I was shocked to learn recently that teachers in charter schools typically last only three years. Compare that statistic with my own: 34 years at Newton South High School. Once hired, I never considered moving on. Although declining enrollment almost cost me my job my first six years, South remained my professional home until I retired from the classroom. I still work at South, as girls’ tennis coach in the spring.
I had several advantages, to be sure, over most charter school teachers. Newton’s public schools provide a fine working environment, with reasonable class size, built-in preparation and meeting time, and lots of staff support. Furthermore, if serious conflicts arise with administrators (they didn’t for me), teachers have union representation at their disposal. My union, the Newton Teachers Association, negotiates fair contracts with a school committee whose heart is generally in the right place.
In contrast, most charter schools are not unionized, and teachers usually earn less income than their public school counterparts. Should an administrator take a dislike of them, they can be fired without much process. Consequently, their professional life is fundamentally insecure. With lower pay and fewer protections, many soon find work in public schools or in other professions.
Not everyone, of course, is suited for teaching. Teachers must be patient as they spend their days hanging out with young people! They must also be well-organized and knowledgeable, especially in their subject area. And they must have common sense.
It may be necessary at times to remove teachers who fall short. Fortunately, the NTA and the school committee negotiated a process by which a struggling teacher gets evaluated out of sequence. Intervention may help the teacher get on the right path. If not, however, the teacher will be let go. That seems only fair, and it protects the profession by assuring a baseline quality.
I had another great advantage in Newton: teaching in a community committed to learning. At South, if I ran a lively, productive class, students responded with active participation and conscientious work. Not every class was exciting and not every student consistently committed…but most were. The students behaved well in class, and we discussed literature and life in ways that usually kept my enthusiasm at fever pitch.
Much of the credit belongs to Newton’s parents, who clearly convey the importance of learning to their children. Yes, the pursuit of grades and of admission to prestigious colleges has had a corrupting influence on high school culture in Newton. Overall, though, it remains possible for a skilled teacher and devoted class to transcend that reality and enjoy thinking and learning together.
Now teaching has its challenges, even in Newton. Evaluating students’ writing, an essential part of my job, became increasingly exhausting as I aged. In my later years, I came to feel that some approaches pushed by ed reformers were limiting teachers’ creativity. I also lost patience with meetings and staff days that seemed less than productive; I would have preferred to be with my classes. Overall, though, I was given the freedom to approach my work as I saw fit as long as my methods inspired my students and met our common goals. For that trust, I am grateful.
To be a teacher requires a healthy dose of idealism. Most Newton teachers cannot afford to live in this community. My income, even at the end, fell well short of Newton’s median income. My own children, both in their early 30s, already earn more in the private sector than I did when I retired. But unlike most charter school teachers, Newton’s educators are part of the Commonwealth’s pension system. Barring disaster, I should be financially secure in the days to come.
In brief, it was my good fortune to live in Newton and to teach at Newton South. I wonder how many charter schools could offer their teachers a career as gratifying.
Bob: What a lovely testament to the joys of teaching, and the particular joys of Newton South! As a former South parent (I guess, post-birth-of-child(ren) one is always thereafter a parent?) I sometimes wondered about the experience from the educator’s perspective. Thanks for providing that.
Great piece!
As someone who believes strongly in public schools and hates to see their resources and funding sapped by charter schools, I’m encouraged to hear of the high turnover in charter school teaching positions – this doesn’t bode well for their future. Hopefully as the charter school experiment fizzles out, this will allow us to refocus our effort on improving education for all in a public setting, and not just for the handful of students whose parents have the time and resources to arrange for charter school educations.
Two gripes:
1. Unions were never meant for government employees where the taxpayers are essentially the owners and the owners’ representatives (School Committee) collaborate with the union rather than with the owners who they represent.
2. The Teachers Unions are to a great extent a part and parcel of the liberal Democrat Party, meaning there is no or tiny percent of conservative or GOP leaning teachers. Newton’s school curricula reflects that liberal bent while the one diversity not protected in the School System is conservatism.
Unions are a way to preserve teacher’s dignity in a profession where parents – liberal and conservative and school boards are not always on the side of a teacher. The writer above utterly confuses the purpose of a union, liberal or conservative, which is to protect the rights of workers from the whims of owners, or tax-payers or politicians or whomever, who see a way to exact more – especially in an idealistic profession where wages are relatively low compared to those in the private sector. What a shame that the value of unions and of teachers is so woefully misunderstood. It is so not about liberal or conservative but the dignity of workers.
Bob, this was a nice summation of your career in the Newton Public Schools. I’m glad that the union served you well. After all that is why it exists: for you and your fellow teachers. As long as we all keep that fact in mind during negotiations, unions can play an important role in the process.
However to suggest that what you do as a teacher in NPS is anything like what a charter school teacher in Boston does is rather silly. I’d equate it to something like a weekend warrior in the army reserve vs. somebody on the battlefield in Iraq. Charter schools exist in Boston and other communities not so much because the public schools have failed (though in may cases they have), but because the parents have failed their kids. To mix another metaphor, this is the emergency room not the well visit.
I’m sure you read the article about the 20 year history of valedictorians in the Boston Public Schools. By way of comparison, you would need to get well in into the lower half of a class of Newton high school seniors to find a student with test scores as low as these valedictorians – the top of the top in Boston schools.
Charter schools are meant to skim a small group of students out of a large failing pool and give them something close to a chance. We should be thankful they exist and thankful that teachers are willing to staff them.
This is a wonderful piece, Bob! I am a graduate of NSHS; my husband and daughter both are graduates of NNHS. Further, I am the daughter of a lifelong educator in the Boston school system, and proud mother of one who is finishing up her graduate degrees in elementary and special ed. Her work this year as a student teacher in Brookline has cemented her love of her chosen career, and the hours that she puts in to develop her lesson plans defy the myth that teacher’s days are short!!I love that she is excited each day to get to work and I see my father’s legacy in her eyes. A proponent of public education, she has eschewed the draw of charter schools. However, as she gets her portfolio ready to present to future employers, she sees how difficult it is to break into public school systems as a new teacher. She will have to spread her resume far and wide, including charter and private schools. I hope that she is able to realize her dream of teaching in a public school and that she will look back on her career some day in the same way that you are, and my dad did: with affection and a sense of fulfillment. Maybe she’ll even end up here in Newton, but jobs are hard to come by and competition is fierce.
Oren, I’m not criticizing the Teachers Unions insofar as they certainly do benefit and protect most public school teachers. Rather, I’m criticizing the School Committee for bedding with the Teachers Unions rather than the taxpayers whom they are supposed to represent, and the Union’s more than bedding with the Democrat Party, to the utter exclusion of any conservative diversity of thought permitted in the schools as well as becoming a principal support — financial, delegates, and beyond — of the Democrat Party.
A great piece, Bob! It sounds very familiar to a very veteran teacher who still loves being in a classroom. NPS is a great place to work.
A few thoughts:
A teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions. It’s all too easy to forget that “the union” is comprised of the teachers in your children’s classrooms. If I may state the obvious – no one else is in the NTA other than Newton teachers and support staff of all varieties. The people who work in the trenches need a voice to express concerns over working/student learning conditions and the union is that voice.
My son “taught” in a charter school for a year and it was a nightmare. After going into serious student debt to earn a Master’s degree, he was ready to leave the profession after one year of abuse, complete lack of support for students with special needs, resources (as in books – there were none). All this for $13,000 a year less than the district teacher who taught in school a few blocks away. After much cajoling on my part, he agreed to give it one more try, but said he’d never work in a school without a union again. Trust me, 26-year olds typically don’t think along these lines. He’s now in his fifth year of teaching in an excellent system and happy with his decision to give it another try
NativeNewtonian: despite what I just said about charter schools, they have become one of the pipelines for new teacher candidates. Some are better/worse than others – she should look at two statistics that are readily available if she is considering a charter: teacher turnover rate and the student attrition rate. If the number of students drops significantly during one of the critical testing years, that’s a huge red flag.
Parents don’t fail their children. Many do their best under the most stressful of circumstances that few who have time to post on a local blog would understand. The rest of us try to do our best but sometimes we just mess up. BTW, it’s a lifelong position. You are never done. You may think you are, but then…
My observation about the critical role in education of the local community, and of parents in particular, was an acknowledgment that the work of teachers alone hardly explains the success of suburban schools. Affluent and educated parents, with resources to aid their children and time to spend with them…..these were always my allies in the classroom. The obstacles facing parents in lower economic strata are daunting, and their challenges filter down to their children.
That’s why the solution to academic challenges faced by students in more difficult circumstances lies not solely in better funded schools with supposedly better trained teachers. I sometimes got in trouble for suggesting that communities try to replicate middle-class conditions for students not in the middle class: special programs after school, replete with tutors and mentors, and supervision until six or seven pm. Van Seasholes, my former principal, advocated this very idea for many years. The price was too high, I guess, and some people thought the concept of replicating a middle-class environment patronizing and offensive. To me it just made sense.
@Bob Jampol: You have written another thoughtful and totally credible article. Thank you for all you have done and continue to do for this City. Yeah, I do grumble and growl when my car dips into a large pothole in Newton; it invariably triggers an accompanying thought that “maybe, just maybe, they could have spent a bit less on the schools over the years so that we could have been on top of things like this”
That said, any person who harbors concerns about teachers unions should look to states that don’t have them. It was just a few months back that teachers finally walked out in Kansas, West Virginia, Kentucky and some other right to work states because they could no longer make ends meet on the meager salaries they received. I’ve heard heartfelt statements from teachers about how they used their own money to buy school supplies, new books and even food for students because the system wouldn’t allocate enough to cover these most basic needs.
The same goes for most federal, state and local public service unions. Federal civil servants would have been in even tougher straits during the recent shutdown if their unions hadn’t been there to provide or coordinate support needs. Unions have their faults, shortcomings and human failings, as do all other public or private institutions; but they are crucial to providing much needed balance in an economic system that favors quarterly reports and the bottom line over all other considerations. The Supreme Court recently placed what they assumed would be severe restrictions on the capacity of public service unions to organize. The opposite seems to be happening in most states and municipalities. It’s actually resulted in more people fighting to join public and private sector unions because there is new awareness about how essential they are to their individual survival.
Bob Burke, if you feel this is relevant, you comment omits my Teacher Union gripe from above of :
“the Union’s more than bedding with the Democrat Party, to the utter exclusion of any conservative diversity of thought permitted in the schools as well as becoming a principal support — financial, delegates, and beyond — of the Democrat Party.”
(My other gripe was directed to the School Committee, not the Teachers Union.)
@Jim Epstein. My comments weren’t directed at you. You made clear before I posted that you weren’t taking about the Union itself, but about their association with the Democratic Party. I would be more concerned about Labor’s general and national association with the Democrats if the Republicans would disassociate their campaigns from corporate big money and financial and logistical support from almost all of the wealthiest Americans. The Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they want to weaken or totally dismember labor unions, place all kinds of barriers to full participation in voting, have their most wealthy supporters buy up most of commercial local media, redirect federal, state and local judiciaries and control, or dismember other public institutions and hobble others such as the 2020 Census. I worked for many years at EPA down in Washington. I know what they have done within my former agency and in other government departments and agencies. It’s shameful and disgusting. There’s going to be hell to pay when all of this finally comes out in some coherent fashion.
Bob Burke, your expanded comment requires answer.
Rather than what you say, many of the very wealthiest Americans, including virtually all of the Silicon billionaires and multi-millionaires are Democrats, not Republicans; both Republicans AND Democrats receive corporate big money and financial and logistical support, while the Democrats receive the great bulk of all the money and support from the major non-profits, endowments, and foundations, as well as probably 99% of the College/University establishment support throughout the country.
In this day and age, it is a myth that the Republicans largely represent the rich; in reality the GOP largely now represents the working class.
Regarding the labor unions, the GOP concern is against GOVERNMENT labor unions, not private industry labor unions which more and more are not needed in this era of technology and where there is growing existing corporate legal and other required obligation to its workers.
What you call voting barriers are merely basic identification requirements for voting, to avoid the widespread illegal and cheating incidents of largely Democrat voters. In any event, what is wrong with requiring ID for voting?
Insofar as media, you must be kidding — certainly you are aware that the mainstream media (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post etc. etc.) is more than in bed with the Democrat Party — really more than an arm of the Democrat Party (where we’ve arrived at the point that the CNN and other media talking heads are now the drivers and the Democrat politicians the passengers).
Insofar as EPA, there has been regulatory overreach in many areas — with the greatest fault the utter reliance on global warming theory as “established” and in so doing dismissing all questions from the other side of the debate and at the same time avoiding true cost-benefit analysis as to any remedies.
And, your insertion of descriptors like “shameful” and “disgusting” merely confirm how many Democrats gratuitously insult the other side rather than engage in legitimate discussion.
@Jim Epstein. Thanks for the dialogue some of which I agree with, particularly the presence of big money in both parties. I’ve also given likes to some of the things you have written
Climate change: Virtually every nation, every credible international scientific organization, former Defense Secretary James Mattis and most other parts of our own Department of Defense acknowledge the seriousness of climate change, it’s profound impact on many aspects of national security, and the urgent need to do everything possible to avert a global catastrophe that will take many forms.
I have some direct experience with this, albeit from some time ago. For 25 years, I worked at EPA in Washington, most of it in the Agency’s Air and Radiation office. I helped compile, write and edit many technical and public information publications related to 10 year trends in air quality, and detailed descriptions of major national and international air quality issues and programs—acid precipitation, lead in gasoline, toxic air pollutants, stratospheric ozone depletion etc. Sometime in 1984, the first technical documents about climate change came across my desk. I searched as many publications as I could find and talked to as many experts as possible. It didn’t take all that long to realize that, if true, the global seriousness of climate change could almost certainly dwarf all the other things I was working on.
It took me more than 2 years to get a summary of climate change research into the Agency’s Annual Trends Report. The Agency’s air quality scientists and researchers were very supportive, but cautious about jumping the gun on putting anything in print that could be disproved at a later date. I still have a copy of the trends report that finally went out to the public in 1987. Everything we included is occurring now, but at an accelerated rate. The tragedy is that we all blithely assumed this country and the international community would move in concert to address it once the threat became more verifiable. Of course, this did not happen. You may be right that some of the proposed solutions may not be “cost effective” , but this is probably a minor consideration in terms of all that seems to be at stake for the planet.
Too long, but some parting points:
I make no apology for saying most of the climate deniers have been “shameful” and “disgusting” because extractive industries and wealthy anti regulatory donors have been the chief financiers of these efforts. They did it for their bottom line; Just like the tobacco industry hid or obscured the health effects of smoking for their bottom line.
Young folks aren’t going to remember the climate deniers very fondly.
“Cost benefit analyses” may be the least of our problems when the total bill for climate change comes due which it almost certainly is beginning to do already.
Couldn’t agree more that some of EPA’s regulatory measures have been overbearing–some even counterproductive because they defied reality. Some, however, the Agency had no choice but to promulgate because of Congressional mandates. I saw this first hand when I was on the receiving end working for various state agencies. That said, just recall what this part of Massachusetts looked like in 1971 versus what it is today. Boston Harbor and the Charles are infinitely cleaner now than they were then. and this has spawned all kinds of recreational and business activities that would have been otherwise impossible. Hazardous waste sites that poisoned nearby residents are under pretty stringent regulatory controls. The ambient air is so much cleaner–very few smog days, even with more than twice the number of vehicles on the road. Kids no longer have to ingest lead near roadways because we now have only unleaded gasoline. Acid precipitation on the land and stratospheric ozone depletion are all better controlled now than in decades past. All of these improvements are the result of federal and state regulations. I shudder to think what this area would look like if these regulatory initiatives hadn’t taken place.
Your comment that the modern national GOP supports private sector unions will come as a surprise to friends of mine who work for unions representing Verizon workers, sheet metal workers and iron workers.
I think I was clear that I was talking only about conservative (right wing) dominance of local radio and television stations outside of metropolitan areas. Go to North Worcester County, turn on the AM radio and search the dial. English language stations are almost completely dominated by conservative talk radio, most of it quite nasty. That’s pretty much what I’ve found on the dial in all rural and exurban parts of this country. Highly focused and repetitive right wing talk radio, right wing religious broadcasting with a not entirely coherent voice of opposition from an NPR station. Trump stepped into a very fertile field throughout most of rural and exurban America.
Caveat. These are only the comments of one person and derive from what I have seen or worked through. At 82, I’m well aware of my biases. I’m proven wrong on something virtually every day. That said, I do think I’ve hit a few nails on the head.
Bob Burke,
1. Don’t conflate ‘global warming’ with other actual, addressable, and fixable environmental problems.
2. ‘Global warming’ if actual as you claim would entail essentially shutting down modern western industrial civilization (as well as China’s, India’s , and modernization of Africa’s which far negates any progress made in the West) in order to have appreciable impact, and expenditure of such vast resources and wealth as utterly to bankrupt our economy and society.
3. Even if ‘global warming’ was actual as you claim, cost-benefit analysis would also include comparison of cost physically to accommodate to ‘global warming’ impacts such as rising sea level vs. cost to endeavor to reduce ‘global warming, the former being far far less in cost.
4. With all due respect, to say ‘global warming’ is the most important issue of national security (using the common application of the term “national security” vis a vis other threatening nations) is balderdash.
5. Conservative talk radio remains dominant vs. liberal talk radio simply because conservative talk radio is commercially viable and even profitable (NPS is non-profit subsidized). Liberal talk radio is simply not because (1) few listen and (2) liberal views never hold up in the face of listener scrutiny, challenge and debate — as opposed to TV where the programming is controlled and kept away from true debate and counter-balance of ideas.