A teacher’s tale: Joy, tragedy and weirdness
A new book from a retired teacher argues data-driven policies have created an education mess
(Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from A Teacher’s Tale, a new book chronicling author John Thompson’s experiences teaching in inner-city Oklahoma City Public Schools. The portion reproduced here is the book’s introduction, which has been slightly edited for length and style.)
I was never a hat-snatcher. I did not believe in grabbing students’ contraband, whether it was hats, cell phones, marijuana, or gambling proceeds. So how did I find myself firmly holding half of a gang leader’s hat, ignoring the teenager’s threatening look?
This standoff occurred in the library hallway, as I organized about 20 of my class’s 70 students for checking out textbooks. I had approached several disruptive students with a teacher’s typical phrase, “hats please.” Hats were removed, as I addressed another group causing a disruption. I repeated, “hats please” to those who had put their caps back on, when I heard a loud scuffle near the library door. Immediately in front of me, I saw the “gang banger” with a heavyweight championship boxer’s physique and a cap back on his head. I took it from him, leaving us both in a standoff.
It made no sense to distribute books in such a tense situation, but what was the alternative? The 2006 school year had just begun, and I was assigned 247 students. I had experienced my share of challenging classes in the past and won them over. This year, however, my class schedule was overwhelming; it was the same for every other teacher at John Marshall High School in Oklahoma City.
Should I just hold recess or should I attempt to teach? When our school’s teachers found themselves in such a mess, they often chose extended recess, and many of my colleagues had again done so, contributing even more to the anarchy throughout the school. Giving up on instruction for an unknown time flew against all of my instincts. Intimidating students was not consistent with my temperament, either. Leadership alone would not be enough to settle this class down. I had to make it clear that I was in charge, and to do so I had to approach the crowd with a mindset that I did not enjoy.
Ignoring the student who was glaring down on me, I instructed students to enter the library in groups and obey the librarian. A principal eventually appeared. As opposed to a teacher, she could bluff, “I’m on my last nerve. Do you want me to send you home for the year?”
This episode encapsulates many of the trends that have complicated the challenge of improving poor schools. Teachers nationwide are expected to educate, discipline, protect, mentor, and evaluate students and report on successes, achievements, and progress within a system of often-shrinking resources. Politicians, policymakers, administrators, and parents demand results—quality that can be translated into measured outcomes. This meant that our activities in the classroom to educate children needed to be reflected in specific numbers—higher rates of graduation, better scores on standardized tests, every student college-ready and marked for success in the competitive global marketplace.
Like so many other districts across the country, ours had adopted a new data-driven formula for determining how many teachers should be assigned to each school. District policymakers had no way of knowing how many of our students, who had endured so much trauma, were different from most low-income students. The central office had no way of knowing the difference between children of situational poverty caused by divorce, an illness, or the temporary loss of a parent’s job, and generational or extreme poverty. Even worse, the district embraced data-driven policymaking before creating a system where humans could override policies that the numbers suggested might be a good idea, but that would not be adequate when all of the complicated realities were considered.
Joy, tragedy and weirdness
In 2006, John Marshall High School was 84 percent low-income and 87 percent black, hispanic, and American Indian, with a quarter of the student body requiring special education services. The proliferation of school choice, a movement designed to give parents options to select alternative schools when their local public institutions were failing, had, in fact, created more intense concentrations of generational poverty in urban schools. From the smaller cities like Oklahoma City and Kansas City to industrial metropolises like Baltimore and Philadelphia, school districts had reached a tipping point, a fragile and teetering position bordering on complete meltdown.
(David Bierschank)
And yet we teachers keep coming back, year after year, fueled by another surge of optimism. A Teacher’s Tale is for young people who look to the profession as a career choice that offers the opportunity to contribute, to make a difference in the world, one student at a time. A Teacher’s Tale is for you—the teacher who has—or will—land up in this inexplicable situation, faced with pressure to achieve measurable outcomes of student learning on the one hand, and violence and chaos in the hallways and classrooms on the other.
The adrenalin rush of teaching comes from the combination of joy, tragedy, and, simply put, weirdness, and the myriad ways that these ups and downs keep on coming. There is no other profession that provides that kind of rollercoaster thrill. Before the morning bell, I would sip coffee, chat, joke, pass out newspapers, magazines, flowers, and fruit to students at John Marshall. The instant the announcements were over, I completely threw myself into instruction. I would forget about my cup of coffee and what craziness might await around the corner. I’d be there one-hundred percent for my students.
My own story of “a teacher’s tale” is first offered as an introductory handbook for my A teacher's tale: Joy, tragedy and weirdness - NonDoc: