Wednesday, November 12, 2014

One New York teacher's resignation letter will break your heart and frighten you for the future of education in America.

Courtesy of Democratic Underground: 

Mr. Casey Barduhn, Superintendent 
Westhill Central School District 
400 Walberta Park Road 
Syracuse, New York 13219 

Dear Mr. Barduhn and Board of Education Members: 

It is with the deepest regret that I must retire at the close of this school year, ending my more than twenty-seven years of service at Westhill on June 30, under the provisions of the 2012-15 contract. I assume that I will be eligible for any local or state incentives that may be offered prior to my date of actual retirement and I trust that I may return to the high school at some point as a substitute teacher. 

As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and educators on the planet. 

I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill. 

A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale. The repercussions of these ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable in our careers and in the education of our children? 

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom. Teacher planning time has also now been so greatly eroded by a constant need to “prove up” our worth to the tyranny of APPR (through the submission of plans, materials and “artifacts” from our teaching) that there is little time for us to carefully critique student work, engage in informal intellectual discussions with our students and colleagues, or conduct research and seek personal improvement through independent study. We have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven. Process has become our most important product, to twist a phrase from corporate America, which seems doubly appropriate to this case. 

After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered. 

For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, “Words Matter” and “Ideas Matter”. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean. 

Sincerely and with regret, 
Gerald J. Conti 
Social Studies Department Leader 

The conservatives have wanted for years to destroy public education in this country, but I never thought they could pull it off as long as we remained vigilant.

I am sad to see that they are winning. 

24 comments:

  1. Hmm. This is one I'm not ready to hang on one side of the aisle or the other.

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    1. Anonymous4:34 AM

      Oh yes you can. This is totally from the RWNJ starting with Texas wanting to remove Thomas Jefferson from the history textbooks because he wasn't supportive of church AND state. True story. You haven't been paying attention. Then there is the RWNJ determination to privatize education and support vouchers. Don't forget the RWNJ governors who illegally give state funds to religious schools. Yep, all true. Maybe you have to be a teacher to know all this is going on, but believe me it is all true.

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    2. Anonymous7:59 AM

      This scene is happening now in the Jefferson County School District in Colorado. My sister teaches as do family friends. What this teacher said in their letter has been the topic of discussion in my family for quite a while.

      Not that the teacher in the letter needs my approval but I totally second their belief that education left them, and not the other way around.

      Connie

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    3. You can hang it on the right as sure as you can breathe. Started with GWB saying ketchup could be the "daily vegetable" for school lunches while he was governor of Texas. It only went downhill. Now, the U.S. spends 30 billion annually on "defense"...but only 7-8 billion on education. And the next two generations are going to suffer such that "Idiocracy" may well become a reality.

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  2. Anonymous3:23 AM

    All this is a feature, not a bug. Dumb down the population to keep them simple and stupid, easier to manipulate and scare the shit out of them as well.

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  3. Anonymous4:30 AM

    I have taught for over 40 years, and I feel the exact same way he does. I often ask when given bureaucratic task after bureaucratic task, "When do I get to teach?" I knew I had reached the tipping point when I advised a student against going into teaching. People need t.o speak out vehemently against the growing stupidity in this country lest stupid becomes a juggernaut

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    1. Anonymous5:43 PM

      I work as support staff in an elementary school. About 3 or 4 years ago I counted the days my students had some sort of testing. I did NOT count classroom testing to measure progress in the curriculum. I only counted state testing, district benchmark testing, state field testing (for future state tests), and revealuation testing for IEPs. The number of days they were being tested totaled almost 30.

      Fortunately, it has been reduced substantially since then, but far too much time is still being spent to test children on material the teachers have no time to actually teach them.

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  4. The two things that I have always felt did a great disservice to education in this country are; 1) The fact that members of any school board are not required to know anything at all about the Education field, let alone, have one, and; 2) The giving over of power, to such a large degree, to PTAs. Just what we didn't need. Giving the power to decide how teaching is done to fawning, permissive parents as to how their grubby little monsters have to be treated, and taught.
    Sorry about the ire, but it just burns me up.

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    1. Anonymous5:49 PM

      What's really frightening is the newest movement that allows parents to take over control of schools they determine are not performing up to standards. They get to decide if and when they assume control, and then they make all the decisions. There are no criteria for which parents are deemed 'qualified' to make those decisions.

      If you've ever spent any time at school events (and who hasn't?) you'll probably recall that the loudest and pushiest parents are often the ones who are the most clueless about what is really necessary to effectively educate children.

      Kind of like how the people making all the noise about education reform (including our Secretary of Education) have spent little or no time actually TEACHING!

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  5. Anonymous7:34 AM

    There has been a concerted effort by the religious right over the past 20+ years to get their people into grassroots positions like school board posts. My Colorado Springs church in the late 80s-early 90s talked openly about this--"the liberals don't care enough to vote for these spots, so we all turn out to vote our people in." Those running did not necessarily support public education and often sent their own children to private schools (and then used disingenuous slogans like "I want to help all children have access to the quality of education my children received").

    They have a VERY effective network of churches and religious organizations who promote their agendas and mobilize voters. Liberals simply don't have any comparable grassroots, well-organized and well-funded system of reaching people. Voter suppression and Koch money surely played a powerful role in the outcome of the last election, but don't underestimate the conservative churches and organizations like Focus on the Family.

    Any discussion of why so many people vote against their own best interests must take into account the way churches communicate to, motivate, and evoke guilt in their members. The equation is simple: Abortion is murder, so if you vote for a candidate who supports abortion, you are voting for a murderer. Nothing else matters; nothing is more important. We can worry about social programs and supporting those children and mothers later; the first order of business is to stop the "holocaust" (they love that term). Opposing abortion is such an integral part of their worldview that all discussion ends there, and the Kochs et al have very effectively attached anti-abortion to a slew of other positions--pro-guns, pro-war, pro-private industry, anti-gay rights, anti-public education, anti-government assistance, anti-environment. So you can have a discussion with an evangelical in which you convince them that fracking will ruin the environment, poison streams, lead to increased risks of cancer, etc., and they say, "Yes, I agree with everything you're saying...but the anti-fracking candidate supports abortion, and I can't in good conscience vote for someone who thinks killing babies is okay." What about the babies who are poisoned from the fracking? "Well, do we KNOW that will happen?" they ask. "Is the scientific proof clear? Because there might be room for interpretation there, but we KNOW abortion is murder." Believe me, I have had this conversation MANY times.

    Liberals need to find a way to develop and motivate the same grassroots activism the conservatives have done so successfully through churches. There certainly are coalitions of atheists, freethinkers, skeptics, and liberals of all faiths who are working together to do this, and liberal Christians are, I think, becoming more adamant about refusing to let the neocons appropriate their name and voice. (The United Church of Christ, for example, has filed a lawsuit against the state of NC, claiming that their prohibition on performing same-sex marriages violates pastors' religious freedom.)

    I don't think people who haven't lived in an evangelical church or community understand just how powerful and pervasive the church influence is. Liberals have to develop similar methods of reaching people and convincing them to run for and vote even in local, school-board-level elections. And with all due respect, I know many people here are atheists and nastily dismissive of religion, but if Pentecostals and Calvinists and Catholics can unite to vote in the GW Bushes of the world, don't you think it's worth setting aside your condescension and working with people who don't share your religious beliefs but do believe in the same platforms and candidates?

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    1. Anonymous8:02 AM

      Politics aside I've never watched such effective communication as the Church Lady Phone Tree (TM). The NSA could learn a think or two from those folks. :D

      Connie

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    2. Anonymous8:10 AM

      7:34 : you spoke from my heart. Thank you.

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    3. Anonymous8:53 AM

      7:34 here...I rushed through the end of my comment because I was late to a meeting. My last sentence should have read "don't share your lack of religious beliefs." Omission of "lack of" may have been shades of my evangelical upbringing slipping through--I've been out for 20 years, but I still have to be vigilant because these weird ideas and prejudices occasionally slide out from hidden corners of my brain. I was raised to regard atheism as a religion, so even though I now realize it isn't, when I get in a hurry I forget to be as careful linguistically as I know I need to be.

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    4. Anonymous9:37 AM

      These Republican single issue voters who have been brainwashed by religion to do the bidding of their corporate overlords regardless of the impact on their personal lives (see fracking as an example). They get their marching orders from the church or conservative news or PACs and they vote in lockstep even if it means lower wages, no insurance and zero social safety net. Simply said, they put on the blinders and never take them off, much to the delight of those who rule them.

      Liberals and Progressives simply don't think like this. We aren't brainwashed thus we rarely vote in lockstep for a platform that is against our best interests. We study the candidates and the issues and make informed decisions, and sometimes we are all over the map. It's because we exercise free will, something the conservatives with their "group think" will never understand, that we aren't as powerful a force as the "collective" that is the Evangelical Conservative Right Wing.

      Comparing the voting style and motivation of Progressives to Evangelical Conservatives is like comparing trees to rocks, there simply is no crossover in that particular Venn diagram.

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    5. Anonymous6:00 PM

      7:34 -
      And that is why local elections are as important, if not more so, than national elections. The takeover has started at the local level where no one was paying attention.

      The first time I read about the Seven Mountains dominionism, I was shocked at how much progress they've made towards controlling various aspects of our society.

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  6. I am sensing some dissonance. Common Core is usually decried by the right-wing, not liberals. The real problem with public teachers (at least in my state of Wisconsin) is our governor has cut funding so badly and pitted school administrators against teachers. In Wisconsin, teaching is now a profession where more years of experience actually creates job instability... short-sighted school boards and admins will gladly hire a teacher out of college for $29K ad get replace someone with 20+ years experience who is earning a whole $45K. Consequently, no one wants to be a teacher anymore.

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    1. Anonymous8:41 AM

      And I bet the administrators making those calls about salary are pulling down six figures themselves.

      My mom taught at a "Christian" school for 25+ years and had the exact experience you're describing, as have at least two other women I know of at Christian schools in other states. Teachers who had reached a certain number of years and pay grade were let go for stupid reasons (my mom's was that students weren't having enough fun in her class--not even kidding), in favor of young teachers just out of school, almost always females who planned to teach for a couple years and then have babies and be SAHMs, at which point they could be replaced cheaply with another crop of fresh graduates. When my dad insisted on filing an EEOC complaint, the school lied and produced false documentation.

      My mom had always said, with bitter martyrdom, that she would have had a better and more lucrative career if she had chosen to work at a public school. After she was fired from the xian school, she did work at a public school for a few years until she was sacrificed to funding cuts. She would agree with everything you are saying, especially about the administrators being pitted against the teachers.

      From pre-K through 12th grade, I went to the Christian school that later fired my mom. I don't know enough about Common Core to have an opinion on it per se, but I do think there need to be educational standards and concepts that everyone has to teach. Our American history class was a semester of why the Civil War should never have happened (hint: the slave owners were going to free the slaves eventually anyway, and in the meantime, they were happy, healthy, and well-cared-for). Half of our American lit book was sermons from revivalist preachers no one has ever heard of (it was published by A Beka, a major Christian school publisher--Wonkette did a pretty scathing series on their books). I was so unprepared when i started college that I wanted my parents to sue the high school for breach of contract, but Kool-aid runs in their veins.

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    2. Anonymous6:18 PM

      The problem is not so much with the Common Core itself, which is a set of common standards all students are expected to achieve, although there are certainly a lot of changes and improvements that need to be made. There are parts of the CC that are simply developmentally inappropriate, especially in the primary grades.

      The big trouble, however, is in the curricula that are created by the states to teach those standards.

      Here in NY state, the EngageNY curriculum on the elementary level is sooo developmentally inappropriate in terms of the material presented, how the material is taught, and how the topics are structured and scaffolded.

      I've worked in a 5th and 6th grade classroom in the last 2 years. The math curriculum has many mistakes (in both the instructional AND testing materials), tests students on skills that are scheduled for instruction later in the year, teaches multiple methods for operations but never gives enough time for the students to master any one of them before moving on, switches topics and returns to topics in an arbitrary order which produces even more confusion, and completely skips some critical primary skills that will prevent students from learning higher level skills later on.

      My district is so fed up with EngageNY that it is developing its own curriculum over the next couple of years, based directly on the Common Core standards, but allowing TEACHERS to create the curriculum instead of researchers and publishing companies.

      Of course, in the meantime, teachers are being evaluated on extremely flawed curricula, using test scores that do not reflect the material actually taught that year.

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  7. Anonymous8:25 AM

    My son called me from the small, excellent college he was attending to tell me he was thinking of exploring pre-law. My response was "that's fine, but no son of mine is going to be a lawyer."

    Months passed and he called again. "Mom, a drug company is recruiting me hard to be a pharmaceutical rep."

    "No son of mine is going to be a pill-pusher."

    He nearly burst my heart with pride the day he called to tell me he decided to be an educator. That's exactly what i wanted for my grown children: for them to be givers and not takers.

    That son has been teaching history and math at a large high school in the South for five years. He has been declared a hero at that school for producing the highest math scores ever achieved by them in standardized testing. He's obsessed with teaching his students the world's history with an eye towards producing tomorrow's leaders (think: stopping Hitler). Just like Mr. Conti, he's always looking for ways to weave real life into student life.

    I'm mostly proud of him for fighting the good fight even though he is impeded by exactly the things deflating Mr. Conti's spirit. But, my son is only 30 years old... how long can he hold strong?

    He's now a Ed.D and on his way to a Ph.D because he knows it's his generation who must fix education's process in America and he needs credibility. As i've proclaimed at least a million times at sporting events: GO NATHAN!

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  8. Anonymous9:10 AM

    I just forwarded this to my son and daughter-in-law, both of whom teach in the Anchorage School District and are increasingly discouraged for many of the reasons stated in this letter. I want them to know it's a national scourge and they are not alone. Truly sad.

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  9. Anonymous2:58 PM

    I know many teachers are discouraged, because I work in a middle school. But I must fervently disagree that the Common Core is "shallow and generic". Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not "dumbing down" schoolchildren; it will smarten them up. Why? Because Common Core is a set of standards that are skills based, not content-based. That means children are learning thinking skills which can be applied to all endeavors, not just the particular ones formerly taught. For instance, in reading, kids learn the skills necessary to analyze any piece of literature, not just read the couple of books that are on the syllabus for that year and answer comprehension questions. And the CC requires constant justification for student responses using facts and evidence-that will be a game changer, when people begin to understand that when people (Republicans) just make stuff up,they should be laughed out of the room. Please, please, please don't be fooled by unfounded criticism of the CC. As a fervent Democrat and patriot, I'm beginning to believe CC may be our only hope for the future. We cannot continue as a nation with the levels of stupidity that pervade our society. Please, please, please, do not confuse CC with the other "reforms" that are also being implemented-unfair teacher evaluations (which are the real things causing morale to plummet) or even the CC state test, which is separate from the standards themselves. Read the standards for yourself at http://www.corestandards.org/ . Teachers who aren't already ready to retire (you'll notice that most of these kinds of letters come from long-time teachers) are energized and doing some amazing, creative, disciplined thinking about how to teach with these new standards. Transitions are extrememly difficult, and lots of folks just aren't willing or able to do the necessary heavy lifting to make things change, but if we stick with these standards, we'll begin to see smarter citizens, voters, and journalists.

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    1. Anonymous6:29 PM

      I agree that there is a lot of confusion about the difference between the 1) CC standards and 2) how they are being implemented.

      However, having had some experience with the CC on the elementary level, there seems to be a consensus among many of the teachers in my district that a lot of the standards themselves are developmentally inappropriate for primary students. Because there is so much emphasis on analysis, explanation, and justification, I suspect they are much more appropriate for students on the middle school level.

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  10. Anita Winecooler6:37 PM

    I sent this to my Sister, who's found herself in the same circumstance in the great state of New Jersey, where the Governor's shrinking and traffic on bridges is heavier. She's done everything "right" while getting her own education, and she's selflessly volunteered her time and money to buy supplies, food, and coats for her students,
    The administrators count the children and think "more money" the teachers count the kids and think "What can I do to help them learn?". How can one learn when they're lugging 30 lbs of books, getting tested and tested and tested on everything but what they're learning? She lovingly calls them "Her kids", and she genuinely cares to the point she's made meaningful relationships with their parents, aunts and uncles.
    She's been struggling, wanting to change careers, but being an educator is in her blood. I think writing a letter like this would honestly be too much to bear, but I hope she does and vents these feelings because she deserves so much more respect. And another part of me feels she'd feel guilty for abandoning "her kids".
    We need to seriously re evaluate what we're asking teachers to do, and we need to respect their careers and reward their hard work.

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  11. Our public schools were designed to do exactly that; provide the minimum education to factory and assembly line workers.

    The right must be so proud. They've achieved their objective.

    They got their hands on the money and destroyed unions, teachers and public education.

    Now they'll turn their attention back to that last in un reachable pot of tax dollars: social security.

    You just watch.

    I am so glad I am retiring in June.

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