So... mic check, 1, 2... 1, 2? Is this thing on? Ok... Here goes...
My name is Mike Lamb, recently morphed to Michael Alba Lamb, through marriage. I've done most things in my life against the grain, not a fan of the grain, and this was no different. I figure it's tweaking the system a little to equate my wife's name with my own. And if people in other parts of the world can have multiple names, why can't us white boys? How many names did Dikembe Mutumbo have? 8? My wife is Panamanian and in Latin America everyone has at least 4 names. You’re someone of someone, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Besides, has a nice flow to it, lots of L's. I admit, I find it a bit uncomfortable using the name sometimes, because in my schizophrenic iconoclasm I do like to fit in. So there you have me, Michael A.L., MAL. Great, my monogram means bad. Off to a good start…
I'm an 11th grade English teacher at South Bronx HS, heading into my 10th year. With an English B.A. from Cal Berkeley, an Education M.A. from Harvard and certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (equivalent to a Ph.D. in the New York City pay scale) I will make $78,885 this year. By year 22 I can top out at $100,049/year. In 2009 the NYC-based think tank Center for an Urban Future, published their research findings that it takes at least $123,322/year to be middle class in New York City.
I am from Scarsdale, NY, one of the most affluent suburbs in the world. We scraped by on the upper middle-class end of town, Edgewood, and enjoyed the best environment and education New York has to offer. I was always taught that a key to optimizing one's education is to follow one's heart, pursue one's passion. By doing so, I've effectively revoked my membership in said supportive environment. My wife and I have lived in her mother's home for four years, saving up enough money to buy a home in Woodlawn. Woodlawn is the last Irish enclave in the Bronx. It's home to young Irish immigrants looking to take a bite of the Big Apple and a population of more entrenched working class Irish-American families. My future children are unlikely to enjoy the socio-economic advantages I did.
When I started at South Bronx HS in 2002, the city was launching a giant reform effort to sub-divide high schools into 'small schools'. After sitting down with founding Principal Ana Maldonado, I began at SB High with Mott Haven Village Preparatory HS. I liked their vision of community uplift rather than escape, and they were run by local veterans of the South Bronx's struggle for survival and vitality since the '60's, not outsiders. This reform coincided with the explosive rise of Teach for America and a well-intentioned trend among white middle-class college grads to try their hand at teaching the troubled youth from the other side of the tracks. According to numbers I was taught at Harvard, 90% of public school teachers in the U.S. are white.
Of the 5 teachers who started the school in 2002, I was the only one left by fall of 2006. As the school heads into its 10th year, the bloom is off the rose. That initial excitement from the founding of so many schools, 21 in the Bronx that fall of '02, backed by Bill Gates, New Visions, Bloomberg & Klein has tapered off as the new small schools become other New York City public schools. And New York City public schools, as other public schools of America's ghettos, face debilitating levels of turnover and teacher quality.
Each new year brings new departures. Another bouquet of flowers, another commemorative plaque, another speech about how much someone has learned from teaching. The kicker is that generally the more educated and talented one is, the more likely one is to leave. As Steven Brill's new critique of our education system, Class Warfare, points out, "Roughly 20 percent [of New York City teachers] quit after the first year alone, and 40 percent after just three years in the system." And the revolving door of chipper 20-somethings teaching the poor as a stepping stone tends to involve us hippy Humanities folk. Math and Science? You don't want to know. American Math & Science majors usually don't bound out of college with eyes on a 10th grade Math position in the ghetto as the goal of all that late night studying. New York City offers teachers in Third World countries incentives, like two years without income tax, to fill its classrooms in Math, Science, Foreign Language and other hard to staff areas. This arrangement often involves ample culture shock. American teens, Bronx teens, don't seem to share the same automated level of respect for their elders as say a Tanzanian, Thai or Trinidadian 'teen', if such a thing even exists. Supposedly America has an “unemployment” problem. To the contrary, New York City is indebted to the immigrants who are heroes back home for sticking with the jobs that Americans don’t want to do.
This past year, my ninth, I finally felt the creeping sensations that make one understand the older veterans who hold on, punching the clock, counting the checks, trudging through failure with the kids. In the campaign against the achievement gap, urban teachers are being asked to run a three-ring circus in a one-room schoolhouse. Like Laura Engels, our rooms are composed of students from 2nd to 11th grade level. To differentiate for all learning styles and captivate a disenfranchised audience, our lessons need to provide a carnival of interactive experiences. The physical energy it takes to capture various classes of needy teens throughout a day can feel like a task meant for 20-somethings exclusively. Teaching, as I experienced it for my lengthy student career on the sunny side of the tracks, is not remotely sufficient. Leaning on my desk and asking, 'So what did you think of chapter 11?" is not going to cut it. The energy and time investment necessary to create a dynamic classroom where oppressed kids are learning is not congruous with our compensation. So career urban teachers figure out methods for getting by, doing adequate jobs for their skill level, while working a side hustle or two to try to approach a middle-class life.
The bottom line is America, you get what you pay for. If you want the ‘best & brightest’ working in our ghettos, then you have to pay for the best and brightest. But how does this happen? I am 34 years old, and I can visit Scarsdale High School tomorrow to check in with some of my old teachers. They have the career teachers, excellent craftsmen and women, because that community wouldn’t settle for anything less and they can pool their resources to pay for it. And do they pay for it, with some of the highest property taxes in the U.S. Mott Haven cannot raise those kinds of funds from the community. So how do we pay to keep talented teachers in the hood?
America as a whole has to realize that racial hierarchy is a curse on our country. I’m not arguing for a system of interminable dependency on hand-outs, like the current welfare system so often works, everyone rich & poor alike have to pay their share. The point is that we have to prioritize racial equity on the national agenda. Our nation, just as many others, the entire Americas, has thrived off a racial caste system for hundreds of years. To relegate people and compartmentalize people based on these American racial identities for their lives and the lives of their children’s children is barbaric. We should aspire to the principles of the movement that brought America and France and Haiti and Latin America about, the Enlightenment. These ideas that every human has equal rights to enjoy life as master of his/her destiny. No one is born to be someone else’s serf or slave. We all have God within us. These thoughts from the 17th & 18th centuries, from Locke and Rousseau, to Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, to L’Ouverture and Bolivar, inspire people of all backgrounds to agree that each human life is precious and deserving of freedom to pursue happiness. How can such an enlightened world live in a society organized by color? As any child can tell by traveling our cities & towns on a bus or train, different colored people live in different sections under different conditions. How brutally simple that is for such a complex animal.
I admit, I am a lowly teacher, who knows little of how public/private funds can be allocated from a bird’s eye view. But I do know this. If we keep paying teachers who work in historically oppressed communities poorly, then those kids will get poor educations. And coming down on us teachers with unsustainable union-busting charter schools and disrespect in the public eye is not going to make the crisis any easier. W.E.B. DuBios began the 1900’s stating the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color-line. Let’s make the priority of this century be the end of the color-line. If we can rebuild Europe, then I’m sure we can take some time off from building Iraq and Afghanistan to build the ghettos of our country into thriving communities. As Martin Luther King told Playboy in 1965, “…after World War Two, during the years when it became policy to build and maintain the largest military machine the world has ever known, America also took upon itself, through the Marshall Plan and other measures, the financial relief and rehabilitation of millions of European people. If America can afford to underwrite its allies and ex-enemies, it can certainly afford—and has a much greater obligation, as I see it—to do at least as well by its own no-less-needy countrymen.” As all the ‘Waiting for Superman’ finger-pointing analysis agrees, one unmistakable factor in improving poor kids’ educations is teacher quality. Let’s find a way to pay for the best for everyone. That level of education in the ghetto, the exurb, the farm town, the reservation, will be one essential spoke in the wheel of decolonization and self-sufficiency for oppressed communities of all races, progress that improves life for all Americans.
This is the situation in the public schools of America. The farther you travel away from the classroom the greater your financial and professional rewards.
-Frank McCourt, Teacher Man
