i feel that i can think clearly again
for the first time in a hen's age
i have no impending financial doom thoughts
blackly polluting the free flow of ideas
today i think that when i get to LA i should be a poker dealer
im going to find the school in the neighborhood today
sign up
learn a new trade
find a job dealing poker in an exciting new city
but until then i need to look for work
just work
work which utilizes my years of experiences in the school district
so i wrote a helpful little letter
and sent it to the newspaper
i think ill write a new letter/article/query letter every day
one or two
just as long as the ideas are flowing, why the hell not share my alleged genius
heres the letter
Oh how I miss the lovely, warm blanket of union work, where a person employed by the school district of can tell the incoming CEO that “that’s not my job” when asked why something obvious wasn’t being done. And she or he was probably spot on. Trust me the contracts the union and the district go to battle on every five years or so are scutinized to the last comma. Jobs in the 2.3 billion dollar behemoth are intricately described in the contracts, down to the minute and you know why? Because bad bosses abused the public servants that take it upon themselves to sit in rooms with 30 disinterested hostages for six hours a day. If you want teachy-poo to stay a minute longer than that you had better be prepared to pay 25 bucks an hour. And if you pay one for it you have to pay them all. Every decision has to be the fairest and wisest of all or they will grieve you and win. All because of the abuses of the past. All because a few dozen poor administrators wronged someone who kept more accurate records than them. Teachers are all about record keeping. Justice was done. Everything was and is written in contractual stone.
So the incoming CEO is facing the same daunting task that has faced the last few reformers. Philly is a tough town. Full of lawyers and people who know them. The schools are in the shape they are in because so much that needs to be done work is someone else’s job. And there are only three of them in the union for the whole school district. And they have work orders for the next six months and are paid by the hour and in no hurry to finish quickly. There is no incentive in it.
An illustrative example occured in my last school when the children got a hold of the master key and had free access to every room in the building for months on end. Teachers who previously could lock their door and find a quiet moment amid the chaos would have a visitor. Hear the key in the lock, and there’s one of the largest and cleverest of the work avoiders in the school , who then leaves because it’s hard to steal from someone with a cell phone in her hand with the 9 and one one already dialed who is screaming at you.
Teacher goes to administration, claiming a very real safety issue. Admin blames “teachers” for losing the master key. Which was only issued to trusted members of the inner circle, who, instead of being bothered to get up off their comfy leather thrones to unlock doors a few times a day, made copies for cronies and led to the situation at the school. A situation that persisted for months. And in the ultimate slap in the face, when the teacher reported the incident to admin, and the admin response was, “are you sure the door was locked?” followed by “when we searched him and he didn’t have it” and that was the end of that.
A deadly combination, inadequate administrators with ironclad contracts and ultimate deniability. A principal can destroy a school and be transferred to carry on their incompetency in another and another because it can always be blamed on the teachers. Who can then blame the students parents, tv, and a drug culture and it’s all a very tidy little blame game. It’s not my job is the mantra of the school district.
The schools are in the business of serving the children and meeting their needs This is not being done. But there are school that work. That is undeniable. Safe havens staffed with veterans. I watched a poor administration gut a school by not repecting the veteran teachers there and every year there were less and less as they worked their contacts in the district they all found better jobs elsewhere. These were advocates for the neediest children, teaching in the heart of north Philadelphia, doing heroic public service and becoming so fed up with horrible administrators that it became a question of their own sanity. I talked to them about their heart wrenching decision to abandon children they had spent a decades serving. It was their last resort and quite a painful decision.
So, maybe there needs to be some sort of oversight when there is a flood of transfer requests from a particular school. No one wants to quit and start over. Teaching is about being a legacy and a part of a community and getting to know the families. A transfer request is a warning sign of a failing school.
The contracts are the way they are and that is the cost of doing business in this modern age of ours. So how do you fix it? School by school. And that can’t be done in some brand new office building downtown. Schools are fixed when caring adults interact with, and inspire children. If they aren’t inspired by the curriculum, you had better find something they like about their school, some point of pride, or you will be fighting the impossible fight. So issue a challenge. If Masterman is the flagship school, the envy of the system, the place mayors and politicians daughters all go to, then open it up.
Inspire 25 percent of the teachers there to make another place more like Masterman. Inspire them with cash is you have to. Replace them with rookie teachers so that they can get the feeling of what a great school is like for a year or two, then send them out the door to make mini-Mastermans all over the city.
I know the people at Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis would love to have a lot more scholastic tennis teams in the city. I bet Masterman has soap in the bathrooms. I am sure that the dedicated and public spirited, children first, professionals who are serving the future by teaching, would have no problem being part of the teaching revolution as I humbly suggest. Otherwise we have a very sad two teired public educational systems and that’s not just sad, that’s illegal.
Harry Baker
Harry is starting his own charter school someday, and was forcefully retired from the Philadelphia School System because he had a really bad day. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good ideas. He will share his ideas with anybody at anytime and loves realistic discussions about school reform. Someday he’d like to be paid for ideas, but he doesn’t have the “credentials”. bakeowski@yahoo.com