A Word If You Please, Governor Christie
We are a month into the 2016-2017 school year in New Jersey. Public school children across the Garden State have met their new teachers and learned the expectations for the year. My teacher friends (many of whom are former students) have set up their classrooms, welcomed their students, and begun the long process of getting to know the young people in their care and helping them learn. In many of these schools, veteran teachers have welcomed student teachers as well, slowly giving them more responsibility as they begin the most intensive part of their preparation to become licensed teachers themselves. After years of studying both pedagogy and content, of combining that knowledge in planning for both learning and assessment of learning, and of demonstrating their combined skills in supervised field placements, these young people are ready to take the final steps on their journeys.
In my own classes, I have had the great pleasure of welcoming the Class of 2020 to their first class in our teacher preparation program. I have to be honest: after 23 years of teaching at every level from seventh grade to graduate school classes, this is my favorite time of any year. My students are both excited and nervous, and they are only just beginning to learn what it means to become a teacher. After thousands and thousands of hours of watching teachers teach, they have a great deal to learn about what goes into that work that they never saw, and they will have to learn how to translate their passion for their content and for learning into effective teaching. They also happen to be great people, a conclusion I draw basically every year. My students are bright, passionate, diligent, incredibly hard working, selfless, and they are giving up many of the traditional distractions of college life for their chosen profession. This time with us in university based teacher preparation is really a gift. Sandwiched between their thirteen years in K-12 classrooms and their future decades of work in a profession of millions, we have four short years to help them get their career journey off to a great start.
So I really have to ask you, Governor Christie: Exactly from where do you think our future teachers are going to come?
This is no idle question at this point. Concerns about the teacher pipeline have been brewing for some time, and while the phenomenon is complex, there is also no doubt that we’ve made it much harder for young people to imagine a positive future as a teacher:
How shocking that there’s a teacher shortage in a country whose politics now revolves around bashing teachersmobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/us/…
And we have to admit that Governor Chris Christie has been a leader in this trend since he began his time in office. Chris Christie ran for office promising teachersto leaves their pensions alone, a promise he swiftly broke with a pension reform bill that he has steadfastly refused to fund – even as he turned the state’s pension fund over to Wall Street buddies who tripled fees without improving returns. Governor Christie slashed school aid and has never fully restored it, leaving districts underfunded according to the state’s own school aid law.
While financial esoterica may escape the attention of today’s school children –although the cumulative impact of $6 billion of lost funding surely has an impact– Governor Christie’s continued and vicious attacks on the Garden State’s teachers is impossible to ignore. Governor Christie plainly hates the New Jersey Education Association, having opened his failed candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination by saying NJEA needs to be “punched in the face,” but the governor takes that hatred out in public on any teacher who dares to stand up for her profession while he slathers contempt upon the state’s schools and teachers. Governor Christie has accused the state’s teachers of using their students like “drug mules” for a civics lesson, and he has whined that the NJEA claimed that he hates children for a fairly mild billboard:
He has screamed at a teacher in public for daring to question him:A Word If You Please, Governor Christie | Daniel Katz, Ph.D.:
