Posted on by Laura Lee

When and How to Reopen Schools: Some Considerations

When and How to Reopen Schools: Some Considerations

Deciding whether or not or HOW to reopen schools in a few weeks is not the same as negotiating a car deal. With the car deal, you might offer to pay some more to get those cool options you want. Win/ win is possible.

Not so with reopening our schools. We need to determine what is best for each school, and that might be different depending on where the school is located, the funding available for needed safety equipment, and the level of risk we are willing to take. How many deaths are acceptable of 6-year-old children? Teenagers? Adults? We need to decide what to do when teachers fall ill and have to quarantine, and we cannot get subs because they are mainly retirees who don’t want to go into the classroom. Do we DOUBLE or “TRIPLE up the students then? We have to decide what to do if the schools must completely close again in an area due to a surge.

This is not a win/ win type negotiation such as asking for a raise. Your boss can retain a great employee with a raise, and a raise can help an employee.

There is no win/ win here except for the virus going away or us getting a surefire and safe vaccine. No amount of wishing can make this happen. Magical thinking, wishful thinking won’t make it so.

It is inconvenient for everyone, this virus. EVERYONE.

However, it is not a “school” problem. it is a nationwide problem, and no matter how inconvenient it is, we cannot put this on schools, or more accurately, on the backs and health of teachers and their loved ones.

It’s not like teachers are asking for a lunch hour (ha!), or a raise. Teachers are asking for a fighting chance of living through this pandemic, based on science, not on their “convenience” factor to those who desperately need help with childcare, computer access, food access, and more. All those needs should be addressed, but not on the backs of teachers, who are overwhelmingly female.

Ask yourself, would we ask business executives to go into crowded conference rooms right now, hour after hour, expect them to clean up after each meeting, and probably expect them to buy their own supplies? No. Would we ask them to work in dangerous conditions so that folks would have childcare? No, we would not.

Sadly, frighteningly, this is not a negotiation. This is a fight for the health and lives of our students, faculty, and staff.

And that should not be negotiable. It is either safe go to back in August, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, there is a lot of work to do to address those MANY societal needs schools try to address.

If so, and we know the pandemic is still going to be around in August, we need to plan for risk reduction and to plan for what we will do if too “many” deaths occur, if a surge happens, and how we will deal with the fact that we opened schools in August during a nationwide/ global pandemic when masks have not been worn often enough because of the mistaken notion that “rights” are being trammeled asking folks to help slow a deadly virus, when people were traveling for pleasure during the lock down, when we have had no single act of positive leadership from the White House to convince us anyone has the best interests of students, faculty, or staff in mind. I know I do not trust anyone in Washington to make these decisions, for they have proven their goal is to win an election at any cost, even the cost of the health of a generation of school children and countless faculty, staff, and other school workers.

I might trust a group of concerned parents, faculty, staff, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, doctors, public health experts to make such a decision for each school, with different decisions made for different schools. 

That may even be too chaotic right now, and we may find we need to ALL stay home from school in August, as AWFUL as that would be. 

Again, it’s not a car deal, where you get pinstriping if you sign a lease today. The stakes are so very high. Our kids can “catch up” with schooling if and only if they are alive, and our teachers cannot teach if they fall ill or die.

There it is.  No win/ win. It’s the awful truth. This situation fits the definition of dilemma, truly no “good” or win/win answer.

Posted on by Laura Lee

Cry, Beloved America

img_1024     Many educators become pensive at the end of the summer; as we get ready to return to the classroom, we cannot help but think about how we won’t have much time to actually *think* for months at a time as we enter a whirlwind of teaching activity.  Think now! Think!

This summer I have been thinking about a novel I read long ago, Cry the Beloved Country, a novel published in 1948 and written by Alan Paton. (See more here: Cry the Beloved Country.)

While this novel is a renowned novel about South Africa, the urgency, sadness, and beauty of the country strikes me to this day and the title–Cry, the Beloved Country.  This is how I felt after seeing Spike Lee’s latest movie, The Blackkklansman.  Cry, beloved America. Is there hope for us? Is there? Can we reach across the years and miles and truly love and respect all Americans?

The news from Washington? Cry, cry, beloved America.

And then I think of returning to the classroom next week and I could weep again for other reasons.

I so strongly believe in the power of literacy to improve lives, and I am so very proud to always have been a teacher of literacy in a nation that educates all students. All students.  I am no longer teaching high school, but when I see my class rosters and check into the background of my students I feel very proud, happy, a bit scared, but mostly so very excited to be a reading instructor at the community college level.

My students, as they usually are, will be those for whom English is not a first language, or those whom struggle with reading and writing.

That’s why I am there, to help them. To create lessons that will invite them to the literacy table, a great strong table.

I so desperately believe in the great promise of educating all students and I so strongly feel pride in our community college system.

So come to class students; I am waiting eagerly to meet you and start our literacy journey together.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Posted on by Laura Lee

When Did the U.S. Stop Seeing Teachers as Professionals? (mini review from HBR)

 

professionals       The Harvard Business Review asks: “When Did the U.S. Stop Seeing Teachers as Professionals?” in an article written 6-20-18 by Robert Bruno and found here: When Did the U.S.  Stop Viewing Teachers as Professionals?

Bruno writes, and I concur, that: “Teachers are seeing their own experience be devalued by policymakers and other officials with little experience in the education field, and it’s not improving the education of their students. In other words, and as others have noted, teachers are balking at the erosion of their status as professionals.”

Bruno goes on to write that today, (and I agree) that “Creativity is squeezed out for conformity and teacher autonomy suppressed…”

As a results of external stressors, Bruno notes that studies are revealing that teachers report feeling highly stressed twice as much as the average American worker, but worse, that

…nearly a quarter of respondents said work was “always” stressful. (emphasis added)

This stress and these outside stressors will lead to “constant battles” and struggles, Bruno contends, with our very democracy at stake.

As he notes, “The outcome of that struggle will assuredly determine the quality of the nation’s schools and, subsequently, the strength of our country’s democracy.”

Because teachers care so much, Bruno writes, teachers will continue to protect their students even while knowing, “To them, nothing less than the education profession is at risk.”

#  #  #

What do I think about this article? If I were not still so burned out from the stress that comes with the deprofessionalization of teaching, with as Bruno calls it, a corporate-styled version of professionalism , I’d tell you.

Wait. I can tell you.

It’s like Bruno has been in the minds of many teachers I know.

It was never about the kids; Bruno does not mention even one time teachers’ concerns about students.  We love the kids.  We love to teach. We are teachers. We are well-educated and passionate professionals.

We deserve to have our well-informed voices heard.  We deserve to have time to use the bathroom during the work day. We deserve time to meet with our colleagues to plan, for we have great ideas and even greater ones when we can collaborate.  We deserve to plan our lessons with our specific students in mind.  We deserve to have fewer non teaching duties, including a duty-free lunch and planning period, less hall and bathroom and lunch room duties.  We deserve the pensions we have paid for diligently and not to be blamed for an entire state’s broken promises.  We deserve to have the public pay for the public part of education and teachers not to have to pay for toilet paper or basic student supplies.  We deserve to be treated like the licensed, educated professionals we are, and not to be evaluated or have our work evaluated by non-educators or those who have spent little time in the classroom.

We deserve to be treated as professionals; since we often are not, many are leaving, and many who remain are stressed, burned out, sad, angry, and profoundly disheartened.

Many veteran teachers are “retiring” early, such as myself.

And I wonder if this wasn’t part of the plan all along–to drive out the veteran teachers who would speak up, to drive out any creativity that might challenge the corporate non-educator reformers.

Could be.  Should I be that suspicious?

I believe so.

Teachers are fighting for the very life of their profession.