FIRST PERSON - A REAL EDUCATION: When a Reporter Becomes a Teacher, She Learns Something

FIRST PERSON - A REAL EDUCATION:

When a Reporter Becomes a Teacher, She Learns Something

One sunny July morning in 1999, on a whim, I called the Philadelphia School district and made an appointment with a recruiter. I thought of myself as a reporter, but I was looking for a job. Like many cities suffering from a teacher shortage, Philadelphia still needed 1,200 teachers and was taking almost anyone with a college degree. I had written hundreds of stories about education and always harbored an interest in teaching. Still, I'd never considered actually doing it, until then. "We need you more than you need us," the recruiter said. He gave me a folder of paperwork including a background check for the state police, and there wasn't much more involved.

I had mixed feelings. My colleagues at The Philadelphia Inquirer -- we were finishing a two-year reporting program there -- were heading to staff positions at papers like the Orlando Sentinel and the Raleigh News & Observer. I didn't want to throw away the journalism career I'd worked hard for since my college newspaper days. I'd interned unpaid through college and reported for a year from Chile, primarily for AP/Dow Jones. When I returned, the Inquirer hired me as one of its "two-year correspondents" to cover southern Chester County, Pennsylvania, a beat that included three school districts, twenty-seven townships, and a mushroom industry that employed 10,000 Mexican immigrants. I gravitated to school stories out of interest and a sense that they were important. From my suburban outpost, I made page one occasionally by regionalizing a story on subjects like revolving-door principals or questionable strategies to raise test scores. But I always felt uncertain about my stories about schools, as though I were guessing at what was really happening inside them.

When the two years ended, I interviewed for a staff position on the Inquirer's city education desk, but the beat went to an education reporter with a decade of experience. Meanwhile, my affection for newspapers was waning; there had been a lot of deflating news about corporate ownership and declining circulation. At age twenty-five, I was already questioning if newspaper journalism could be the vehicle for change I wanted it to be. I was eager to make a difference.

So, when I saw the article about the teacher shortage I got excited. If I taught for a year I would be able to see the real issues firsthand. I could have an effect on education in a way I wasn't having with journalism. And I wasn't throwing away my career, I reasoned, because if I wanted to come back to newspapers, I would be an even stronger education reporter. I decided to do it. Six weeks later, I stepped into my story.

My school was Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School, a 100-year-old stone building in The Badlands, the nickname for a heroin-ravaged Puerto Rican neighborhood in North Philadelphia. City test scores ranked it as the worst middle school in the city. At my first teachers' meeting in September, the new principal, Jayne Gibbs, warned us, "We can't fail any special-education students this year because the government is breathing down our neck." As the teachers nodded and murmured, I sheepishly glanced around. I needed to remind myself that I wasn't a reporter sneaking into a meeting. Other teachers were talking openly to me, without that guarded, clipped manner that I was accustomed to. To them, I was Ms. Asquith, a sixth grade bilingual teacher, with a classroom of forty desks, two blackboards, bars over the windows, and a scenic view of the boiler room roof.

My sixth graders ranged in age from ten to fourteen, and were mostly first- or second-generation Puerto Ricans. Half the class spoke little or no English. The first week, the school was still missing another sixth grade teacher so I got two classes. They shuffled in carrying composition notebooks and wearing puffy jackets, tapered jeans, and Timberland boots. They called me "miss," and were shy, obedient, and eager to please. They wanted stickers for their notebooks and to read the Harry Potter books. A couple of boys wore gangster-style skullcaps and looked tough, but beyond appearances, they were not the drug-dealing street-toughs fitting my stereotype.

My journalistic interests were immediately eclipsed by the reality and enormity of teaching. I had Jose, a thirteen-year old boy from the Dominican Republic, who spoke mostly Spanish and had been left back twice already; Darnell, a mentally troubled boy who jumped out of his seat constantly; and Evelyn, a diligent, articulate eleven-year old who aspired to be a doctor. I didn't know how to teach a lesson, let alone how to teach a class with such a range in abilities.

The school didn't help. When I asked the vice principal for a curriculum, I was promised one that never appeared. By the fourth week, I was finally given a set of grammar textbooks and a set of social studies textbooks, but they were too difficult for my English-as-a-second-language students. I had to invent everything myself. When the Philadelphia Daily News ran a story in October reporting that 100 new teachers across the city had quit, complaining of lack of support and supplies, I understood. For the first few months, each day felt like a churning, eight-hour tempest. I invented lame writing assignments -- "What would you do with a million dollars?" -- and read Chicken Soup for the Kid's Soul. Several of the administrators were also new, and just as overburdened by the remaining seven teacher vacancies. Whether and what I taught were secondary concerns to them. So I used my journalism skills, asked a lot of questions of other teachers, and wrote everything down. A significant handful of teachers were so incompetent that it was dangerous. They screamed at the students all day and created a climate of fear, abuse, and violence. But by November, I was finally picking up enough tricks and materials from the good ones to put together a semblance of a daily lesson. I got by with the help of my nicer colleagues, who amazed me with their ingenuity. In my class, instead of the typical reading and writing assignments we read newspaper and magazine articles, and wrote letters to the editor. The Daily News printed a short letter from one of my most easily discouraged students. Seeing his face light up pushed me forward.

At night, after grading and planning, I wrote in a journal all that I was learning in my new world. Details I had never focused on as a journalist fascinated me, such as who kept student attendance and how easy it was to fudge upwards. Schools get higher ratings and award money from the state for high attendance, and as a teacher I saw how attendance could fluctuate depending on what time it's taken, whether suspended students are considered absent, and whether a school counts excused absences in its total.

And from the inside, I could see how some education stories really miss the mark. For example, in late winter the school board announced plans to spend millions of dollars on a new "discipline school," a place for kids with behavior problems. From an outsider's point of view, that might seem like a good idea. Indeed, our school had about thirty or forty students who needed to be removed. They roamed the hallways, picking fights, threatening teachers with scissors, and destroying the learning environment. These students were often victims of abuse themselves and needed help. But they remained in our school year after year. The problem was not a lack of discipline schools. The fact was that the city's existing discipline schools were half empty. The reason: the stacks and stacks of paperwork required by the city and state to transfer a dangerous student into one of the city's discipline schools. It could take up to eight months to put a transfer through, so few teachers bothered. When the Inquirer wrote a long feature story about the proposed new million-dollar discipline school, the article made only brief mention of the fact that the existing discipline schools were not being used, and no mention at all of the many roadblocks involved in moving a student to a discipline school.

The issues I had worried myself with, as a reporter, suddenly seemed quite esoteric and bureaucratic in comparison to what the students and teachers had to deal with. Most of my sources as a reporter had been administrators, union members, and school board members -- instead of students, parents, and teachers. And yet, much of what the school board dealt with was unrelated to what really happened on the ground. For example, the school board fussed for months over prohibiting social promotion, finally deciding that a failing student could not be passed on, regardless of age. Yet our principal is allowed to change grades, and about failing students she told us, "If you retain them we will have to deal with them again." When I turned in two failing report cards they came back to me with the grades raised.

Journalists' assumptions, I was finding out, can be off the mark. An example of this arose when I was given a $1,200 iMac computer for my classroom. As a reporter, I had written a number of stories involving the effort to put technology in the classroom, and just assumed it was a positive goal. I am now less certain. My class's computer collected dust in the back because one, two, even five computers are not that helpful with thirty-three kids. I always believed that increased funding would help schools, but now I saw how existing money was sometimes misspent. The sad truth was that many teachers used the computers to busy the tough-to-control special-education students so that they wouldn't destroy the school. A reporter is not likely to get that story from just talking to a school board member. What the school really needed was not fancy technology but someone to design a curriculum, coordinate the grades, and order appropriate books.

One morning I saw a thirteen-year-old girl crying in the hallway. The security guard was screaming at her, so I offered to walk her back to her classroom. Her name was Angela, she was mentally disabled, one of some seventy students placed in "special education classes" out of about 700 students in the school. When we reached her classroom I understood why she preferred the hallways. Students were fighting and overturning desks and the substitute teacher was shouting, "they're animals." The ceiling was peeling, and exposed nails stuck up from a piece of wood on the floor. Angela was attacked. When I turned to get help, I saw that the security guard was already there and had just been overpowered. This was not an emergency; this was a typical day for special-education students. Yet here was a kind of story that reporters tend not to find -- the routine and systematic abuse of special-ed students.

Later I learned that Angela's group was one of five special-education classes that would not have a teacher all year. They were bounced from room to room each period. One substitute pushed his desk in front of the door and turned on the TV. Occasionally, a substitute wouldn't show up, and the students were left alone in the room. In the spring, at a school in the same neighborhood, a girl in special education was raped during the school day. The overwhelming reaction at my school was "thank god it didn't happen here." But it easily could have. With no teacher or program, Angela and the other special-education students just ran loose in the hallways, starting fires that nearly torched the school, pushing and hospitalizing a teacher, molesting younger students, getting arrested, and shredding the learning environment for the rest of the students. We were dependent on the school district to find real special-education teachers, but it never sent us any. Much of the time of our special-education teacher was spent on completing paperwork that glossed over such problems. Indeed, when our special-ed program was reviewed by federal auditors in May, the school passed.

Seeing this abuse daily made me feel personally frustrated with the media, which -- while investigating the police and other public departments -- tended to treat the schools as a feature beat. In October, the Daily News wrote its "special report" about new teachers quitting. In the spring, there were stories about a rape and a shooting that occurred at two different schools, and in between there were many stories about contract negotiations and administrative matters. Not much about actual education, its successes or failures. And when something was written about the schools, it often carried the intonation that the students were at fault. After a vice principal was shot during a scuffle in a West Philadelphia school, the Daily News followed up with a cover story: why the schools are stuck with so many bad kids. It was illustrated with a shadowy image of a student lurking in the background. The underlying assumption -- that the students were to blame -- reflected a sentiment popular with many in the school board, teachers union, and the administration -- none of whom want to take responsibility for their failings. But what I experienced as a teacher showed me the opposite. The story should have read: why the kids are stuck with so many bad schools. The ongoing failure of our nation's urban school system is a scandal -- it's hurting millions of children, stealing from taxpayers, and creating violence and desperation that has a ripple effect on all corners of society. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's time for the education desk to shed its reputation as a soft beat, for reporters and editors to take a sharper pencil to the schools.

Having once dealt with deadlines, editors, and the pressure for copy, I feel I have some understanding of the complacency that affects the coverage of education. But I can no longer justify it. Too many reporters think that nothing can be done. They allow the protectors of the status quo to use sensitive issues of race and culture and poverty as a shield against their critics. They feed the sense of hopelessness that is encouraged by bad teachers, self-aggrandizing union leaders, and hapless administrators. All those things affected me, too, when I was a reporter. It took a classroom of them to convince me that the kids really do deserve a chance, and that they won't have one until the news organizations act as if they believe it.

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Christina Asquith recently completed a book documenting her year inside Philadelphia's toughest middle school. She lives in New York and can be reached at Clasquith@ aol.com. Students names in this article were changed.

Sadly, it is the very system that the liberal organizations support that is destroying their kids. Here in Seattle nearly half of the public school teachers send their kids to private school. They know the truth and won't experiment with their own kids. However, they (and their union) are content to have other people's kids in a failed system.

As for the journalism angle - most of our journalists today are lazy and liberal. The journalism schools are a joke and everyone on campus knows it's the way to get an easy degree. (The only other equally laughable degree program is education.)

Thanks for posting this, summer. It's fascinating and explains so much.

"Now I ask you, what is the difference between 2 school districts about 6 miles apart?"

Good question. I'm sure some would just say "6 miles."

Well that's what I would say, if it were a question on the SAT. Do they still ask math questions on the SAT?

All these problems in schools are NOT new. They have been with us at least 32 years. I know for my first year in the classroom was 1970-71, which seems so long ago now. And one thing about teaching: it NEVER changes -- always the same ol' same ol'. Don't say that's an attitude problem on my part. You wouldn't think so if you have been in a classroom for any length of time with a plethora of "slow learners."

"Would these be the Philadelphia schools that Ed Rendell is claiming - in his gubernatorial primary campaign TV ads - to have rescued and made most excellent?"

Yep, dem's be da wonz.

All these problems are NOT new....

I respect your opinion, Theodore. Others may disagree with you, however, as according to this survey, some problems are new: The public's perception of major problems facing the public schools, 1970-1995

dingram, annie is correct -- and that fact is well known and has been documented before: many public school teachers, all over this country, do send their own children to private schools. BTW, private school teachers earn much LESS thank public school teachers.

Frankly, teachers don't have to all be great. Many students are at their mental capasity just warming chairs. The will go into the work force and we all meet them everyday. Workers who can not and will not think. When we had a coal digging, farming economy, these workers were mentally able for their tasks. Now that we are moving into a information moving economy, well, it is tough on them.

RE; "...unlike other "professionals" have limited protection in terms of potential professional liability..." First, many health care workers can not be alone with their patients. Military Officers go to prisons. Sea and aircraft captians can lose their license for one DUI. Same for good old truckers. Frankly a lot of occupations get zapped way quicker then teachers. Lastly, blame the lawyers. And what group is the largest donator to the Democrat party? Lawyers. So, one crew of democrats( the lawyers) is kicking another faction( teachers ) of the democrats. They deserve each other.

Perhaps. I personally know of none. I am aware that private school teachers earn less, but they do get the added advantage of saying no to students and parents who are uninterested, unmotivated, and undisciplined. Also, I'd worry about sending my child to a teacher who would accept less pay. Usually, people with a higher level of education wouldn't put up with such small pay. Makes you wonder about their competence. Of course, back to my original statement, it may be worth it not to worry about discpline problems.

Frankly, teachers don't have to all be great.... tasks. Now that we are moving into a information moving economy, well, it is tough on them.

It is precisely because we are moving into an information technology that the quality of teaching becomes even more important now.

...can not be alone with their patient

Well, it can be very difficult to provide one-on-one instruction when you feel you can not be one-on-one in a student/teaching situation for the purposes of improving a student's reading, writing or math skills. Many doctors will no longer provide obyn care because of the high cost of insurance. Likewise, some people may not want to teach in classrooms because of the potential for being the target of a baseless lawsuit. There is a lot at stake when a child makes the accusation. The professions you mention do not routinely have contact with children. It's a very different world today. I can certainly understand why qualified people leave teaching - and I personally know people who left teaching to return to the health care profession.

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