NC teachers being ‘voluntarily exploited’
Former Wake County teacher of the year Angela Scioli recently lacked money to buy her own groceries. “In a strange way, I was glad for the experience. It’s a gift if it helps me understand what my kids face.” PHOTOS BY CHRIS FOWLER
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The level of commitment, professionalism and selfless dedication demonstrated daily by heroes like NaShonda Cooke, Angela Scioli, Brendan Fetters and the other teachers they represent and inspire can barely be comprehended. They instruct with generosity, patience and passion. They lift up children who face our society’s most impenetrable barriers. They push back against unrelenting tides – unwilling to surrender, or retreat, in what might be life’s greatest mission. They move beyond the classroom into troubled and threatened communities – looking our boldest problems in the face, rather than turning from them like the rest of us do.
They do all this, too often, without real compensation, support and appreciation – at least appreciation beyond the parents and students who worship them. They work for basic salaries that embarrass both them and North Carolina, in an education system dramatically stacked against the poor children to whom they have dedicated their lives. They are teachers who, as Jesse Jackson used to say, “teach because they can’t help it.”
I think Cooke, Scioli and Fetters knew what they were signing up for. This path has never been strewn with rose petals. I know they didn’t expect, however, to be officially derided for their efforts. “The elephant in the room,” Fetters explains, “is the constant claim that we are failing our students.”
The politicians who accuse them, of course, never go to their schools, never talk to the teachers. They do, though, “take away our teaching assistants, run good teachers off to other states, give us bigger classes, cut our budgets and disparage our schools,” Cooke says.
It’s not lost on teachers of high-poverty children that all the current political energy is directed toward vouchers and charter schools, draining already inadequate resources. They “evaluate us on matters outside of our control,” Cooke says, “pronounce us broken, and then make it tougher to do our work.”
Cooke’s own daughter attends one of the high-poverty Durham schools receiving an F on the state’s new scorecard. “I know the greatness of what they do in that school. I’d never move her,” Cooke says. She gets angry when her daughter’s teachers are maligned by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
It’s one thing, I suppose, to wage war on public education. It’s another to shamelessly defame in the process.
To do her job with commitment, oddly, Angie Scioli has to be willing to work for free at her Wake County high school. That’s hardly the American way. “We lost our longevity pay this year. I would have gotten $2,000 in June,” she says. But last month, master’s degree, national board certification and past recognition as Wake County’s teacher of the year notwithstanding, she didn’t have the money to go to the grocery store. She is 44 and has been teaching in Raleigh for over two decades.
“In a strange way, I was glad for the experience,” Scioli says. She was able to see, more directly, what her high-poverty students live with every day. “It’s a gift if it helps me understand what my kids face,” she told me. But, “I’m counter-cultural, you won’t findNC teachers being ‘voluntarily exploited’ | News & Observer: