Teaching in Texas

I used to teach at an inner city school in a major Texas city. The children dealt with many difficulties in their home lives. There were students with parents who dealt drugs, were repeat offenders, or were chronically unemployed. Some had single moms who survived any way they could, even when it meant exposing their children to violence and various types of abuse. Child Protective services was in contact with many families, however it usually took years of repeated complaints to get a child removed from a home.

The teachers were also a mixed lot. Among the caring, dedicated teachers were angry burnouts, the uninspired, the emotionally uninvolved. Many of the more competent teachers lived in daily fear of job loss, while others who should have been fired were treated to all sorts of perks. They came to work when they pleased (up to 2 hours late), left early, took long lunches. All their absences were covered by aides provided by the principal. They were treated to cozy chats, snacks, and impunity for their often illegal acts. These teachers used fear and intimidation as classroom management methods. One had a habit of painfully grabbing and pinching the ears of students, one put them up against the wall with their noses pressed against the sheetrock, another was seen actually picking up and tossing first graders into the classroom. Her favorites kept order in the manner they pleased, as long as they produced high test scores at the end of the year.

The teaching style insisted upon by the principal endorsed all these actions against children. Her main goal was to walk down the halls of a completely silent school. If there was noise from a classroom, it meant that the teacher had lost control, and that those students were not learning. Thus the teacher’s job was at hourly risk if any sound or activity came to the principal’s attention. She ruled with the iron fist of an unchallenged dictator, as long TAKS scores were high. Protests and complaints were useless and risked jobs. A teacher's union poll listed her as one of the district’s worst principals, which was vindicating to read, but did not produce change.

I walked into to this unknowing, idealistic, and full of creative ideas. I was hired along with two others to replace those whose test scores had not measured up. At the orientation meeting I met my mentor, a favorite of the principal. She wasted no time telling me how angry she was to have been called in a day early to deal with me, that she had no intention of helping me in any way, and that she was leaving as soon as the catered luncheon was over. I never saw her again except at staff meetings or when we passed in the hall. She walked past me each time as if she had never seen me before. My co-workers advised me that protest was pointless.

Another new teacher was placed in the classroom next to mine, and I survived my first few months mostly because of her ineptitude. She was inexperienced and judged poorly, with little sense of where she was or who she was dealing with. She enthusiastically brought all sorts of things to enrich her classroom; a puppet theater, costumes, finger paints, music, nerf balls and other play equipment. She had everything in place for the first day. The students walked in and chaos descended. I could hear the noise through the shared wall. The principal was immediately notified by her network of spies. She descended, and rang the emergency bell three times, an in-school 911 signal. The assistant principal and all three secretaries responded to restore order.

This was how Ms. Craft began the school year, and her situation never improved. She was singled out for random, almost hourly, administrative visits. If a child was up or making noise, she was reprimanded and written up. The principal repeatedly tried to force Ms. Craft to resign, but Ms. Craft refused. She knew the principal’s teaching philosophy was fundamentally wrong, and she needed the job. A stalemate was reached. The principal moved Ms. Craft from one grade level to another, ultimately placing her in 5th grade, where her students would face an array of standardized tests over a number of subjects. Although she was eventually accepted by both students and parents, her fate was sealed. When end of year test scores were reported, not all Ms. Craft's students passed.She had been their teacher for only a few months, however she was blamed for all failures, but received none of the credit for the successes. I later overheard the principal telling the office staff to take steps to insure that Ms. Craft would “never teach in Texas again”.

Thanks to Ms. Craft, I was mostly ignored, except for a few highly unpleasant visits of inspection. I was left to find my own way, which i did. Through sheer luck, the principal usually seemed to appear at a moment of total calm, although I did get called to the office for minor offences. Once I was grilled for 30 minutes because a student “touched his head” while I was reading my class a book. Due to various staff turnovers, I was moved to pre-kindergarten in late November. This change was to my enormous relief. I was then exempted from most intense scrutiny, as my students were too young for testing.

Retribution eventually caught up with the principal and her favorites. The situation at the school had deteriorated to the point where it drew the attention of parents, notified by unhappy children. When many repeated complaints about the abusive teachers were ineffective, some began their own spying program. The ear grabber was seen by a grandmother who arrived early for dismissal and peered through the glass door panel. One particularly angry morning the teacher who threw children into the classroom was witnessed doing so by a group of parents . The principal refused to make changes, so the parents simply withdrew their children and placed them in one of two neighboring schools. Word got around, and enrollment dropped off. There was talk of the school being closed.

My classroom was full, as were the other early childhood classrooms. Positive word had gotten around too. Mostly free from harassment, we were able to allow our students the freedom they needed to learn. However, this was not enough to save the principal’s job. At the end of my second year the principal was moved to a desk job until her contract expired. A new principal was brought in. Informed of the situation by the assistant principal, he cleaned house. In the end, justice was served.

I had left, thinking that any other teaching job had to be an improvement. I was wrong, but that is another story.