Becoming a Teacher

Before moving to New York, I was alerted to the education crisis in the US through work with an inter-generational collective organizing to solve the extremely high drop out rate in my hometown. I wanted to be involved in the struggle in a meaningful way, and thought I would be best suited to do that in the classroom. I was accepted to a certification program in NYC and moved out here to work at one of the new small public high schools.

My first year teaching I worked in a small school with 87 students and 9 teachers. The principal of my school had been recruited and trained by a program called “The Leadership Academy.” Principals in this program go to school for two years to learn how to be a principal. While they’re in school they have an internship where they shadow a principal. They get their own school to lead at the end of the two years. Like many small schools, my school had amazing, dedicated teachers who were mostly new to teaching.

My first year of teaching was challenging. During that year our principal was making a lot of mistakes, but we could, for the most part, clean them up. There were discipline problems among the students, but it was manageable. During that year, we were required to go to lots of staff meetings. The principal’s philosophy was that we’re going to make this school a community and we’re all going to love it. The teachers agreed to go to these endless meetings because we were trying to go with the spirit of the new school.

When Principals Attack

We didn’t really trust the principal, though. He would keep us in meetings forever, after contractual hours, and then not follow through on decisions we made. He’d go after teachers and attack them. He chose a friend of mine as his target. He threatened her with a bad rating and told her that if she agreed to leave the school, he’d give her a good rating all to get her to leave. She eventually had to leave the school.

Our principal learned to go after teachers in the Leadership Academy. It’s called the Welch Model, and the idea is that you fire 10% of your staff each year. The theory is that you cut off the bottom 10% of the workforce and keep the super-productive workforce who are working their assess off. Those who remain are willing to adhere to the rules and expectations placed on them, because they are so scared of being fired. The principal was trying to fire two of my co-workers that first year. The second year he took away one of the teacher’s license.

The first year there were a number of complaints against him. The kids didn’t like him; they didn’t think that he cared about them. He was a “nice guy,” but he would choose students to have vendettas against. He focused on a few boys and was trying to get them out of the school. The kids felt unsafe in his school.

He was very focused on theater, and prioritized it over academics. A co-worker and I developed a 4 year curriculum that would get the kids up to calculus to get them ready for college, and we proposed it to him. His response was “you know that we don’t have to offer anything above algebra.” To which I responded, “no disrespect sir, but they can’t get into college with just algebra.” He was like “Well, I’m just saying, we don’t have to offer it.” We also had this unconventional schedule with 4 classes a day that were 72 minutes long, and one day in the first semester I asked him how the students were going to get their credits to graduate with these classes? He said “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. I should work on that and get back to you.”

He created an environment in the school that was toxic, where people didn’t trust him. There was fighting among the staff and the union, because he was trying to play people off each other. He’d offer jobs to people without posting them. The in-fighting that resulted created a hard environment for the union to operate in. We got through it that first year, though, and there was even a “family feel” to the school, despite the principal’s efforts to make it a horrible place.

Violence in the Classroom

The second year was when it all went down. There were 180 kids in the school that year; a much bigger population of students than the year before. One reason that a lot of things came unraveled that year was that we didn’t have the special education services that we needed for our students. We had several self-contained students being admitted. These are students who need to be in classes of no more than 15 students with a certified special education teacher. The principal was accepting them even though we didn’t have enough special education teachers on staff to create that type of classroom. The thing about students with special education designations is that when they are admitted, extra money comes with them into the schools to cover their services. But they weren’t getting the services, so many of us were wondering “What’s happening to this money?” That was a big issue.

The second year was also pretty violent. There was not one fight in my class my first year, but there were 2-3 fights in my room the second year, and a lot more out in the hallways. There were a lot of young people who didn’t feel safe and were not getting the services that they needed, and some times the pressure became too much.

A few of my colleagues got hit that year, too. A student threw a garbage can at one paraprofessional, and hit them in the head. The principal took the child out of the class, but he was back in class later that day. According to the Chancellor’s Regulations, [hitting a teacher] is grounds for long-term suspension. The union marched into his office as a group the next morning, and demanded that the student get suspended. It took all of us to get that to happen. We shouldn’t have had to fight for our safety!

One of our teachers got pushed after a verbal back and forth with a student, and again the principal wouldn’t suspend the student right away. When we grilled him about it in a meeting, he finally the student was suspended.

In the last couple of weeks of school, my co-teacher was in an altercation with some students. There were a couple of young women who were getting riled up in my classroom, and she took them outside to quell the situation. She had gotten the students out of the room and pretty calm, awhen the principal showed up. They became agitated, and one of the girls hit the teacher on the arm and bruised her trying to get back into the room. The principal, who was standing right there as the incident happened, later denied seeing anything, and once again there had to be a fight to get the students suspended.

There was also fighting happening in the hallways and the lunchroom. When there were fights or other misbehavior in the hallway, the principal would often walk by without saying anything to the students, leaving it up to teachers, if there were any around, to step in. That sent the message to kids that they could fight and the principal didn’t care.

Getting to No

In response to all these developments, we started talking about the idea of a vote of no confidence, which would state that the principal is not fit to lead the school and ask for his removal. It’s a tool that the union and teachers have to get their principals out. It’s usually not successful, so it’s not a strong tool, but it’s there.

Even though we were having lots of union meetings about the vote of no confidence, a lot of the teachers in my school were scared to do anything about it because the principal had gone after teachers in the past.

But many of the teachers in my school were scared and untenured, so they didn’t want to file grievances, which is the accepted union channel for dealing with contract violations. As a result, we didn’t have a paper trail to document what was happening, and no one would make the paper trail that we needed, because people were so afraid. The teachers wanted to do an anonymous vote of no confidence. We talked about it for a long time.

While all this was going on, a letter was sent to the Department of Education (DOE) that was signed “the parents of students at ____ high school. The letter documented violations that had been committed by the principal. Nobody knew who wrote it; the parents didn’t put their names on the letter, because they didn’t want their kids to be singled out and targeted. In response to the letter, the DOE sent in people to question the principal and staff. The investigation was coordinated by the “Office of Special Investigation,” which is brought in where there are very serious complaints against a principal. We don’t know exactly which complaint got that office involved.

The letter convinced teachers to do something. The teachers started to get organized to write our own statement. We talked to our union rep, but his response was that without the paper trail, the vote of no confidence wouldn’t be effective. He said that we hadn’t done the work that needed to be done, but he stood behind us, and helped us draft our statement about the principal. Some of the things that we included in our statement were the fact that:

• Special education students’ needs were not being met
• The principal was denying teachers the right to disciplinary hearings and intimidating them out of having them
• The principal was going after staff members, trying to remove them from the school without valid grounds
• There were various safety violations in the school.
• He jeopardized students’ safety by leaving them unattended without Department of Education employees to supervise them
• He would leave students in his office with unlocked file cabinets that contained confidential information about students and teachers

We wrote up our statement, and held an anonymous vote of no confidence. The vote was unanimous against the principal.

Picking Up Steam

After the vote, things got rolling. We’d do actions at school where all the teachers would come in wearing the same color one day. When students asked, we’d tell them that we’re showing union solidarity. The principal noticed, and it freaked him out. We’d all walk into meetings together. We also started having very visible union meetings in the morning, and then would walk to class together afterwards.

In response to all of this, the principal started pulling students aside to write statements against teachers. He’d also write statements against teachers and ask students to sign them. He was intimidating the students; they told teachers that they were afraid to say no to him.

Even before we submitted the results of our vote of no confidence to the Board of Education, I decided that I needed to leave the school. The union had told us that these votes are usually not honored or don’t work. After we submitted the vote, the principal was still there. Nothing had worked so far, so I started looking for a new job and got one.

I didn’t want to leave the school without telling my students. In the last week of classes, I told my students that I was leaving because there were things happening at this school that were not part of my teaching philosophy. None of the teachers ever told the students that we were leaving because of the principal, but they knew that we were leaving because of him. It was hard because there were a lot of tears and anger. A few other teachers were leaving as well.

Students on the Move

One of my students was really upset, so one Friday afternoon that student got 6 or 7 students in a car and went down to the DOE, and demanded that they remove the principal from the school. The DOE staff told them that they had to get a petition signed, and then bring it back with an adult.

After they collected all the signatures, the students got one of their family members to take them back to the DOE. The parent letter, the union statement and the student petition were all coming together in June, at the end of the school year. In the midst of all the horrible things that were happening, it was really inspiring for me, as an educator and an activist, to see people coming together around a common goal and working to make it happen.

At this point, the principal’s coaches and mentors were asking him to step down. But he refused to step down, and he couldn’t be fired unless the superintendent did it. It wasn’t until the end of July that we received word that he was out.

We Did It!

For me, the whole thing was pretty scary because I was untenured, and they could fire me so easily. I am young, and there was some tension around the fact that one of the leaders of our effort to get rid of the principal was this young, inexperienced teacher. It’s important to mention that as a teacher without tenure, you’re not protected from much. There’s not a whole lot of recourse, if your principal tries to fire you.

When it was becoming clearer that the principal was going to get fired, I asked myself “how can I move away from this amazing group of people at my school?” But my friends who are union activists reminded me that I didn’t know who was coming in as the new principal. That person would very likely be another Leadership Academy person, and could have orders to get rid of the union activists in the school, which would include me.

The school has a new principal now. I’m hoping that he does right by the kids and the staff. There is a lot of potential at the school, and it is still young and has room to grow. I really am proud of my school community for pulling together and making this happen.