From Journalist to Teacher: One Reporter's Year in the Classroom

From Journalist to Teacher: One Reporter's Year in the Classroom

by Christina Asquith

One summer day I saw an advertisement by the Philadelphia School District telling me I could "make a difference in a child's life" by becoming a teacher. Like most education journalists, I cared about the schools and covered them daily. Yet I was clueless about actual life behind the classroom door. The timing of the advertisement was perfect: I was 25 years old and about to finish The Philadelphia Inquirer's two-year reporting program and look for a job. I wondered whether leaving journalism for a year would damage my career path. But I felt determined to see the story first-hand. The school recruiter fanned the flames of my idealism: "Believe me, we need you more than you need us," he told me, a bit too cheerily.

Through the district's 'emergency-certification" program, new recruits only needed a college degree and a clean police record to teach ("A B.A. and a heartbeat," teachers joked). The school district gave me a few days formal training in lesson plans, and I was required to enroll in night classes at the local university to work towards my masters in education. My assigned school -- surprise, surprise -- was ranked 42nd among 42 of the city's middle schools. (The teachers' union contract specified that the more experienced teachers had first pick of schools, leaving the tough-to-teach schools for the rookies.) My choice, Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School, was housed in a 100-year-old building covered with gang-tag graffiti. The first morning, I drove past rows of abandoned houses and junked cars and saw hundreds of kids rowdily pushing each other around in front of the school. Nervously, I entered the main office and took my class list out of my mail box: "Yahaira Colon, Jose Ramos, Jovani Merced..." This was terrifying - I had been given only two days' formal training.

At this time, there were 1,200 other "emergency-certified' teachers like me in the Philadelphia School District, and a growing number of us around the country. School districts began allowing emergency certifications or "alternatively certified" teachers as a quick-fix solution to the teacher shortage years ago. In the best cases, this approach attracted retired scientists and military commanders looking for a second career but unwilling to go back to school for several years to complete their teacher certification. However, the majority of the "emergency-certified teachers" were like me: young, untrained and naively believing that good intentions were enough to handle a classroom of kids.

When outsiders talk about the challenges of teaching, they often overlook physical exhaustion. I awoke each day at 6:30 a.m., and the bedlam began at 8:15 a.m. and continued without pause for the next seven hours. It was like being on a different breaking news story every 45 minutes of every day, with only four minutes between each story and no time for lunch. Post-work hours were devoted to desperately scrambling to prepare for the pandemonium of the following day. Furthermore, instead of being in a newsroom full of sound-minded adults, I was surrounded by shrieking, irrational, attention-seeking kids.

By September 30th, 100 new teachers in Philadelphia had already quit, according to an article in "The Philadelphia Daily News." It crossed my mind to do the same. All new teachers get sick, and I had laryngitis by October, lost weight, had bad skin and broke up with my boyfriend. I was too stressed out for a personal life.
The first few months were a maelstrom, and I would have been mortified at the thought of a journalist observing my classroom. Surprisingly, though, this was not because of the students. My 6th grade class was mostly Hispanic, low-income, and all scoring below basic on math and reading tests. There were a handful of special education students, and a handful who spoke no English (I speak Spanish). While most would consider these students, "tough-to-teach," they weren't; they were eager to learn. And yet I sadly watched a year later as my brightest students, Vanessa and Rodolfo, gave up on school forever and dropped out. As my top student, Vanessa, 12, felt bored and unchallenged by the "baby work" I had to give to the rest of the class. Rodolfo was the opposite case. At 13, he could barely read and needed constant guidance with all the assignments -- which was impossible with 30 other kids in the room. In a more organized, well-run school system, their individual needs could have been met. Our school was too chaotic. The school district was in much worse shape than the public relations department had ever allowed me to realize as a journalist.

The worst problem was vacancies. Our school of 800 students had nine teacher vacancies, leaving about 30 students, mostly special education, running around the school at any given time without a teacher. The other big problem was staff turnover/attrition. Our school principal had been hired three weeks before school began, and she was the third principal in four years. (At the end of my school year, she would leave, too.) The union-driven contract guaranteed an absence of any real leadership in the school, by refusing to let the principals choose their staff, financially reward good teachers or fire bad ones. The union openly discouraged teachers from working overtime or arriving early, and created a do-the-least-you-can-get-away-with culture. Parents of special education students were routinely misled, and many didn't know their children had untrained teachers or rotating substitutes. Anyway, without a readily-accessible charter school or a city-wide system of vouchers, parents had no alternatives but to send their children to a failing school.

Seeing the depths of the problem made me realize that failing school systems are scandals, and the newsroom ought to give them the same investigative eye it gives to police and government. We also must open our minds to different ideas being tried in education across the country, such as voucher programs, charter schools (both of which give parents a much-needed voice) and innovative schools that place students by ability, not age, and give them college-level work if they are ready.

Journalists too often try to measure a school by observing one day in the classroom. This is useful for making contacts but not much more. Instead, journalists should look at the hard numbers: teacher retention and attrition rates, vacancy rates, test scores, student transfers, graduation rates, principal turnover, percentages of college-bound seniors, applications to nearby private schools and - if possible - numbers of disciplinary transfers. Parents' opinions are another measure of a school's success.

And journalists should avoid trends in education by staying abreast of studies showing which 'best practices" are truly working, many of which can be found at www.NewTeacher.com. Most of all, don't be afraid to challenge the union.

While I do feel more sympathy for teachers, my year on the inside won't soften up my coverage. In fact, it made me even more of an advocate for reform by seeing first hand the tragedies wrought on children by a failing school and our unwillingness to expose those tragedies.

Buy "The Emergency Teacher" (West Parley Press 2005) the true story of journalist Christina Asquith's year teaching inside Philadelphia's toughest middle school. Go to www.TheEmergencyTeacher.com or www.Amazon.com. To contact the author email ChristinaAsquith@yahoo.com