Emergency Teacher (20 page)

She shrugged. “I wouldn't worry about it. Most of these kids don't even pick the report card up.”

“My students do care,” I told her.

“See Mrs. G. about it,” she said.

In her office, Mrs. G. immediately informed me she had nothing to do with whatever my concern was and directed me to see Mrs. Liss, the attendance lady and all-around administrative person. When I finally found her, she sent me back in a circle: Mrs. G. was in charge of report cards, she said.

“Look, Mrs. Liss,” I said, panting. “Can we get this changed in time?”

Mrs. Liss was a sweet, absentminded veteran teacher who'd been in the Philadelphia school system since the early 1960s, the days when it actually worked. “It's too late now for this term,” she answered. “Oh, Ms. Asquith, I wouldn't worry. The students don't even look at them.”

Later that day the principal called an after-school report card meeting. “From the beginning of the year,” she said, “I've said that failure is not an option at Julia de Burgos. Yet, I've seen that many of you have not only failed students, but given grades as low as the 30s and 40s.” She gripped the podium like a shield. “Failing a student, any student, with a grade as low as a 50 this early on in the year virtually eliminates their chances of passing the year,” she said. A student's final grade was cumulative, based on a total of four grades, each given every few months.

“I'm not saying that you should automatically pass a student. I am not saying that.” What she did say was that she wanted us to raise this first grade up to at least a 64 so that, despite the failing grade, there was still a chance to raise the mark by the end of the year. This, she stressed, was in accordance with school district policy. “Let's give them a chance. It's only fair,” she added.

No one said anything. Her curt, no-nonsense tone implied that this was not open for discussion.

“Additionally,” she said, “I saw that a lot of the special education students had been failed.”

She told us that, by law, special ed students had to have an individualized education plan (IEP), which was an analysis of their disabilities, along with strategies for teaching to those disabilities. I wasn't sure whether our students had IEPs. Mr. Whitehorne complained that they were incredibly labor intensive to create. The student had to be screened and tested. A parent had to come in for a meeting. Some students might need extra test-taking time or a personal reading tutor or a bilingual text.

How could we possibly evaluate every special ed student for an IEP? We had only a few guidance counselors for eight hundred students. There were only two full-time special ed teachers left for one hundred special ed kids, and one of those teachers worked full-time on “paperwork.” Even if the students had IEPs, there was no teacher to follow them.

The rule was if we couldn't provide an education that fit their special needs, we couldn't hold them responsible for their performance. So, education or not, we had to pass them all. I wondered who in my class was officially labeled special education.

Mrs. G. raised her hand. “And since we have no ESOL program, you can't fail ESOL kids, either.”

Wait a minute. I thought every student in my class was labeled ESOL.

The principal nodded her head in agreement. The atmosphere thickened into a palpable quiet. Most of the teachers remained expressionless, fixed in the wooden chairs like robots.

“Shut that off,” the principal said.

There was a student in the corner with a video camera. Earlier they had been filming a portion of the vice principal's ten-year anniversary celebration. The kid had kept the camera on, recording everything the principal had said. She strode around the library card catalogue toward him, but he continued to film her.

“Uh, let's turn that off,” she said. “I mean it. Off.”

The student squinted through the eyepiece, backing away from her. He refused to put the camera down. “Let's have it,” she said. “Okay, Okay now ... we don't want this on film. We don't want to be on
Hard Copy
tomorrow.”

Several teachers laughed. The principal attempted to chuckle along, like she was in on the joke. A few teachers whispered animatedly and smiled. Then Mr. T., the former lawyer, stood up from his seat in the center of the room.

“Headline,” he shouted, spreading his arms: “SCHOOL FAILS SPECIAL ED STUDENTS!”

With that, the whole room erupted into laughter. Teachers were doubling over, making more jokes. I laughed, too. What she was telling us to do was so unbelievably wrong, yet she had been doing her best to normalize it. No one had the guts to stand up and challenge her, but now we didn't have to. A student had caught her.

The principal forced out a few more chuckles, making sure everyone saw that she was also in on the joke. I couldn't stop laughing as she calmly walked over to the student with the camera, plucked it from his hands, and shut it off.

The principal announced that Mr. Rougeux and I tied for first place in her Ice-Cream Scoop Reading Contest. We received school-wide recognition over the intercom. This was a huge victory, and my students encircled me, cheering and exchanging high fives. They were so proud of themselves, and we were on a high for the entire afternoon. Neither Mrs. G. nor anyone else on my “team” congratulated us, but I no longer expected it. I gave each student a “recognition” certificate to take home to their families. We planned out where we would put the library of books that the principal had said would be our reward.

There were no students on Monday. Imagine ... a day with only adults—just like most people's jobs! The school felt both hauntingly abandoned and pleasant. I got two more awards for perfect attendance, and I could crack jokes, discuss world politics, and gossip about my weekend. God, I missed adults.

By the end of the day, though, I missed kids again. One of the cluster administrators droned on for an hour about a multimillion-dollar federal grant we just won.

“What has it been spent on so far at our school?” I asked.

“It has helped pay for the tutors from La Salle University. You know, so we could add a little boost to their salary to make the job more attractive. That's about it.”

That didn't even begin to make a dent in the money. How about some more workbooks? Either the money was wasted, or this cluster lady was clueless, and why did we have to sit through this, anyway? Our days were so rushed, and the problems so time consuming, that a full day training with colleagues was precious. This wasn't a day for us to learn to better help students. It was a day for the cluster people to fulfill requirements of their grant-money salaries.

Then the principal took center stage. I wondered if she was still going to try to maintain this outward appearance in front of her bosses that our school was fine. How could she? I couldn't help but think about those first few meetings, and how I now weighed everything she said against the promises she made in the beginning.

“We are the lowest-achieving middle school in the city,” she began. “There are forty-two middle schools, and we are forty-second. I don't want to say we have great teachers and a great program and are making changes, that despite these strengths we are still number forty-two. That just doesn't validate anything we do.”

For the first time it occurred to me that this year had been a failure for her, too. It wasn't entirely her fault. How did she convince herself to come to work every day? At the end of the year, would she wonder if she had suffered through 180 days for nothing? I often wondered if certain kids would have been better off staying at home in front of the TV or roaming the streets, because at least then they wouldn't have been packed together like sticks of dynamite.

When the training finally started, the principal posted three large white pieces of paper on a blackboard. She listed “What Works,” “What Needs to Be Fixed,” and “What Doesn't Work.” She steered us toward problems like lockers and agendas, but one teacher after another interrupted to complain that the principal was trying to pressure teachers into changing grades and passing every student.

“If the student fails marking period one, two, and three, and we've done some things to help, then the parent comes in at the fourth marking period and goes ballistic, why should we have to pass them?” George the math teacher asked. “Isn't that unfair?

Indeed—and illegal, too. Just last year, the school board had abolished social promotion. Social promotion meant that once students reached a certain age, they were to be promoted regardless of their grades. With social promotion, the city had the problem of illiterate twelfth-graders. So they abolished it, and now we had the flip side problem of fourteen-year-old sixth-graders. Who knew what was worse? The principal seemed to prefer the latter.

Mr. Whitehorne stood up and complained that the requirements were still too burdensome. “What we have is de facto social promotion. We've erected so many hurdles that they can't fail.”

Ms. Davis, the science teacher, was nodding at Mr. Whitehorne. She was looking at a summer of paperwork if she stuck to her guns to fail most of her class.

The principal sounded defensive: “You guys have known since September what is required. I have parents in here that say ‘I can't believe my child failed and the teacher never called me.' Parents are more informed than they used to be and they know their rights. As a parent you would be highly indignant if your child failed and you didn't know about it. I'm just saying, protect yourselves.”

Soon, she would clarify exactly what she meant.

T
hird-marking-period report cards were due in just a few weeks, and the complaints from that last meeting had now swelled into an uproar. “Failure is not an option at Julia de Burgos” became a sarcastic sneer among teachers, especially after the principal sent around the following memo:

• 1. For all students who may receive a failing 3rd report card, please submit the following by Wednesday March 15th.
  
  1. A copy of all the grades upon which you base this decision.
     
  2. A list of all the times you contacted parents regarding the imminent failure.
     
  3. A copy of the complete CSP Tier 1 report that your team worked on.
     [This was a four- to six-page paper that a teacher had to complete with her team. It documented the problem, strategies, separate work given, and outside sources the teacher arranged to help the student.]
     
  4. A behavior performance review.
     [This was a two-pager in which the child's behavior and all the teacher's responses were recorded and dated.]
     
  5. A list of all supports and accommodations you used to pass this child.
     
  6. A list of the activities that the student needs to make up to pass.
     

This list of requirements was intentionally impossible to meet. Failing a student would require a full-time secretary, according to this memo. The problem was not only the paperwork involved, but all the meetings with parents and other teachers. Furthermore, what happened to student accountability? Why did we have to have supports and accommodations for each and every child? Why did we have to give them second-chance “activities” they could do to pass? Plenty of students in my class worked hard to pass the first time around.

And where did that leave a student like Jovani?

The school hadn't provided Jovani with special ed, ESOL materials, a trained teacher, aides, a psychological evaluation—any of the supports he was legally entitled to. Jovani hadn't even received any textbooks. What were we holding him accountable to? The final result would be that I would pass him on to the seventh grade as a student who couldn't read, write, or do much else academically. Sadly, I could say the same for José R., Ronny, Yomari, and about six others. When I actually counted, I was astonished—that was 25 percent of my class.

That wasn't the end of the memo. Just in case teachers still had too much wiggle room, the principal added on these other requirements:

• 2. No special education students are to receive a grade lower than “65” or a “Withdrawal” without written permission of the Principal.
  
• 3. No student is to receive a grade lower than a “64.”
  
• 4. Students attending and completing satisfactory work in Saturday School will have the Saturday School grade count as 25% of their marks.
  

Ms. Davis had been persuaded to raise all grades to 64, supposedly to give her students a chance to pass the year. The principal created this Saturday School, and even if a kid received a grade as low as 66 it was enough to eke by. The students would pass. The principal would boast a high-pass rate. Her accomplishments would be twice as impressive.

At the bottom of her memo, our call to arms:

During lunch one day, I visited the main office to look through my students' files. I was alone except for a few secretaries. The vice principal and the team leaders handled most of the discipline in their offices, so it was rare for a student to come in. A parent sat in the waiting bench by the door, his tough face tucked into the flannel lining of his scuffed jacket. Staring down at him from high on the wall was the melancholy face of Julia de Burgos, the Puerto Rican poet. I knelt on the floor, pulled open a cabinet door, and turned first to Jovani's file. I flipped through my students' names again and again. Jovani's file was missing. I continued to look and couldn't find several other students' files, either.

Behind me, a secretary clicked away at her computer. I said, “Excuse me, I'm looking for some students' files, and they're not in here.”

“What's his name?” She typed Jovani's name into the computer and found him registered. “His records must be at his old school,” she told me. “We'll call them and have them send it over.”

Back in the files, I gazed at old class photos of my students. They looked so small and cute, with bows in their hair and missing front teeth. About half the class came from Cramp Elementary School, a kindergarten through fifth grade about one mile north of Julia de Burgos. There were state and city test scores, all of which were under twenty out of one hundred, and some were as low as one. There were old teacher reports describing some students as “wonderful in class but behind academically” and some as having “anger inside.” Many folders were missing; others had missing information. José R.'s thin folder made no mention of special education. One student's folder didn't mention any special status either, even though Mrs. G. specifically told me this student was evaluated as special ed and that I should go read his folder.

The big surprise for me was the number of students in my class who had already been retained or left back. Scanning all my students' files, I learned half had repeated a grade twice. They weren't even in middle school and had been held back twice? I realized why there were so many thirteen-year-olds in my sixth-grade class. I rested my elbows on the cabinet in frustration. For months I had puzzled over why past teachers would promote illiterate students. They hadn't. In light of this, my question wasn't Should I pass or fail them? but How did I make them learn? Likewise, who cared whether Jovani was labeled special education? We didn't even have a working kitchen in our cafeteria. There were no special ed services available for him here.

It was true. Failure was not an option.