No One Will Read This Particular Blog

I was reviewing a book on Amazon today,  Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Front Lines of American Public Education by John Owens.  I became so incensed while I was writing the review (not at the book, which I really liked, but by its message) that I thought I'd publish it as my blog this week.  It doesn't really fit my theme, but it does reflects another aspect of my New York past -- the experience of my family with its public school -- and why it gets less difficult to leave my city.

This is a book about the current state of NY public schools.  Sadly, I know that this sentence will prevent almost everyone from reading on, but really, really, it's important for anyone involved with kids, teachers, or humans.  And it's funny.

Owens spent less than a year teaching middle school but his observations echo those of my son, who currently teaches middle school in Brooklyn.  The NY school system has never been anywhere near perfect, but over the years when my kids, now adults, attended public school, it did provide a lively, haphazard, but ultimately good experience for them.  New York public schools had, as they still have, the severe challenges of serving communities that are weighted with low-income, non-English-speaking families.  However, when my kids were growing up, they were packed with engaged, creative teachers who were passionate about serving its city's children. 

Like Owens and my son, they still are, but that energy and creativity may now be fatally subdued by a system patched with a Kafkan bureaucracy, barraged by incessant standardized tests, and drowning in empty clichés that are pumped out of a marketing cesspool to "inspire" and "direct" exhausted teachers.  No real solutions and no effective rules are offered that a burned-out teacher can use to subdue those hormone-riddled chaotic nests called "classrooms".  All that the teachers have to guide them are helpless administrators (see Major Major from Catch 22) and inane sound bites disguised as training guides.  NYC teachers are burdened by the full responsibility of educating kids, who go home each night to vacant homes or adults who can just manage to live, and they are blamed when these students fail. 

Teachers live, like all of us, in a culture that respects only wealth or mindless accomplishments that evaporate when a screen goes dark, that disregards people who chose jobs that serve the most vulnerable rather than the most arrogant.  Right wing attack dogs are out to destroy their only protector, the union. Teachers are accused of having an easy job because they get long vacations, but as Owen writes and as I've observed with my son, new teachers typically leave early in the morning during the week and come back home to work on into the night and most of the weekends grading papers and torturing themselves with lesson plans. During vacations, they often work on the curriculum for the next year and catch up on educational tracts. 

And what my son faces and what Owen faced every school day, hour after hour, are doomed out-of-control children, who are either pampered inappropriately because of politically correct blinders, bludgeoned with incomprehensible tests, handed Ritalin, or left to wander the halls and finally the streets. And even worse, so many teachers, like my son and Owens, love these troubled and troubling kids and are stunned by their inability to help them, until, like their students, they believe they have failed.  Fifty percent of teachers are gone within five years. 

Read this book.  It's engaging and funny, but if you stop laughing with Owens, you will weep.  As a coda, Owens left before the end of his first year.  My son has lasted three years and will be leaving at the end of this year to become a priest.  I'm not surprised.