My friend Noreen loves to tell a story from 30 years ago. She and another mutual friend were out a bar in lower Manhattan when they started up a conversation with a pair of guys from Wall Street. After some initial innocuous chitchat, the inevitable “so what do you do for a living” question arose and the two males learned that Noreen was a New York City kindergarten teacher and Joan, an ER nurse in a city hospital. Well, that just made for a barrel of laughs for the evening for them as they nicknamed the two of them Mary Poppins and Florence Nightingale respectively, and asked when the bar departure time was to assure the shelter would still take them in for the night since surely they couldn’t afford apartments on the salaries they were making. Needless to say their condescending attitudes didn’t make for any potential matches made from heaven and they parted ways for the night. But it is a conversation Noreen has never forgotten. “I often wonder if those guys ever got laid off when the going got bad and if they are some of the people so inclined to begrudge the security and slow and steady increases and pension accumulation teachers like me have been able to sustain over the years.” “I knew I would never be rich but I did ok for myself and have always loved my job and was willing to survive meager wages in the beginning in exchange for a rewarding career that I was intended for. “ “I live to teach, “ she added.
She loves to tell that story and I have always love to hear it because it seems so pertinent to the environment in the country for the last couple of years related to education. Though improved scores, increased literacy, a greater mastery of Math and love of Science are all viable and in fact noble goals, I can never help but feel that many of the cries in the general public for eliminating tenure and improved evaluations and accusations about union’s callousness toward education improvement to protect the concerns of teachers are a bit ill spirited in their origin.
I say that because thirty years ago teachers and nurses were not making great wages, and in fact many of their salaries were substandard. Gradually, over the years, there was an increased cognizance of the fact that to secure and retain quality professionals, a certain wage is necessary and to its credit over time, the New York City teaching scale provided an extremely competitive salary and a chance for teachers to enjoy a solidly middle class lifestyle. But when the economy soured, and so many more highly paid professionals started losing their jobs and their bonuses and their matching 401(k) plans, all of a sudden, a teaching job with its perception of security and its decent salary and its promised pension at the end, was the envy of many. A professor I once had for a Criminal Justice class as an undergraduate, once told the class, “The persecuted persecute” in reference to a concern for the mental health and ideal longevity for corrections officers in tough prisons, before the job starts affecting their personal lives. I am not convinced it’s a coincidence that the unrelenting attention on education has correlated with the downturn in the economy. A better education system is wonderful and I can see how in this increasingly competitive global society in which we live more necessary but graduates from Harvard have had trouble getting jobs in recent years so it is not likely we can blame all the supposedly bad teachers out there for all of our economic woes.
I know that a lot of things have changed in 30 years, I know public pensions have been difficult to support iuu8and I know all of the reasons why people find tenure antiquated. I understand that nothing could be more important than the education of our young. And that people may abhor the idea that a poor or non-functioning teacher keeps a job. There are not many professions left with tenure although they are significant in numbers served since police and fireman and all civil servants operate through seniority. But the fact is, at least in my experience having been in business, where everyone is judged under a performance plan and now in education, where you are graded on evaluations, teachers do not operate, conduct themselves or act with callous disregard about the way they are rated because they feel, “there’s nothing they can do to us.” On the contrary, they take the same personal pride in the ratings they receive as any other professional. As a guidance counselor, I have seen teachers receive evaluations they were not comfortable with in great distress upon hearing the news and with the same determination to improve as I saw when it happened to business professionals. We get rated. We get reprimanded. We are subject to if not formal, informal evaluations by peers if we fall short in any way. It only takes not doing right by a student to make a teacher make another teacher feel inferior in a heartbeat.
Personally, I have been rated and evaluated most of my professional life so it does matter one way or the other really in that I still have a motivation to do my job as well as possible from both an ethical and practical perspective. Yet, the fact remains that tenure has always been a nice job attraction as a tradeoff for a job which while rewarding can be much less diversified than many other careers, offers the ability to make a living but significantly restricts earning potential for many professionals whose education may have allowed them to earn much more, which requires a godly amount of patience, virtually no glamour, no bonuses, no unexpected big promotions, no trips, no frequent mileage points.
But that’s ok as the vast majority of teachers in their positions now wouldn’t have it any other way as they love what they do and they are good at it. I am not sure so sure future graduates will have the luxury of feeling the same way with the turbulent waters created now.
When all of the attacks, first among people in the public through letters to editors and loud voices at NYC and other Board of Ed meetings began a couple of years ago, I remember one fellow teacher putting it all very simply, “If they are so resentful that we have benefits no one else does, why didn’t they become teachers?’ At the time, I thought we couldn’t just position things like that and we had to defend ourselves. Now, I am not so sure she didn’t nail the crux of the matter right there.
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