My sister got her layoff notice yesterday. After teaching 5th grade for three years in an Orange County school district, and having achieved “permanent” status, she was told her services will no longer be needed as of the end of the school year. By all accounts her students’ parents loved her, and as she told me last night, “I don’t know what else I would do, teaching is all I’ve ever wanted to do.” And that’s true, ever since she taught our cousin what a fork was. Teaching is the family business, and now, she’s been told her dreams are no longer possible because California has stopped caring about schools.
She is not alone in watching her hopes and dreams vanish. Over 20,000 of her fellow teachers have been pink slipped, with LA Unified alone firing 9,000 teachers. Uncounted numbers of support staff – the people who answer the phones, who drive the buses, who enable teachers to focus on their jobs, are getting laid off as well. Nobody in Sacramento or the offices of the Zombie Death Cult have been able to explain how this is going to help our state survive economic crisis.
The mass layoffs are an act so vile and insane that it almost defies description. Teachers should be the last people in society laid off, before almost everyone else but the technicians at the water treatment plant. To engage in a mass firing of teachers in the midst of a Depression is like a man stranded in the desert poking out his eyes with a stick because the sun is too bright. Sure, it might help temporarily, but eventually you’re going to want to see where you’re going, and wish you’d never acted so rashly back there on the dune.
Here at Calitics we have repeatedly explained why these layoffs are happening – a conservative veto (the 2/3rds rule) enables Republicans to starve government of revenue and then force crippling cuts while Democrats fail to craft a coherent response. Our knowledge of those underlying causes should not blind us to the insanity of these layoffs.
These pink slips also make a mockery of President Obama’s education plans, which revolve around trying to attract new teachers to the profession:
And so today, I am calling on a new generation of Americans to step forward and serve our country in our classrooms. If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make the most of your talents and dedication; if you want to make your mark with a legacy that will endure – join the teaching profession. America needs you.
Such words ring hollow here in California, where those who already have stepped forward to make the most of their talents and to make a difference in the life of our nation have discovered that the legacy that will endure is a pink slip telling them “sorry, we don’t really want you after all.”
As Chris Bowers pointed out yesterday Obama’s education plans have an overemphasis on dealing with “bad teachers”:
I don’t entirely understand why talk of making teachers work harder, making their profesion more competitive, and making their job secure is so common in America. We don’t talk about making the lives of other people who work in public service, such as soldiers and first responders–or even health care workers–in such a foreboding way. If, as a nation, we actually want to solve our teacher shortage, part of that is going to mean dropping our constant national threats to make teachers lives more difficult. That is just a really, really bad way to recruit and retain teachers.
Obama’s efforts to attract and retain the good teachers is simply impossible and unrealistic when those teachers who, like my sister and her 20,000 colleagues, have been given glowing reviews from administrators and parents alike and yet still find themselves turned away from the career they love.
His plans also suggest he is too wound up in what education writer Stanley Fish called the neoliberalization of education – the belief that education reform involves introducing market forces into schools, even though market forces prioritize money and denigrate other values such as good teaching, care for students, and building communities.
If Barack Obama wants to be serious about education reform, he needs to realize that you must first stop the bleeding before you can do anything else. The US Senate’s decision to gut the state stabilization funds is behind the mass layoffs here in California. That act will neutralized the effect of the stimulus in California and cause lasting damage to a generation of young people whose education has been sacrificed to appease Republicans in Sacramento and the US Senate.
Before Obama focuses on how to fire bad teachers, he needs to first ensure that we retain the good ones. If teaching becomes seen as a profession where quality work brings no job security, then reforms are doomed from the outset.
