May

Despite the fact that each classroom door on the first floor had a large yellow bolded  “Testing- DO NOT Disturb” sign taped to it, the hall walkers still swaggered their way to the parking lot on the way to the McDonalds down the street or to the park across from the attendance office.

The campus was a Columbine waiting to happen. One teacher, frustrated with how many students roamed the campus halls –daily “transacting business,” as they said– counted fifty-four accessible unsupervised entrances.

“Make sure your classroom is a welcoming place by keeping your class door unlocked,” chirped an assistant administrator in an email entitled, “My Thoughts about Doors and Windows.”

Melissa Zeta had just followed the exhaustive testing checklist to the letter. She had spot-checked the students’ completed computerized bubble-in answer sheets, coded their test booklets, filled out the batch sheet with Melissa’s information –attaching these kids’ scores to her record, her reputation, and eventually her evaluations– included the fifty-page scripted proctor book and rubber banded the number two pencils into a fist-sized bundle. It was all there in the plastic bucket stacked and alphabetized, her high school English teaching career.

“Don’t let your test bin out of your sight. Take it into the bathroom if you must … When you pick up your test bin, you symbolically leave your teacher’s license with the test supervisor until your test material is returned …”

She had heard these comments so many times, but they still unnerved her. Any screw-ups and she could lose her job. This semester has been particularly difficult as she taught remedial 9th grade English, a veritable who’s who of the daily suspension list.

Anything could go wrong and, of course, something had.

She had only one makeup- a testing irregularity. The rest of the class had miraculously shown up although she had prodded two students awake and she thought another was on something.

A girl who had spent more days on outdoor suspension than actually in class, Ixia del Mar, loved to fight. Smart and quick-witted, she regaled the class with colorful stories from her bizarre home life. Once, her mom had even driven her over to a transgressor’s house and egged her on from the driveway. Ixia expediently and obediently broke the girl’s nose when her mom shouted that Ixia needed to finish the fight because they had to pick up her sister.

Most recently, Ixia had clocked a girl over the head with her track trophy for calling her a slut on social media. She was allowed to come in for testing but arrived 30 minutes into the session. Melissa had been willing to read the directions to her in a hushed whisper and get her going, but Ixia insisted on making a call on her cell phone first. As she pressed the buttons, she waved Melissa away as if she were an errant and annoying fly.

Melissa spat just under her breath, “Put. That. Phone. Away. First, it is not allowed in school or my class during testing, but also you could get the scores for each of the students in this room canceled because you have a cell phone on during a test.”

Ixia returned, “Whatever, Ms. Z. Ima tell my homies where I’m at.”

Thus, Melissa, red-faced with anger, mashed the white emergency button interrupting her test takers for the second time to summon an administrator and waited an interminable ten minutes. As the man with the walkie-talkie led Ixia down the hall to the office, she screamed a comet trail of obscenities. The girl would earn an Incomplete for the class and have to take the end of course test during the summer.

Fortunately, for Melissa, Ixia had cussed out the administrator, so he had to call the state and report the testing disruption himself.

“No longer my problem,” thought Melissa, as she collected the testing box. On the way to return her materials, she passed the skipping hall walkers, some of whom she knew. She knew Felipe should be in math right now. He nodded to her, chewing the tip of a McDonald’s straw. She debated addressing him. Turn the tests in first, she decided.

She continued down the hall to the closed-for-testing Media Center. Box turned in; she mused that her teacher’s license was still intact. She saw that she still had half a planning period.

Her other class, journalism, was completing the end of the year paper, so she logged in to a desktop to work on some editing before the staff arrived for class next block. Lost in a paragraph, she almost didn’t hear the summons from the principal’s secretary.

“Ms. Zeta, the principal needs to see you immediately,” the intercom squawked.

Melissa had mostly positive feelings about this principal, her 14^th in her career. He did not insist on reviewing the newspaper or the students’ online postings before publication, and he always met with her whenever she needed something. The last time she had spoken to him, she informed him that she had won a $1200 grant for her class. She had a reasonably good rapport with all her students, even Ixia.

Confused, she made her way to the office speculating … it could not be. No. Contracts were supposed to be in the mailboxes, but she had not checked hers yet.

For the last several weeks, the local papers had recounted raucous and contentious school board meetings where the superintendent was predicting hundreds of teacher layoffs. Local districts had already made their cuts, some weeks ago.

Melissa and her husband, Luis, and their two sons had moved to the area two years ago, so she was a recent hire in the school district, but she had twenty years of experience. Furthermore, her evaluations had been exemplary, and in addition to sponsoring the school newspaper, she was on several committees.

She had even worriedly met with the principal a few weeks back, and he had assured her that her job was safe and that she was an asset to the school.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

Melissa went in the back way to the principal’s office. The door was half cracked open, and she could see his round polished dark wood table stark and shiny but for the stack of cream-colored official letters in her line of sight as she entered. Could it be? No. No.

The principal, his usual photogenic face crestfallen, motioned for her to take a seat. He moved the stack with his elbow after taking an official letter off the top.

“Melissa, this is the worst day of my career. I didn’t know. You have to understand. I have to give you a separation letter that says your services, as a teacher here in the district, will no longer be needed after the school year ends in two weeks. I don’t have a contract for you.”

Silence.

She noticed a tissue box on his desk and vacantly pulled a few out because she was a crier. No. This could not be. Caught in a Reduction in Force (RIF) at age 45? She felt a vice-like pressure on her head, and the sounds of school got fuzzy. Sanchez continued to apologize and explain that there would be meetings for unemployment benefits, but Melissa couldn’t process what he was saying. He asked if she wanted to call Luis, at his job as an English teacher at a neighboring high school.

She walked out of the office, deflated. She staggered into a hall feeling lightheaded hoping she would not pass out.

She was not alone.

When the stack of letters had been distributed, almost 50 teachers of just fewer than 200 had been dismissed. Most, like Melissa, were simply the last hired. Several had earned unsatisfactory evaluations but had been willing to work on a prescribed plan of improvement. Several stellar math teachers had been cut because they hadn’t used enough technology in their lessons or other minor indiscretions. Even on negative mark on their annual evaluation threw them into the jettison pool. Seven beloved young coaches had been let go.

Luis dropped her off each morning. Melissa enjoyed the daily commute together. Luis’s school, just two miles down the road was deemed Title I, because of its high poverty level. According to the No Child Left Behind mandates, it was a perpetually failing school because of the test scores produced by a community comprised mostly of undocumented immigrants, single parents, and hardworking underemployed folks. It had a high transient rate. Melissa’s school might also qualify for Title 1 had it not had a small pocket of middle-class students and an International Baccalaureate magnet housed on the campus. It had been on the NCLB Needs Improvement list for several years.

When Melissa called, Luis’s principal had been distributing the separation letters, as well. The chaos at both schools, as devastated teachers returned from the office and students reacted to the news, severely disrupted the end of course, IB, and Advanced Placement testing that had locked the school into testing mode for the last week or so.

Luis had missed the ax as his hire date in the district was before Melissa’s. The stark and somber mood on the commute home was due to shock, uncertainty, grief and the knowledge that they would have to drop this life-changing bomb on their boys over dinner.

Melissa felt the resurgence of her long-buried posttraumatic stress disorder emerge.

“What is to become of me? Of us?” She sobbed later that night as she began six weeks of sleep deprivation and depression. “There are no jobs. I can’t even apply in nearby districts. They were laying off, too. And any positions that open up will be filled by teachers without advanced degrees who have only a few years of experience,” she cried.

Melissa silently suffered numerous indignities at school for remaining few weeks until she was unemployed. Her committees met without her as they were planning for the following year. The groups selected new chairpersons. One office secretary decreed that any spare cardboard boxes in the school would be available only for teachers moving to different classrooms and not for the RIFed teachers. There were different memos, separate lines and unwieldy obligations like handing in keys and her laptop. She needed to compile all her journalism lessons for whoever would take over if the program would even be sustained. She owed the Media Center $90 because she had taken out books for some of her students. Some had been banned from the library for bad behavior, and others had too many outstanding fines. Melissa was on the hook to pay when the kids failed to return them – as they had with their own books.

Her students helped her break down her class. Stripped bare, the harsh, inhospitable emptiness reflected her heart. Even the hall walkers stopped by to help take stuff to the car. Luis helped her bring home her things every day.

One more cruel slap of fate was handed to her in the form of her test scores two days before school let out. All of her remedial 9th grade students passed their standardized test and even outscored the regular ninth grade students. The administrators, or the A Team as they liked to call themselves, trumpeted this feat as they predicted higher graduation test scores in the upcoming year from these low-income minority students – the golden sub groups upon whom the NCLB fortunes of the school rested.

Melissa skipped the end of the year picnic and the retirement breakfast. The weekend before school let out Luis and Melissa decided to move to a less expensive house. The first day of break, Melissa e-mailed 30 resumes.

June

She wasn’t a failure, yet she could not even share the news of the layoff with her mother-in-law and begged Luis to keep it quiet. It had slipped out in anger when she had spoken with her father recently, but she had not intended to tell him. Now, it was all her mother could talk about and she was tired of daily and nightly sobbing. Reduction In Force, RIF, reduced into fear. No, she didn’t have any news.

When a law practice downsizes attorneys, the dispossessed can hang a shingle from home and open for business. But, teachers … Melissa’s identity as a person had been taken from her like a bandage ripping and pulling away skin. She had carefully constructed a career, a scaffolding that encompassed years of training, certifications, experience, and expertise, but the economy, the district, the decision makers had let loose termites who had bored into her foundation and nearly toppled it.

She couldn’t lose her shit.

She couldn’t even afford to be angry, those last two weeks a careful study in holding her cards tightly to her body. If the district was rehiring, she had to be the one called back. She knew of one math teacher who had just stopped teaching and a Special Ed teacher who stopped showing up for work.

It was a reality tumor, and she and Luis spent hours strategizing how to excise it.

Apply for jobs in another state together and take the kids out of their schools and away from their friends?

Washington DC was hiring for Master Teacher positions (100K+), and both she and Luis had the credentials to pursue this. It meant moving and leaving the classroom. She still could not accept that she had been forcibly removed from her teaching position. Besides, she had always been suspect of those who left the classroom, especially administrators. Why leave the front lines, when the epiphanies of public education happen here not in meetings of suit-wearing adults? Luis still had his job. Could she take a DC job and commute home on the weekends? What would that do to the boys?

She could go corporate. She had amassed computer skills, editing skills. She could take unemployment and get retraining, but as what? A project manager? A corporate trainer? The tech industry was also downsizing. She trolled Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Craigslist. She voiced to Luis those niggling issues of age, of over-education, of not having the size three body she used to rock before she had kids. She had been thrown into the career shark tank unexpectedly, and she felt bloody, exposed, overqualified and underprepared to make these kinds of life-altering decisions.

After an intense school year of teaching remedial ninth graders, she also needed some time off to reflect, to relax, and to rebuild her psyche but she was in the fight of her life—midlife– to find a job.

If she had only known, she thought bitterly; but the principal had been as genuinely floored as she was on that day. May Day. (Help, mayday …”I’m going under” day!) She could not even call it what it was although later she would say, “When I got fired” just to see her peers wince with discomfort.

One slight consolation was that the students had acted with sincere angst by walking out, staging protests, posting missives on social media. They could express the anger, the rage, the panic, the frustration, the resentment and the betrayal that she and the others felt but had to maintain a mask of hypocritical adult professionalism. It reminded her of the Civil Rights era. The teachers turned their backs- they had mortgages and car notes to pay – while the children streamed out of the schoolhouse windows to participate in the marches.

There were rumors that the district had cut too many. Be patient, her principal had said.

Financial hardship loomed. Bankruptcy? Unthinkable just a month before, now a reality by the fall or winter.

Every day, the metro newspaper’s blog posted stories like that of the brilliant and engaging young science teaching couple- also RIFed- who fled the district for international school positions rather than stay the course and wait for jobs that might not resurface. Luis told her to stop reading the blogs, but she couldn’t. They were her validation. Enraged parents and angry students, fists raised waving letters, overrun School Board meetings.

It wasn’t but, at the same time, it was –shameful.

She had stopped eating lunch with her friends at school and withdrawn those last few weeks. She could not take their muted non-responses or the typically Southern, multi-dimensional catchall phrase, “Bless your heart!” They would helpfully say it; their real thoughts reflected on the surface of their faces — better you, than me. She knew the mediocre had been passed over for the new hires, and so did they.

“Bless your heart.” Most did not even ask her how she was doing, or feeling, or even what she was going to do.

“I am praying for you and your family.” A sympathetic school-appropriate shoulder squeeze. Melissa recoiled from their speciousness.

In this modern age, her face-to-face physically there community let her down, so she commiserated with her virtual communities.

Melissa sent a note to her HS journalism educators’ listserv.  

The good news is that I can share a journalism final for anyone who wants it. The questions run from current events, policies, procedures, ethics, etc. The students made it, and I am proud of their work.

The bad news is that I was laid off today. 

I am 45 with two teen boys. My husband and sister- also teachers- mercifully didn’t get the ax. We all teach in the same county.

Apparently, they ranked all the 700 English teachers after retirees, poor evals, and part-timers were cut. I have two years of service in my state, but this is my 20th year of teaching. They cut all first and second-year teachers in the district. I am in my second year.

My school lost 49 teachers today from a teaching staff of 197. At my son’s school, he lost his world history teacher, English teacher, and drama teacher. His high school has no drama or horticulture departments anymore. One school lost their football, basketball, baseball and soccer coaches. All taught AP but were in their early years of service. The county, in total, laid off about 1000 full-time teachers (of 7000) and all its part-time teachers. Once the dust settles, the district will transfer around some of the under three-year service teachers to fill the few open positions and hire back some of the laid off. Class size is scheduled to go up to 30+ for regular classes.

I have never seen it so bad anywhere.

I have had a job continuously since I was 17 years old. First, I worked at McDonald’s, then other service jobs through college. After college, I joined the Peace Corps then started teaching. I really can’t do much else. I love teaching English and have grown to love journalism. It makes me vibrant and alive. And I love working with high school students.

In my first two years of teaching, I was also RIFed but hired back over the summer. I don’t know if that will or can happen here. The district is $137 million short. This year, my husband and I have endured the loss of our National Board bonuses, 2% pay cuts, higher insurance and three furlough days for a family loss of $15,000. Now, I have no job.

My principal is devastated and is trying to find any creative way he can rehire me including posting the open position as one for ESOL/AP Language/Journalism. He doesn’t know anyone who has all three certifications.

I will let you know what transpires.

Keep in touch. I don’t need sympathy, maybe just drop me a line and tell me how you all are doing. How is journalism going? I have had a blast. We got out nine online editions and four print editions. I had five students’ work selected for the Nat’l Edition. We made a cool color brochure for the school. We finally started posting some videos of school events online and learned to use the editing software. Overall, it was a wonderful year with incredible students. I had about 60 over the two semesters. More than 100 signed up for next year, and I was just starting to read some of their application essays to winnow down the staff. I am not sure what I am going to do about that now.

Take care. 

Melissa

She got support.

“Hang in there.” “Those bastards.” “What a loss for your school and your students.”

Linda, a TV production teacher from Maryland, wrote:

Your post rattled me. I am so sorry that someone like you who brings so much to the table would have to go through this. It is unnerving. Somehow, I think you will be rehired again as administrators find ways when they really want someone (evidenced by the multiple certification thread already). Of course, they will want YOU. How disheartening to have this happen after you built it and the students started showing up. I remember your first post about your first issue. 

We are all thinking about you. We are all going to get furloughed an unspecified number of days, and we are wealthy county compared to most. People have been let go here, as well, and the bureaucrats are scrambling to get school-based jobs is what I am hearing. 

Please keep positive. Something wonderful will happen. If not, then it might be time for you to write that book that is screaming to get out. I think you could be the next Nora Ephron or Bombeck. 

We are rooting for you, kiddo. You are the best.

Melissa posted on Facebook. She tweeted, and she attended webinars. She networked, she researched, and she thought.

Wait. Take the first job that comes along? What?

This was a test. Attest. A testament to what … her patience? Her sanity? Her survival skills?

After completing several dozen online applications and sending off scores of emails, she got a few interviews- a history book editing job, a hyper-local online journalism stringer position, a part-time contract as a curriculum writer for a start-up virtual school looking to go national.

Several years back she had scored the essay section of a national assessment test and scored national certification teacher assessments. She updated her files with both corporate entities and took a short-term summer contract with one of them.

She- no longer a teacher by circumstance- would train teachers to assess candidates for National Board Certification. She, herself, had earned National Board Certification but it did not mean much while unemployed. Mercifully, she had not lied on the application when she had filled it out shortly after the RIF notification.

“Are you currently working in your field?”

Yes. The form didn’t ask if the job was over the following week.

The other side of the testing equation- scoring- was a mystery to most teachers. They knew how to review, remediate, differentiate, distribute, supervise, worry, compile, collate and return materials semester after semester, year after year. Hours of virtually the same training script ensured that they did not forget a step. Once the answer documents left their hands, the metrics and mechanics of how a score was determined were baffling.

Melissa’s scoring work had given her insight into the assessment of written responses. Luis scored AP essays for the College Board each summer. They both believed in the training and systems that these corporate and non-profit entities had implemented to ensure uniform fairness and national equity. She liked the certainty of a well-written rubric.

When she scored essays online at home, she thought, “I just helped someone get into college.”

When she assessed National Board candidates’ responses, she felt that she validated their reflection and professional work. She contributed to raising the standards of education nationwide, even though after the summer, she might not be in the field any longer.

While Luis was off scoring AP essays with a couple thousand English teachers, she immersed herself in painting and cleaning the new house they had located near the boys’ schools but at a substantially lower rent. It was ugly; it smelled, but it would suffice especially if their income would dry up when the summer checks ceased. The boys helped paint and were remarkably supportive and respectful to her.

After a month, she still did not have a job. At least, the crying had subsided.

Melissa had been playing tennis for a local park team and amongst all this activity- applying for jobs, moving, cleaning, painting, worrying about the future- she felt instability in her knee. She wrapped it up, but its constant throb hobbled her, further reinforcing her bewilderment. Had she expressed hubris? Did she need to be cut down physically —literally hamstrung– in addition to having her self-awareness, her finances, and her future handicapped?

One day, she awoke stiff from painting and disinterested in packing. After completing an online career survey that determined she would make a great high school English teacher, she put her head down on the computer desk. She knew gainfully employed teachers who were miserable, who phoned it in, who hated their students and who were disinterested in the art and craft of teaching.

She checked her email and was grateful to see a message from the Washington DC district. Both she and Luis had been selected as finalists for the DC Master Teacher program. They completed phone interviews when Luis returned from scoring. However, the kids expressed resistance to relocating to another state again, especially Mateo.

Many signs emerged that Mateo was troubled and the upheaval of the job loss, the move, and Melissa’s injury solidified Luis and Melissa’s’ concern. Their fears were compounded with the discovery, while packing the garage, of nine crudely constructed marijuana pipes.

“I was bored,” said Mateo sullenly.

He was spending days away from the house in the company of a pack of friends. Luis and Melissa could not think about that now.

The big move was the last week of June, and while awaiting the van, Melissa received a call from the principal. None of the teachers in the transfer pool had been qualified for her old job. Would she like it back? It would be three preps.

She said yes.

July

The smell of wet dog hung in the air even thought they did not own one. Melissa could not rid the house of the stink, and she could not hate the house because she needed to be appreciative. In addition to Melissa, the RIFed coaches and the stellar math teachers had been rehired. One woman –who had lost her home the previous September in a flood and then had been laid off in May –was not.

Melissa flew to Dallas to the corporate assessment center to supervise the scoring of National Board entries leaving Luis, the boys and the mess from the move. She took hot bathes at night and tried to work out on the treadmill before breakfast. She knew a pulled muscle should have subsided by now. She knew something was up with Mateo. She knew that everyone else in her department had one or two classes and that she had willingly, voluntarily agreed to three classes to get her job back.

“Grateful. Grateful. Grateful.” She grimaced, gritting her teeth.

A balanced school calendar would send them back for professional days in late July with school starting the first week of August. When she returned home from Texas, the chaos and smell overwhelming, she finally opened the boxes she had packed away in May, her whole classroom in piles in the garage.

A sociologist could have excavated any box and determined that the owner of the contents had been interrupted, in the midst of something and frantically forced to stop, pack and leave. Melissa sighed and got to work arranging everything needed for the upcoming year. It was too late for closure. It felt like someone had pulled a chair out from under her, laughed as she had fallen to the ground, then pulled her up and plunked her in place expecting her to be glad she had a seat. And she was.

Suppressed anger bubbled up at the indignity of the layoffs and rehiring. The anger needed to go somewhere, so she raged about perceived slights at home — dishes left downstairs, toilet seats left up, curfews ignored. She and Mateo argued, and she felt him slipping away from her, from them, as he absorbed and exhibited the banal culture and slothful values of his friends. He was morphing before their eyes into someone they didn’t know or particularly like.

One boy had been kicked out of his mother’s boyfriend’s house, and Mateo asked Melissa and Luis if he could live with them. They said yes, as it was an opportunity to show Mateo their love and social justice through action. The boy moved in creating an instant obstacle to privacy, intimacy, and redirection of Mateo back to scholarly pursuits, family interests, and planned goals. Miguel suffered, too, frequently retreating to his room as the two older boys ganged up on him and bullied him into silence over their drug use.

Meanwhile, Luis was gearing up to return to his school, a deeply dysfunctional workplace which yearly saw 3-5 staff members fired or suspended for inappropriate relations with students or money issues.

In the previous two years, Melissa served as the “minister to the minister” listening to and empathizing with Luis’s stories of undocumented students caught up in immigration drama, gang beatings, unmotivated low achieving students embroiled in cycles of violence, teen pregnancy, and poverty. Once again, his school didn’t make the No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Would the school be shut down? Could Melissa regain her job only for Luis to lose his? Rumors flew fast at this school, mostly untrue and frequently reflecting the most exaggerated, horrible outcome.

When Luis and Melissa had moved to this state, a recent law had conscripted Luis to this particular school as his National Board bonus was only in effect if he worked at a low achieving school. The irony is that if a highly qualified teacher helped the school make gains, he would lose the NBCT bonus. Melissa had earned her National Board certification before the new mandate and could take a position at a more successful school. Thus, Luis with four years of service to the school was considered an elder statesman in his department at a school whose turnover rate for teachers matched the high transitory rate for students.

It drove him crazy that mandates and improvement initiatives were continually being implemented by a fresh set of administrators and academic coaches only to be thrown out the following year as a new junta of school site leaders acted like the next idea would save students from their societal conditions and raise their test scores. The previous plan, with all its training, time and technology, now abandoned and forgotten; if mentioned, the newest facilitator would cite “researched-based” and “standards” in the canned response that never actually answered why there was no continuity or cohesion.

Both Luis and Melissa had taught excerpts from the Odyssey that year and were struck by the metaphor of Penelope weaving Odysseus’ death shroud by day only to tear out the stitches at night. At least, she had the purposeful hope that her husband would return to her and rid her property of interlopers. Luis, himself Latino and an immigrant, had no such faith in the current system. Each new administration ripped out the stitches, but there was no pattern, process or purpose for the effort and the daily travail of having to remake the fabric of a school- potentially a death shroud- was stupendously ironic.

This year, teachers at Luis’s school were to state aloud the curriculum standard of the day and have the students parrot back what it was they were to be “learning.” It made no difference that Language Arts was not internalized in day-sized learning units. Members of the junta circulated classrooms clutching observation checklists to record that teachers obeyed the mandate. Some of the junta arrived with handheld devices to record compliance. Both Luis and the students sardonically remarked that the devices could have been used to engage student learning and that might have improved the test scores.

Having barely literate students repeat,” Today we are learning about literary devices” didn’t internalize their understanding of literary devices; nor did posting word walls, infusing activating strategies, setting smart goals, or handing out tickets out the door. In Luis’s 22 years of teaching English, he knew that the culture of poverty, racism, and illiteracy could not be overcome by requiring teachers to jump robotically through the latest educationalese hoop. It was hard to keep them all straight having come into the career during the Whole Language and Direct Instruction phase. Poor kids, immigrant kids, just wanted people to care about them first.

Luis had been incensed this past March when shortly before the state graduation test was to be administered; he had been pulled out of his classroom for a week to run cram sessions in reading, and math, a subject he did not teach. His selection for the test preparation sessions was pitched to him as an honor by his administration.

“Mr. Ventano, we selected you because you build relationships with students and they respond to you. We need people in there to create relationships with students, so they have a chance to pass their graduation tests. We know you don’t feel comfortable teaching math, but we will have packets for you.”

Luis’s questioning of the plan landed him in the principal’s office challenging his loyalty. His participation in the cram sessions burdened him with five days worth of sub plans and grading for his own students in addition to preparing the lessons to teach the cram session packets.

Several other teachers at his school were transplants from various states like Luis. There were new teachers fresh from university; newly minted teachers from second career transition programs; Teach for America participants who were doing their time to cast off crippling student loans; slothful, burned out teachers who had given up on the challenges of poverty and oppression; and involuntarily transferred teachers. These teachers in the latter group had been given a choice—transfer to a different school (usually from an affluent high achieving school to an impoverished, low achieving school) and the negative evaluation would not follow nor would they be required to undergo prescriptive measures to improve their teaching skills. If a professional development plan failed, the teacher would not have a contract renewed. Since Luis’s school was frequently the only school with job openings, there was a significant population of involuntarily transferred teachers.

They would wax nostalgically about their previous school, conveniently forgetting that they were gainfully employed and had been given another chance. These teachers would harrumph and pull out papers to grade during professional development sessions led by earnest academic coaches who offered scripted teaching lessons to the department.

Luis endured it all. He suffered the blows to his integrity, the overlooking of his credentials and experience, the stupidity of the initiative of the month. He girded himself to return to this environment, the stress of the summer– Melissa’s layoff, the move, her injury, Mateo’s insolence and layers of secrets, the new boy’s problems — these all weighed heavily on Luis. Sometimes, as he left the school for the afternoon, he felt like he was emerging from a tar pit, the streaming tendrils of sticky substance threatened to engulf him. He made the mistake frequently of befriending a colleague only to find out, this person had been suspended or even fired for imprudence.

They spent their last few days of July cleaning the garage.

October

Melissa and Mateo were at it again.

She goaded him into a response, taking his monosyllabic non-committals as personal insults. He, in turn, denied, lied and swallowed his feelings sending her into a rage. He tested her to her limits, but this time, he snapped.

“Fuck you,” he said to her face.

She compelled Luis to intervene, to align with her. Luis acquiesced but felt conflicted. So much conflict, at home and at school.

Mateo’s friend slunk into the shadows, while Miguel retreated to his room.

Melissa, Luis and Mateo found their respective places on the couches for the post-fight talk. What was going on with this boy?

He and the friend had left a mountain of clothes unwashed, homework undone, responsibilities unmet. Pizza crust, gallon-sized iced tea jugs, burger wrappers littered the basement. Dirty socks plopped where they had been thrown across the room looking like little arctic icebergs against the black carpet of the basement family room. Who gave them license to act this way?

Melissa was exhausted haranguing Mateo to be respectful. She wrote lists, spoke in short direct sentences, used metaphors, tried bribery, established job charts, invoked checklists, wrote contracts, implemented incentives but to no avail. Mateo ultimately did not care, and his actions showed it.

His grades plummeted, and his PSAT score reflected that of someone barely literate. She knew his stanines from years of testing and the scores had to be wrong. Too often, Mateo’s red, glassy eyes reflected his activities. His priorities. Between the drugs and his friends, he had no time or interest in anything else. He was even so bold as to admit to obtaining free tickets to a school event so Mateo and the friend could pool their money that they had been given to buy marijuana.

Melissa and Luis did not understand how Mateo could be so bold, so overt, so cavalier about the drug use. They felt powerless to stop it, though.

Mateo and Miguel did not go to the schools in which Melissa and Luis taught. While they taught their hearts out helping other people’s children– desperately needy students– who was looking out for theirs?

Miguel was having a rough time adjusting to middle school. The friend was flunking every course and staying home from school without their permission. Mateo was floundering in his courses but was not asking for help. When Melissa and Luis checked the weekly grade book email, the Cs slipped to Ds and the Ds to Fs. Mateo did not care and even stopped lying about trying. The friend and another friend talked about dropping out. Miguel fled to his room and Melissa and Luis argued late into the night and during the morning commute.

One day, Melissa stopped one of the hall walkers on his way out the door.

“Why do you even come to school, if you are not actually going to go to class?” she asked.

“I’m on probation. I have to show up to be marked here. I don’t have to pass, though,” he said as he sauntered off, clutching his sagging pants. The ever-present McDonalds straw bobbing up and down as he hobbled off to catch up with his friends.

Melissa wondered if Mateo or his friend had become hall walkers at their school. When would they be caught? Why were they constantly testing the limits of appropriate behavior, of school rules, of family expectations?

“If this is a test of parenting, then we are failing,” thought Melissa.

December

Melissa was going to have surgery on her knee the day before school let out for winter break. The first week of December amounted to all kinds of personal tests to prepare for the operation.

“This is the story of my life,” she grumbled.

She wound down her classes, pleading with the students to behave for the substitute.

She was getting worried because for one class, she was awaiting a committee-developed semester exam but it was not forthcoming. She needed to make copies to have everything ready so she could administer the test, grade it, and enter the scores in the grade book so she could evaluate the totals. Any student that could potentially fail needed some quick remediation, and a phone call home. She had several students who could go either way.

One day a week, collaborative team planning usurped her planning period. The meetings would frequently be observed by someone from the A team who showed up to make sure they were meeting. He or she would observe, but not participate, and take notes as group members contributed to the discussion.

For most of the semester, the teachers created a pacing chart. Each week, a section of this chart would be discussed for 45 minutes, and minor changes would be made to the previous year’s work. One teacher’s contributions were to agree with everything that anyone said. Another was purposely petulant. The leader continually misplaced his notes or the agenda, so he spent lots of time trying to access materials on his computer, reprint them, then slip out to make photocopies. Melissa knew that there were expectations from the A team to submit lessons and unit plans and that this would be part of their yearly evaluation. She volunteered to do most of the work for the group. She resented the subterfuge and doing the lion’s share but felt as powerless to stop it at work as she felt at home with Mateo. After all, if there were layoffs again, would she be the first to go?  Her evaluation had to be perfect. The team tested her patience, and she had to work on holding her tongue.

At her previous school, Melissa had experienced incredibly fulfilling professional development. When she underwent the National Boards process, she worked with a group of six teachers who had volunteered to take on the certification together. The cadre established norms, committed to their work, and served as constructive critics of each other’s portfolios. She enjoyed working with teachers outside of her discipline and appreciated the scholarship, the effort, the reflection and the knowledge of content that went into their teaching practice. Each week, they would encourage each other, read drafts, discuss and evaluate student work and help each other to reach goals or to submit sections of their National Board portfolios. She felt nurtured, honored and she grew not just as a teacher but also as a person from the voluntary collaboration.

At this school, however, these weekly meetings required alignment. Furthermore, each team was supposed to develop pre-and posttests, common assessments, and common unit plans. Melissa had seen no research-based studies that proved that forcing teachers to work together would elevate the teaching practice or even raise test scores. In fact, these initiatives seemed to deaden creativity and burden teachers with more paperwork and less time to complete it. Words like “lock step” were thrown around.

Melissa became a teacher because she loved literature. She felt that there was artistry in putting words together. She loved to work with teenagers and see their potential and individuality emerge. She did not get into teaching to analyze data, to administer tests, or to punish low achieving students. She liked to tell stories, to read to students and with them. She loved to read their writing and watch it develop into something of merit.

Just yesterday, Melissa had checked the Twitter feed for the school newspaper, and a student had tweeted “My teacher read my poem aloud in class. She said it was great.” That was Melissa, and she knew it had been a special moment for her student. To see it in writing admitting to all his friends that he was proud of work done in her class was the most honest validation for her. A student was trumpeting for the world to see that he was proud of his work. And it was good, too.

This bubble of confirmation quickly burst.

A flurry of emails by the A team remonstrated moving furniture around during class because the noise of the chairs dragging could be heard in the rooms below. An email titled “bathroom issues” contained five paragraphs about letting students go to the bathroom during class. One email congratulated everyone on the floor for doing a good job of standing in the hallway during class changes. Another scolded the department for using too much copy paper.

Metal grates were installed in the building, and whole sections of the school were locked down after the bell rang. A secretary started announcing over the loud speaker each afternoon the threat of arrest to any student in the building not under direct supervision of a teacher. A math teacher quit midyear.

Union protests in other states put the spotlight on the profession. Conservative commentators derisively pontificated that teachers could afford pay and benefit cuts and that contributions to their pension funds were luxuries. Melissa had taught in three states each with a variation of a functioning union. The first was a right to work state with a strong local union. It negotiated salaries and job requirements. For example, it was not until she taught in the present state that she had ever had to complete a daily duty like supervising a lunch or guarding a garbage can. The union negotiated security guards or offered the tasks to teachers who wanted to earn extra hourly pay. In another state, the union struck for month to bring back art, music and physical education programs which had been cut to save money. The union, with the support of the teachers, felt that these classes were too important to drop or scale back. The settlement re-established weekly art and music and daily physical education. Parents and students supported the teachers.

The current state was a right to work state with a weak union. Melissa had never felt more like a cog in the wheel especially after the layoff. Teachers in the county started the year with five unpaid furlough days while the bell schedule was extended by ten minutes a day. The daily ten minutes added up to five days of school.

“The joke is on us,” thought Melissa.

Once again, Melissa attended the test proctor training for the December administration of end of course tests. She received the same handouts as the previous May. She heard the same threat.

“You leave your teacher’s license with me when you pick up your test bucket,” said the A team administrator.

Students filed in and placed their book bags against the wall.

“Cell phones off,” she firmly directed.

She distributed the test books, the answer sheets and the number two pencils. She read the directions aloud word for word from the proctor’s guide. It resembled a litany with her parts emboldened on the page.

As she placed the testing sign on the door, she could see the hall walkers at the crossroads of the hallway. Her former student acknowledged her as he headed out the door.

“Any last minute questions? No? You may begin.”

Melissa circulated the room observing while the students read and bubbled answers. Teachers were not to look at the tests, but it was hard to move up and down the aisles and not see a question here, a passage there. In this state, previous tests were not released, and the score for passing (and the math behind it) is a mystery every year. To compound matters, a nearby district was in the throes of a cheating scandal that hit the national news outlets for its audacity, depth, and scope. Investigators alleged that some administrators held “erasing parties” colluding staff participants into erasing incorrect answers and bubbling in correct responses so the school’s overall scores would meet AYP. Federal funds were on the line, and fines were to be levied.

Melissa wondered what would happen when teachers’ salaries would be tied to students’ test scores. Would teachers flee to affluent schools so as not to teach the impoverished, the developmentally or mentally disabled, the second language learner? If pay would be withheld or evaluations docked, would she abandon her school to support her family?

Already, her district had purchased handheld testing devises for many thousands of dollars to assess students electronically bypassing the need to bubble in an answer sheet. Benchmark tests had been administered this way two months ago. The term “teacher-proof” was used in the justification of funds. Melissa shook her head.

At least she could put this test behind her and, after her surgery, the year would end soon. She hoped the next year would not challenge her on so many fronts. During winter break, after surgery, she would make a concerted effort to rekindle her relationship with Mateo.

Collect, stack, count, alphabetize, band together, collate, compile, and place in the bin. Return the bucket and have someone observe you count the tests. A palpable sigh escaped as she signed off on the tests, signed off on the check off sheets, and signed off that she had signed off.

She returned to her room to use the remainder of the planning period to edit the December edition of the newspaper. The intercom buzzed.

“Ms. Zeta, the principal needs to see you right away.”

Her breath caught. What could it be? Not another lay off, which would not happen until the spring. She limped down the hallway favoring her stronger leg. Once again, she entered the back way and burst into the principal’s office.

He looked up from his desk and asked if something was wrong with her cell phone. Melissa explained that she had just completed testing for the day, so it had been turned off in her purse. He nodded and said,

“Your son’s school has been trying to contact you. The resource officer caught him skipping class and found with drug paraphernalia on him. He is obviously under the influence of an illegal substance. Someone needs to get him. Do you want to call Luis?”