wealth of available books for students to read, it won’t be possible for most of the bilingual students in HISD to become literate by the third grade, which is the supposed ultimate goal of the Literacy 3 Program.

Scholastic Resources Quick Reference-1 (The publisher documentation clearly shows minimal resources allocated to HISD’s bilingual education program.)
 

Things We Had When New York Was A Union Town
by Dr. Mark Naison
With collective bargaining rights having just been eliminated in Wisconsin by legislative fiat, and with more states poised to do the same; with union teachers everywhere being made scapegoats for the nations educational problems; and with the most powerful business interests in the nation funding movements to privatize government services and decertify public employee unions, I thought be useful to look back at a time in New York City’s history when unions had far more power than they have today.

When New York City emerged from World War II, the most dynamic sectors of its economy- garment, electronics, transportation, construction, and food processing- were all heavily unionized. These union gains in the private sector were soon followed by the acquisition of collective bargaining rights by teachers, employees of state and city government and workers in health care.

Given what is being said about unions by elected officials and the media, one might expect that time in New York history- the 1940’s 1950’s and 1950’s- to be one of educational and cultural stagnation. One would expect that New York City today is a much more dynamic and democratic city than it was during a time when more than half the city’s work force was unionized.

But when do some historical research and ask yourself the question, “Does New York City have better schools, public services and cultural and recreational opportunities for its poor and working class citizens than it did 50 years ago” the answer you come up with is a resounding NO.

I have spent the last nine years doing oral histories with Bronx residents through a project I lead called the Bronx African American History Project, and to a person, the people I interviewed feel that young people growing up in the Bronx had better opportunities in the 50’s and the 60’s than young people growing up there today. As Josh Freeman points out in his wonderful book Working Class New York, many of the programs that my interviewees talked about that made their lives better were fought for by the city’s labor movement.

Here is a list of just a few of the programs which New York City unions fought for that are no longer with us today. I will leave it to you to decided whether we are better off without them,.

1. Supervised recreation programs in every public elementary school in the city from 3-5 PM and 7-9 PM, which included sports, arts and crafts and music. These programs were free and open any young person who walked through the door.

2. First rate music programs in every public junior high school in the city featuring free instruction for students in bands, orchestras and music classes. Students in those classes could take home musical instruments to practice. Among the beneficiaries of these school music programs were some of the greats of Latin music in NYC, including Willie Colon, Eddie and Charlie Palmieri. Ray Barretto and Bobby Sanabria.

3. Recreation supervisors, as well as cleaners, in every public park in the city, including neighborhood vest pocket parks, who organized games and leagues and prevented fights. One of the greatest of these “parkies” Hilton White, organized a community basketball program that send scores of Bronx youth to college on basketball scholarships including 3 who played on the 1966 Texas Western team which won the NCAA championship.

4. A public housing program that constructed tens thousands of units of low and moderate income housing throughout the city and staffed these with housing police, ground crews and recreation staffs to make sure the projects were safe, clean and well policed

5. Free tuition at the city university, at the community college, college and graduate levels, for all students who met the admissions standards

6. Parks department policies which made sure that parks in the outer boroughs were kept as clean and environmentally sound as Central Park or parks in wealthy neighborhoods

7. Free admission at all the city's major zoos and museums

These policies, all of which were eliminated during the fiscal crisis of the 1970's, when a banker dominated Emergency Financial Control Board was put in charge of city finances meant that children in poor and working class communities had access to recreational cultural and educational opportunities which are today only available to the children of the rich . These programs were not there because of the foresight and compassion of the city's business leadership. They were there because unions fought for them and demanded that elected officials they supported fund them

This is not to say that unions are right in every dispute, or that they are immune from arrogance, greed and crruption. But it should give pause to those who think that our lives would be better in a union free environment

Let me leave you with some numbers. In the early 1950's when 35% of the American work force was unionized, the United States had the smallest wealth gap (between the top and bottom 20 percent of its population) of any advanced nation in the world. Now, when 11.9% of our workforce is unionized, we have the largest.

Is this progress?

Let's think long and hard before we blame unions for the city's and the nation's economic problems

Happy Birthday BATs!

By:  Dr. Mark Naison and Priscilla Sanstead – Co-founders of BATs

Priscilla Sanstead

I came to activism late. I'd always heard that eventually you find something in life that combines all the things you love with all the things you do pretty well. I'd also wanted to find that thing that helps people. The wake-up call to action for me came with the Seattle Map Test Revolt. To think that a school's media center would be closed to an entire school population for weeks just because of testing was mind boggling. I know how few kids have homes with books and computers with internet access.

In 2011 I had started a Facebook group helping people who didn't buy into the notion that college (and the associated debt) was the only way to success. It had over 500 people when I passed it on to someone else after about 2 years. I started two other education groups to connect people that now have a couple of hundred members. I had lots of grand ideas for groups IF a lot of people ever joined! I liked connecting people. I want everyone to know everyone else so they could feel stronger and empowered. The word "badass" hadn't yet crossed my path! According to Malcolm Gladwell I was a "People Connector". And there seemed to be millions in education reform activism who needed to know each other. How could they all meet in a big way and share stories and empower each other?

While devouring education activist blogs and joining groups on Facebook, of course I would meet amazing and passionate activists like Mark Naison. I asked Mark one day - June 14, 2013 - "when is someone finally going to do something", because other people were asking the same thing. He said, "Start a group". Mark and I thought we'd just see what would happen, but the market already seemed crowded with groups, and nothing really huge had resonated or captured people's imaginations. We had the usual expectations - several hundred people in a few months. Mark added Marla Kilfoyle right away, and we all started adding colleagues and friends, and by Saturday night we realized we ought to get a website. Marla had proposed a contest with Mark to find members, and by Sunday night there was no doubt we were riding a rocket ship. Everything became a blur!

I now got serious with plans for a Really Big Group - to get an infrastructure in place, facilitate growth, meet the needs of the members, and "people-connect". We had 20,000 members in 18 days! It was crazy-busy from the first few days. Fed up teachers told us they loved our name. Others - teachers, trolls, who knows - joined to tell us they hated it. Some people were added by well-meaning friends and they were quite indignant and didn't want to be a badass and told us how we'd never be successful. (Hey, we were still hearing that last week!)

This new group was active 20 hours a day. It was like the Wild West! Lots of emotion was overflowing onto us after the most grueling school year ever for many teachers. Posts went to over a thousand comments. Original posters of nice threads that turned contentious would get disgusted and delete their post. We'd be accused of deleting it. And their emotional fussing and troll-ish remarks would start all over again. Lots of people joined who really weren't badass, just asshats. And we really hadn't made any guidelines yet. But we could tell we were helping a lot of people, especially the New York teachers. They'd join and pour it all out and be heard. Then they'd feel their new badass power and join in helping us welcome the next teachers who were joining and sharing and being heard. Someone mentioned that their television had not been on in 2 weeks! This new group was so compelling that people couldn't walk away from us - they couldn't leave their computer screens. Hey, we couldn't either. We had never imagined such a thing as was this new busy, compassionate, explosive group.

Almost every day some killjoy would post that the group was 'just so negative'. So there was more emotion in response to that. I finally wrote a long comment on July 2, 2013 to one post that I then named "Thoughts on Negativity" and put in our Files section. What I was seeing was most definitely not negativity. We were witnessing hurting people pouring out their hearts to everyone. We'd suggest to the negativity-complainers to skip the threads they don't like or else try to be compassionate. It was so emotional for us on the other side of the screen to be facilitating this, but there was far and away more painful, raw emotion coming from our new members. People had found their "place" in BATs, a refuge, and they proudly became BATs and embraced the name and the power of this exploding group because it was what they had been waiting for. We weren't even calling ourselves BATs back then, but teachers now had a fierce new group, an identity, and were part of something larger than themselves. It looked like a group that was gong to take action. They had Hope! And we were humbled as talented people literally poured from the sky with ideas and time and motivation to help us grow in new ways and in new areas.

Here's the first part of my "Thoughts on Negativity - written when we were 19 days old:

"I see the negativity here as just SO much pent-up emotion. I don't have that much of a problem with it. Most of those people probably haven't had anyone to share (and dump?) all those feelings on that really, really understands. And with 20,000 people, well, even 1% who are unhappy write a lot of posts to go through. Skip the posts you don't like just like you avoid people you don't like.

My motto is always assume best intentions. Since there is no body language or voice inflection, what some may read a B%&$#-ing, others read as crying while sharing. People are in all kinds of places in their journey, (stages of grief, anyone?) and some can't handle the emotions of the people just coming to grips with the sadness of the loss of their beloved profession. Compassion is appreciated and valued here."

So Mark and I and Marla and all our new amazing, compassionate, volunteer badass admins could see from early on that what was needed in this group was both Action and Compassion - fight the reformers with one hand (fist) and put the other hand around the battered teachers and parents and their children who were shell-shocked from the test results out of New York state. The New York teachers who flocked to our group in huge numbers were our canaries in the coal mine. This high stake testing machine was what was coming for the rest of the country. A year of trying to teach with their hands tied and their students demoralized with incessant tests and assessments had left students, parents, and the teachers battered. What was suddenly happening to cause only 30% of the children to pass a test?

So. Where are we now a year later? We have over 48,000 BATs - teachers, parents, interested college students, and retirees. We have chapters in 50 states and DC. New York and Florida BATs have close to 2,000 members. BATs has a website, almost 11,000 followers on Twitter, 1,000 followes on our more recent exploding Pinterest page, our Youtube, the movie channel, dozens of BATs only secret groups, an outstanding blog, the spin-off groups BATs International, Canada Badass Teachers Association, New Zealand BATs, and a group inspired by us - Badass Moms Association. And the most amazing action of all - a national family-style celebration of the teaching profession and march around the DoE planned for July 28th.

What a year! Thank you, BATs for joining us on this improbable journey, for volunteering your time and brilliant ideas, for working long hours, for having faith that we could hold this rocket ship together to get where we are today. Thank you for sharing your painful, sweet, angry, empowering, shocking and/or hopeful stories with us. We all feel connected. We are all better for it. And we couldn't have done it without YOU! I love you, BATs! And I think we all love each other!

 

Love Letter to the BATS- On the First Anniversary of the Badass Teachers Association

Dr. Mark Naison

  I have been enraged by what has been happening to teachers and public education  for at least 7 years. My involvement began in  2007 with school grading and school closings in the Bronx, which drove the history projects I was doing out of the public schools, and victimized many of the great teachers I had worked with. It built up steam when Barack Obama and Arne Duncan unleashed Race to the Top which blamed teachers for the country’s education deficits and required that teachers be rated on the basis of student test scores

  I started writing and speaking about what was happening  and got a modest response  from teachers and education activists around the country. I spoke at several rallies in Washington, helped found the Dump Duncan group on Facebook, participated in several unsuccessful demonstrations against  school closings in NY and found my frustration building. I became a loose cannon, exploding in rage at dinner parties and family gatherings when anyone attacked teachers, losing  many friends in the process.  Everyone I thought I was a crazy man when I attacked what  Michael Bloomberg was doing in NYC and Barack Obama was doing throughout the US was a deadly blow to Democracy and Free Speech as well as Public Education

  Then came the great NY Test Revolt of the Spring of 2013. Parents up in arms about Common Core aligned tests, mostly in suburbs and rural area, began opting out their children in unprecedented numbers. I was invited to speak in several Long Island communities and in the process met some amazing parents and teachers who were as alarmed about what was happening in education policy as I was. One of these was a parent activist from Oklahoma named Priscilla Sanstead; another was a teacher and parent from Long Island named Marla Kilfoyle.  Even though I only knew them from email and Facebook, I found them to be kindred spirits, funny, creative, feisty, ready to fight back against the Billionaire Privatizers  and their supporters in both parties using social media as well as more traditional protest methods

 Then one day, when Priscilla and I were comparing notes, we decided, as an experiment to create a Facebook group called“The Badass Teachers Association.” We had  been working together  on an innovative site called  “ The Badass Parents Association” which had amassed a nice following in a few months and thought we might be able to attract a few hundred teachers  who were as angry as we were about the testing and scripting  and demonization of teachers in America’s public schools

 What happened next took us totally by surprise and changed the course of American education history. Priscilla launched the page  on June 14, 2013 at4:30 PM and we invited several people around the country we had worked with to join, one of whom was Marla. By Sunday night June 16, in part attracted by a recruiting contest Marla had started, we had nearly 2,000 people in the group.  No one had ever seen anything like it. Teachers all over the US were pouring into a group with a name that you could not easily mention in polite company, that seemed- at least to some-impertinent and unprofessional, and that connoted total frustration with normal paths of protest for an aggrieved group.

  I was utterly stunned by this phenomenon. I had never been part of any organization that had grown this fast, much less an organization that had been started with such low expectations. But when I thought about what was going on, I was deeply moved by what was happening. Clearly, I was not alone in my rage! All over the country, teachers were totally fed up with being the scapegoat for failed social policies and the punching bag for political leaders, media pundits and everyone trying to shape education policy. They were, like me, ready to be up front, in your face and outrageous, demanding that teachers have a place at the table or they would turn over the table!

 What I felt that weekend is was relief, gratitude, and determination. I was no longer alone. I was part of an army of teachers ready to fight back even if their colleagues, friends, relatives and union leaders thought they were crazy. I decided, along with Priscilla and Marla, to put everything I had into this movement to build it, nurture it and help it grow, not only because the country needed it, but because we all needed it!

 Every day since—and it is a year now-- has been filled with purpose, determination, but above all with LOVE. I have met so many great teachers and activists around the country through BATS whose courage and creativity and fighting spirit inspires me every day.  And  while my colleagues, relatives and what remain of my old friends still think I am crazy, they look at me with a new respect because I am part of a powerful national movement of teachers who will not let their voice be smothered and ignored.

BATS and the people in it have given me purpose, given me solidarity , and given me hope.

 Together, we go forward toward a better day

Happy Birthday BATS!!!

Resignation
Letter from a First Year Public School Teacher
By LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ

Dear Principal of Title 1 Elementary School,

Thank you for the opportunity to work in your school with your children, as you have referred to them. Thank you for reminding me to look you in the eye, for reminding me to never “turn my back on students” as I walk them in straight lines down the hall, for telling me that they will forget my name.

I will not make a difference in their lives, you said. Teachers don’t, you said. Thank you for telling me that you must “act like a dictator” at the school because you have to. Most of the teachers toe the line, handing in fake grades, spending their hours at night creating elaborate lesson plans to adhere to standards, spend hours creating bulletin boards to display student products and proof of real learning. Because I did not, and because I spent most of my time as a teacher figuring out how to teach children and reach my students, even if it was in contradiction to what was on the standardized test, you singled me out as an incompetent teacher. I was taken out of my fourth-grade classroom to take on various itinerant teaching positions (that kept me off the grade books and out of standardized testing), the last of which was held in a utility closet with two African-American students considered behavioral issues.
I learned much as a first year public school teacher. My background as a journalist, marketing director, and college instructor had very little insight into my new profession.  In my two classes of 23 fourth-grade students,  (a number that fluctuated weekly as new students were added constantly), I spent most of my time surveying the room making sure that emotional explosions were kept at bay while keeping the students engaged in real, meaningful work. While the classroom two doors down read a story about a mischievous frog to learn about main idea and summarization, (something I refused to do and was reprimanded after I debated the issue with my team), I invited my students of refugees, English language learners, and barely literate students to the carpet so I could read Kafka, Sherman Alexie, the biography of a world-record female swimmer (“Swimming to Antarctica”). Sometimes during the readings we had to laugh hysterically. Sometimes I did cry, and the students did too. I saw lights in my students’ eyes when I showed them Depression-era photographs of migrant workers.

Two doors down, the reading class was discussing condensed versions of second-grade literature from a basal textbook, with literary devices displayed by cartoons and large dialogue boxes. Eventually I was forced to use the same texts as well, but I kept my own; that was my downfall.

I didn’t have enough student product to show, you said, Dr. Principal. Where were my student-produced charts, diagrams, expository essays? I was spending time throwing a ball around in a circle to students to get them to tell personal narratives with limited vocabularies, which they did: stories about an uncle dying from a  car bomb in Iraq, a beloved grandmother that died in her sleep, lots of stories about baking with a mother for the first time. I took the students out to the decrepit, overgrown garden on campus and they came back and wrote essays on the sensory experience. “I see smellee in dark water. Made me sad and want to grow.”
We talked in class, argued, and I lost my voice coming to work with sinus infections and colds, asthma and tired from the 60-plus hours a week I worked, in addition to being a mother and wife. When the pressure of learning to read texts outside of the students reading level became too intense, we danced.  (Please note, Dr. Principal, that you are not a part of this “we.” I wish that you were, but often you were the one standing at the window with your arms folded, and speaking to me after school to warn me about the lack of student products. Your final warning, after a mere two months of school, was that my students must pass the district level reading assessment at 85 percent – or else.)

And that was just subject matter. Sometimes I worked all day to move a child off the floor from a fetal position so he could write about “his favorite place,” (so he could be ready for STAAR testing) while reminding another student that she could learn to read and write as she stared at her own backwards letters or destroyed markers, books, and tissues at her desk. I spoke privately to the girl who stole from my desk so she could show me her bruises, tell me her story of being choked. I called parents almost day, called CPS, cried at night after another child told me she wanted to die.  When I wrote lesson plans at night on main idea and how to write summarize, this is what I thought about. When I told administrators, including you, I was told “These kids exaggerate.” There was the implication that I cared too much, was too weak and emotional.  Not detached enough to be a good teacher. Not in it for the long haul because I didn’t spend the majority of my time studying the intricacies of the STAAR test and how to get my students to pass it.

When I spoke to you, Dr. Principal, about the direction of my instruction, you said don’t forget to differentiate instruction, to make sure there are enough anchor charts displayed on the walls. This, unfortunately, was a point of contention between us. Not how rigorous my instruction was, nor how engaged my students were on a daily basis, but whether I displayed colorful charts all over the empty walls for students to look at and reference. Additionally, I did not give enough handouts, charts, diagrams and worksheets. I argued about this, saying that it was sensory and information overload when most of the students were not functionally literate. That was my mistake because a month later I was fired from my position and slowly forced out of the school. The last day of my class I received notes from students; my cell phone was stolen off my desk; students waited until the principal was out of the building and left messages on the whiteboard: “We are our teacher forever in fourth grade.” “We love you and will miss you and want you back now.” 

I did not listen to your directive to not tell my students goodbye. “We have to cut the bond,” you said. “It is better.”

For the boy with homeless, drug-addicted parents, you said, “Just let him be”. Take up his blood-spattered tests, (the ones he sprayed his punctured nose upon in defiance.) I graded it carefully and reported the grade, which you asked me to change to passing. He tried to sleep and cry on the desk, and when I made him stand up to learn and write, you said let him be. “You can’t save students,” you said. “You will have very little impact on them in the long run. You said don’t forget to make those students be silent in the halls, totally silent, and clean up every piece of trash off the floor.”

Dr. Principal, we never talked about how 60 percent of what I taught in the classroom was ethics, common sense, and basic human worth.  When I showed you how the refugee student was beginning to write English and speak in class, you loudly pushed a chair under a desk that was sitting in the aisle and said “These children need to push their chairs in every time they stand.” I had learned that this student had seen her father murdered and had not spoken in school for a year. This was not important to you. What was important was that the superintendent was visiting that week, and appearances were important rather than the actuality of the students’ growth.

This child, from Africa, wore a hooded jacket in the 90 degree heat.  The year before, her first year in the United States, she hardly spoke. I played jump rope at recess with her sometimes with the other children, who often would shun her for her short, Afro-style hair, her worn clothes and too-tight shoes. Eventually she took the hood off, then the jacket, began talking, even cursing. After I left their classroom she would find me in the hall. “When you come back Ms. Schwartz? Tomorrow?  Next day? When? I love you.”

I would have stayed, even for the chance to be near my students and to be able to teach their siblings, who I did see in my new, multiple assignments.  I have appreciated the opportunity to teach at your school but I am finding reasons to find other employment. If I have not mentioned enough, here is a good one:

On January 21, a mother was shot and killed on her way to pick up her daughter, 100 feet away from our school. It was during dismissal, and a group of students screamed for help as they witnessed the murder in the front yard of someone’s home. Students continued to walk home by themselves and with parents, as the woman’s body lay on the ground. Parents picked up their children in their cars and drove by the body as well.

This is not on national news because it happened in what is considered a “bad” neighborhood, where such things are considered commonplace. The school’s students are refugees from Syria and Iraq and Africa, African-American and Latino. The majority of their parents are low-income. There is no parent-teacher organization.  Teachers are afraid to speak up, and parents don’t know or how to speak up themselves.

I was 100 feet away at the front of the school helping dismiss prekindergarten and kindergarten students, even as the staff saw an ambulance, police cars, and a helicopter overhead. I watched as the assistant principal began taking the older students inside the building ten minutes later. I asked a teaching assistant what to do. She asked a supervisor and ten minutes later we also went inside. We didn’t know what had happened until later that night. A teacher told me she was with you in your office when it happened, that someone called you screaming in panic. You simply said, “Call the police” and hung up. You were busy giving a teacher evaluation.
I was given various teaching assignments after you fired me from fourth grade. On one new assignment, which was teaching creative writing, the first graders asked me if I remembered the woman getting shot in the head and how she died. They looked at me as if I was their teacher, that I could provide an answer or a comforting word. When I asked an administrator what I should say, she said, Nothing. The counselors in the library nodded their heads. Those are the facts, they told the children, yes, as the children wept.

Later that day, in the computer lab, which I was asked to babysit, I felt a ball of panic is my chest. Never before had I felt so powerless and controlled. I was a teacher in which students were allowed to walk home around a dead body of a parent. I was a teacher who was encouraged to ignore violence, disability, mental illness, neglect. I was a teacher by name only. I was not a teacher. I began to shake and asked for someone to come cover the lab. You came, Dr. Principal, do you remember? You said, what’s the problem? I told you that I needed to speak to a counselor about the shooting. You raised your eyebrows. Was that disdain or surprise?

Later that day I went to teach two African-American children in a utility closet that teacher assistants used to use as a lunch area. You consider the students to be behavioral problems because of their severe inability to concentrate or pay attention to one thing at a time. One of them had been a former student in my fourth grade class. I called his mother, who said she had mental health issues, and she told me you would not refer her son to get special services.
I can’t work at your school anymore, because I want to be a teacher. I think I am becoming one right now, since I left your building. I was escorted out of the building like a criminal but I felt proud of standing up for I believed in.

Once a child from Iraq asked during a vocabulary lesson, “What does all this matter if someone can just come up to you and break your neck and you die, and then lie in a puddle, dead?”
Without hesitation, I said “It is not about that man that kills you. It is about what you are doing now, every day, as a person, to do your best while you live. We can’t control if that will happen. I want to teach you the word ‘fatigue.’ It is important that you learn it, just for today.”
I did not want to teach them word from the prescribed vocabulary lesson that day. I did not want to teach them a lot of the irrelevant subject matter that had been determined necessary by a set of researchers. I tried anyway, and in turn, I stopped teaching what mattered.
You said that I should change the subject when things about death, murder, violence and are said. I won’t.  I don’t want children in straight lines, silent, sitting in chairs, cleaning up trash and filling in bubbles. I want to be their teacher, to accept their notes on my desk asking for help, to hug them back and smile when they say “I love you, Mom, don’t leave.”
I was escorted out of the building so the children could not see me, or say goodbye. You said they will not remember my name years from now. I don’t care. It is not about names or recognition. The children were always my principal, and today, by resigning, I become their teacher.

Respectfully,
Leslie Contreras Schwartz

Leslie is collecting stories and information from teachers and staff for an upcoming advocacy online magazine. To share your story, email lesliecon@gmail.com.

BIO: Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a writer and teacher. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and two daughters.You can contact her at lesliecon@gmail.com.

Badass Teachers Association

Press Release

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  June 12, 2014

More Information Contact:

Marla Kilfoyle, General Manager, BATs

Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. General Manager, BATs

contact.batmanager@gmail.com

Badass Teachers Association -  http://www.badassteacher.org/

 

The Badass Teachers Association (BATs), an association of over 48,000 teachers, is horrified by the ruling yesterday in the Vergara Trial.  A teacher’s right to due process is a guarantee they can advocate on behalf of children, education, and the community without repercussions. Due process IS NOT A JOB FOR LIFE!  The Vergara Trial was NOT about students' rights or ineffective teachers- it was about billionaires destroying public education and unions. Please see http://dianeravitch.net/.../were-the-vergara-trial.../.  Will firing teachers end the poverty, violence, and trauma in many of our urban schools?  Will firing teachers erase gross racial and class inequalities that exist in education? Will firing teachers redraw the lines of a zip code so that children can attend a school with the resources they need to succeed?

Co-Founder of BATs Mark Naison stated, “A fixation on 'bad teachers' is the surest path to getting rid of the best teachers.” Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis stated today, “Due Process prevents demi-gods, tyrants and extremists from firing a teacher for no valid reason.”

The Badass Teachers Association stands in solidarity with the California Teachers Association, parents, and students who will fight this preposterous ruling.  The judge that eventually overturns this ruling will be hailed a hero to public education, a hero for equality, and a hero for children. 

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