'Yes, But Where Are Your Credits in Recess Management 101?'
Ohanian, Susan
'Yes, But Where Are Your Credits in Recess Management 101?' Those who can't teach, certify by Susan Ohanian We've all heard about the sorry state of America's teaching profession. No less than a...
...There's no way you will be allowed in a primary classroom before you have earned six units in reading ." By now his tone was menacing...
...Can they teach it?—is perhaps the most important reform we can make...
...But to this day I can't fathom it...
...I applied to every village, hamlet, and town 1 could think of, and while many of them had openings, none would allow me to teach...
...As a teacher I realize that it won't be easy...
...What upsets me most is the knowledge that I was just one victim of a giant, little-acknowledged conspiracy against the good will and sanity of dedicated, committed teachers...
...For all the hassle I've been through, and for all the certification requirements, none of the administrators, union officials, or state examiners that I've mentioned has ever seen me teach...
...I tried to compromise...
...He replied that teachers were now a glut on the market, and that there were scores of recent graduates already qualified for the job I wanted...
...In fact, I even told myself that education courses made some sense, and that I would become a better teacher by taking them...
...The problem was that I had never been a student teacher...
...You'd be too intellectual and too radical for us," he proclaimed...
...At worst, I thought the bureau might require a course in the history of New York state and perhaps in the methods of teaching elementary math and science...
...Can't you look at my permanent certificate from the New York state education department, which qualifies me to teach English, and accordingly conclude that I couldn't have received it without having presented my official transcripts...
...On several occasions the state department of education had hired me as a consultant on reading problems...
...They wanted me to spend a semester student teaching and take two more education courses in reading...
...The superintendent told me he couldn't let anyone teach elementary education who wasn't certified in that field...
...Paper Pushing 101 I'm not suggesting that I'm a great teacher, nor do I think that standards are irrelevant...
...No less than a half dozen national commissions have given their baleful assessments of our public schools within the last year, and the poor training and the low quality of our teachers have figured prominently in their criticisms...
...The examiner handed me a form that would waive the student teaching requirement, although it still required my superintendent to attest to my having successfully taught elementary school for two years...
...I realized just how important my presence was when I found the professor pleading whenever one of his students betrayed the slightest hint of dissatisfaction, "Please don't drop this course...
...This only added insult to injury: the bureau couldn't have cared less...
...Two years after that, I started a new—experimental, of course—program for seventh and eighth graders with low reading ability...
...I figured that obtaining elementary certification would be little more than a formality...
...The High Priests aren't making sure we have competent, qualified teachers in the classroom...
...When I offered to sign a statement testifying to my willingness to sacrifice job security for satisfaction, he curtly replied, "We can't let you do that ." I never did learn why the union was so adamant...
...regardless of my elementary teaching talent, he insisted that I could not afford to succumb...
...Was the job there for me all along...
...My acquaintance with the High Priests of Certification goes back a long way, so let me start at the beginning...
...To my professor, mismanaged paper distribution was apparently the first step down the slippery slope to classroom anarchy, and he insisted that mastery of his technique would make or break a teacher...
...I knew a few people in high places at the department of education...
...After my job was eliminated, I was assured that a position awaited me at the local high school...
...If you have a job to offer, please tell me directly',' I pleaded...
...But having experienced first-hand the obsession of the High Priests with enforcing irrelevant regulations, their strict adherence to the letter of the law, and their zeal for bureaucratic pettifoggery, I've reached an opposite conclusion...
...An examiner at the bureau agreed to look through my papers and let me knowinformally— where I stood...
...Getting the signature was no trouble—and wouldn't have been even if I had been a raving incompetent...
...One professor instructed us in the psychology of the adolescent—without once mentioning sex...
...At best, the state would accept my tenure as proof that I should be allowed to teach elementary school again...
...I had letters of commendation about my work as an elementary teacher...
...But I told my superiors that I didn't want that job, that I wanted to do the kind of teaching I liked and did the best—in elementary school...
...But I've taught, really taught:' I protested, describing my harrowing year in the urban high school—a trial by fire that I thought would count for more than practice teaching...
...Many who've been teaching these kids—whose major problem is not being able to read—must now take 36 new, improved units in order to keep teaching...
...like most teachers, I'd taken a course here, a course there, and compiling all the necessary transcripts would be an exasperating chore...
...This struck me as a silly excess of bureaucratic caution, but I thought it shouldn't be too much trouble to comply...
...I accepted...
...I asked my sister, who happened to teach the subject herself...
...they had to "look out for my best interests...
...I asked...
...I felt a bit like a captive in some Kafka novel, thrown in prison and prosecuted without ever being told the charges against me...
...But my "liquidation" brought me into the educational mainstream for the first time, and I was in for some rude surprises...
...Looking back, from the perspective of a year's leave of absence, I'm not bothered so much by the hundreds of dollars I had to spend on the reading courses, or the endless wasted hours I spent stalking my new certificate...
...I had been a member for more than ten years, and had dutifully paid my $68 in annual dues...
...People who've never taken an education course think I'm joking when I tell this story, but it's true...
...A principal asked if I'd like to organize an open classroom, kindergarten through the sixth grade, with an emphasis on reading and writing...
...The superintendent hired me on the spot because of my experience in Queens working with "those colored kiddos...
...Can I get an extension, a year in which to complete these courses...
...I only know that after I was offered the job, no one ever asked to see the certificate that made it legal for me to teach those third graders...
...That's not the point',' the union representative told me...
...For 13 years I had been toiling on the educational fringes, working in experimental programs where no one had mentioned certification requirements...
...Low pay, burn-out, pushy parents, incompetent administrators, and apathetic kids are certainly problems...
...Goodlad assures us that the means already exist "for providing a continuing supply" of such persons, and I don't doubt it...
...For example, the state of New York no longer believes that a master's degree in reading is sufficient for children with "learning disabilities...
...if anything, their activities seem to be one of the major reasons such teachers never get near a classroom—or decide to leave the profession altogether...
...I'm not a very good high school teacher',' I protested, observing that I hadn't taught regular high school since my first year in the profession...
...I decided to make one, last-ditch effort to escape this bureaucratic purgatory...
...Then I realized it's exactly this attitude that keeps the circles of hell burning—once they've suffered the trials of certification, teachers feel little urge to grant absolution to other hapless souls...
...My obvious shortcomings in these areas apparently were of no concern to the state of New York...
...colleagues put on the usual culprits when they try to explain why talented people shun the profession and the best teachers are usually the first to leave...
...Nor do I agree with the emphasis many of my Susan Ohanian, a teacher on a one-year leave of absence, is a staff writer at Learning magazine...
...The union representative trotted out a new argument: if I moved to primary education, a young teacher without secondary certification would be without a job...
...It's not the easiest way to make a living...
...He agreed to waive some of his own requirements to admit me into his doctoral seminar on reading...
...He agreed that my having received tenure from the district in an elementary education job was somewhat at odds with that rule, and conceded that my status made a "potentially interesting legal point...
...Rules were rules...
...This made absolutely no sense...
...But I persisted...
...To the union, my proposed defection to the ranks of the elementary school teachers suggested willful abandonment of 12 years' seniority, assorted "vested rights',' and other mysterious but valuable commodities...
...And then I burst into tears...
...And as I handed out hammers and saws to first graders as part of my effort to spark their interest in story writing, I wondered if anyone in the district office was still worrying about intellectualism in my classroom...
...By some miracle of administrative apathy, this program lasted for six years, until the spring of 1982...
...Still, these aren't the reasons that I'm now thinking of leaving the profession after 17 years...
...In another class, we spent the entire term rewriting Greek myths...
...Back in the school district office, the secretary offered to help...
...How wrong I was...
...Unfortunately, that's the last thing that the High Priests and their apologists seem interested in...
...Even the uninitiated probably can guess the difficulty of trying to make Silas Marner meaningful to disaffected ghetto youth...
...A second demerit was that my undergraduate and graduate degrees were not in education...
...In fact, his reaction to my pleas illustrated another striking attribute of the High Priests: they don't have much of a sense of humor...
...Less than a week before school started I was in the district office, applying for work as a substitute, when I heard that some state funding had come through for a new, experimental program in remedial reading...
...This was helpful to me because I could take the course over the summer and be ready to teach the coming fall...
...Pedagogical Purgatory Then the bomb fell...
...My boss was enthusiastic...
...The government must take reasonable steps to insure two important things: that teachers know their subject matter and that they know how to teach it...
...The district had its own set of my official transcripts, and she suggested sending them to the Bureau of Certification...
...Just a few weeks before the new term was to begin, the union renewed its campaign to force me into a high school teaching job...
...don't come back, he told me, until I had the 13 units in education that were required to get an emergency teaching certificate...
...I even have a certificate of continuing eligibility, allowing me to teach reading forever and ever in New York State...
...So I found a sympathetic university professor`You know those guys in certification:' he commiserated with me, using what by now had become a standard refrain...
...For the fifth time in my 13 years of teaching I responded to the official directive, writing the necessary letters to faceless college bureaucrats so I could prove to some state bureaucrat who'd never seen me in a classroom that I was, indeed, fit to teach...
...We have the minimum number to keep it going ." The seminar gave me a new insight into why education schools are such rabidly enthusiastic allies of the High Priests of Certification: without all these requirements, a lot of their professors would be pounding the pavement, having to seek honest employment...
...If I could find an accredited course on teaching Serbo-Croatian folk tales to left-handed senior citizens of Aleutian descent, that would be just fine...
...It's late in the year...
...I must admit I was partly "at fault" for the pain and suffering that followed...
...Inspectors from the state department of education pronounced my experimental program a success...
...My years in elementary education taught me something very important: that this was the kind of teaching that made me happiest...
...Transcripts are "official:' she was told, only when they come directly from college registrars...
...This minor victory at least provided some consolation as I left the bureau, wondering if all this grief was really worth it...
...It was there that I had my next encounter with the High Priests of Certification...
...The first big surprise was the reaction of my union, the American Federation of Teachers...
...Through the grapevine, I heard that they also met with the superintendent, urging him to press me on taking the high school job that I didn't want...
...In all modesty, I also had some talent for it...
...What kind...
...The seminar was everything I'd always found education courses to be: dull, pedantic, filled with lofty theorizing and totally devoid of useful advice on how to really teach eight-year-old children how to read...
...I told him I didn't want the union offering me jobs or trying to pressure me into taking one I didn't want...
...one must also have a Ph.D...
...everything came back to the union's insistence that I take the job at the high school because it preserved my seniority...
...I was also the editor of our union newspaper...
...In fact, several administrators at the state education department wrote me letters of commendation and congratulation...
...Finally, I could pass official muster...
...In 1969 I moved to Troy, in upstate New York, and applied for a job in the public schools...
...It's a noble purpose...
...It didn't seem to bother him that I had no experience teaching seventh graders or remedial reading...
...I sought help everywhere I could find it, including weekend seminars, summer workshops, collaborative newsletters...
...Still, it gave me three credits (I picked up the other three by paying $270 tuition to enroll in an "independent study" program and write a magazine article...
...I'd given speeches at conferences on elementary education sponsored by the state department of education...
...In fact, amidst all the theory and meaningless exercises, the tips on paper distribution were the only practical things I encountered in that tortured year of night school...
...The math and science problem, I assumed...
...No one in the state department of education seemed the least bit concerned that a teacher who originally had been certified in secondary English could be tenured in elementary education...
...For one year, four nights a week, I listened to such discussions as an overview of American education policies and practices up to 1914, taught by a professor who poured most of his energy into constructing multiple choice exams...
...In fact, the classes didn't even have to remotely involve reading instruction for elementary school children...
...Nationally, many well-meaning reformers are offering similar prescriptions...
...The class also served my professor's interests...
...in—you guessed it— education...
...You'd be too intellectual for us:' the local superintendent informed me...
...Who would have suspected that some of the greatest paper pilers in the world could also shred with such abandon...
...Perhaps my most memorable class taught me how to pass out paper...
...Surely these top-level specialists who had expressed respect for my work would help me cut through the sticky morass of officialism...
...The looks of withering scorn that I received from more than one interviewer made it clear that this matter wasn't worth discussing...
...The ad used the word "crisis',' but I soon discovered that New York City's Board of Education was not so desperate as to think my master's degree in English literature qualified me to teach...
...So I meekly acquiesced to this bureaucratic stricture...
...Was it a coincidence...
...Still, I resigned myself to the bureaucratic imperative...
...Three years later, the funding for the program evaporated as quickly as it had appeared...
...Among the suggestions offered to correct these deficiencies have been higher salaries, merit pay, master teachers, abolition of tenure, and stiffer training requirements...
...These were subjects I knew little about, and if the state was going to insist on my learning more about them, it would be hard to get indignant about that...
...And I'm constantly hearing of new strategies education schools and state bureaucrats have devised to make certification rules more onerous and even less relevant to good teaching than they already are...
...Catching myself, I instead asked to see a list of precisely how many positions, like mine, had been "liquidated',' compared to the number of openings that had occured through attrition...
...All that mattered was that the class have a course code that belonged to a university department of reading...
...A basic tenet among the High Priests of Certification is that nothing can be taken on faith, not even the previous approvals of certifiers in their own bureau...
...There's one final irony...
...She sent me boxes of texts, articles, and suggestions...
...Assuming my transcripts were finally in order, the examiner told me I still needed to take some college courses...
...the relentless interrogations of the unforgiving secretary when my roll book statistics don't balance...
...He said he'd have to rely on the advice of the state education department's Bureau of Certification...
...The open education concept was canceled in favor of some other fleeting fancy, and I was out of a job once again...
...I quickly learned that I had several strikes against me...
...John Goodlad, a noted professor of education and author of numerous tomes that are required reading for education majors, recently urged the creation of a new position called "head teacher...
...For actual certification we must have official transcripts:' he told me...
...This actually struck me as reasonable, all things considered...
...But I've taught reading for 13 years:' I protested...
...Little did I realize that my avowal of pedagogical preference would brand me a troublemaker and a malcontent—and subject me to six months of bureaucratic misery...
...The examiner acted annoyed that I was wasting his time...
...I lived close to the bureau's headquarters, so I decided to pay them a visit, taking along copies of all my college transcripts...
...I'd sent official transcripts when I was recertified in New York City, and again when someone at the bureau insisted on checking on my status as a reading teacher...
...I left New York City and moved to central New Jersey when 1 got married...
...Though my longest stretch of teaching involved remedial work with seventh and eighth graders, I deliberately used the warm, close-knit elementary model rather than the more formal, statistical curriculum necessary in high school where one is required to process over 100 students a day...
...If the examiner found this odd, he didn't let on...
...Still, he insisted that he was absolutely, positively sure that accepting a position as a secondary teacher was in my "best interests ." By now it was the end of a long, tortured summer, and I phoned the superintendent...
...So I found a job at a local Youth Center— teaching kids who had dropped out of the local high school...
...You can't enter an elementary classroom without six more units in reading:' the examiner told me...
...I told the examiner he need only consult my file...
...Now I was being told that I couldn't teach elementary school, for one simple reason: I didn't know enough about reading...
...Who are the High Priests...
...they never ask for testimonials from principals, fellow teachers, or students...
...So I had to take some reading courses...
...Your primary concern must be job security',' he insisted...
...I still had to bring them official transcripts...
...They mouth a common goal: to protect the citizenry from unqualified, incompetent teachers...
...It was at this point that the superintendent offered me the third grade job I really wanted...
...Then I began the classes...
...For all they know, I could be the best teacher in New York state—or the worst...
...It didn't matter...
...This wouldn't be easy...
...The prospect of teaching such young children was daunting, but also challenging...
...My friends offered little more than a few phrases of token sympathy about how ridiculous the situation was before telling me, "I wish I could do something, but you know those guys in certification ." They'd beaten me...
...There was just one final problem: finding a job to match my new credentials...
...I couldn't have been more wrong...
...The union representative couldn't provide me with a list, confirming my suspicion that there were more than enough jobs for the teachers in my predicament...
...I studied the texts each night and the kids each day...
...An exasperating exchange of letters between the union and me followed, to little avail...
...My first impulse was to snarl, "Well, why didn't she spend her summer the way I did—getting certified...
...I've talked to several colleagues who've left the profession for good, hounded into exasperation over certification rules...
...He curtly informed me that the state wasn't claiming I didn't know enough about reading, it was merely a matter of meeting the certification requirements...
...How do you teach remedial reading...
...Of course, to be admitted to summer school I had to order another set of official transcripts, but that's another story...
...If we're truly concerned about improving the profession, then evaluating teachers according to meaningful standards—Do they know their subject...
...Reading was my strength...
...In 1973 I was given tenure, and the next year I was named Teacher of the Year for Troy...
...I made a lot of mistakes and I learned a lot—more from the kids than the texts...
...Once again, a major miscalculation...
...Wrong again...
...To qualify for this position one can't be just an excellent teacher...
...When the superintendent discovered that my degree in medieval literature was from Berkeley, my fate was sealed...
...While some of these reforms are better than others, all of them recognize the special urgency of encouraging the nation's best, most talented young people to forsake lives of tort litigation and commodities speculation for the far more useful occupation of helping to revive our floundering schools...
...I taught for a year in a large urban high school in Queens, where I quickly discovered that all the theory and history I'd learned in my education courses was as useful as a water pistol in a street gang fight...
...If one were willing to work with "those" kids, any troublesome requirements apparently could be bent...
...making sure everything on the blackboard got transcribed into braille for my blind students...
...And union officials weren't kidding about looking out for my "best interests...
...They just took my word for it...
...I also learned that the paper distribution technique I'd learned worked only with straight rows, and I wasn't a straight row teacher...
...I was rapidly realizing why most teachers I knew stuck with the same job, year after year, however much they might complain about "monotony" and "burn-out ." To change fields is to risk coming into direct contact with the High Priests of Certification...
...Meanwhile, the additional requirements will, I suspect, be one more reason that potentially good teachers steer clear of the profession altogether...
...The union representative told me they just couldn't allow that...
...We discard our files every four years:' he replied, leaving me stunned by the audacious irony of it all...
...I'm not sure I expected the union to help one of its own, but I certainly didn't expect it to throw up roadblocks in my path...
...But the good times were not to last...
...the job has some daunting occupational hazards...
...As for the requirement that I take a course as a student teacher, I was able to wear him down on that one...
...Even to the most obstreperous bureaucrat, 13 years' experience in the classroom is a convincing argument that you at least know the business end of a chalk eraser...
...They come in many guises—as school administrators, state government bureaucrats, even union officials...
...But he hadn't been superintendent when I was granted tenure, so he wasn't about to champion my cause...
...Never having taught, I was hardly brimming over with confidence...
...I was trying to make this as painless as possible...
...Besides, there were the certification rules...
...I went on to become one of five finalists in New York's Teacher of the Year program...
...The school district's administrators likewise were suspicious of my desire to move "down" to elementary school...
...My next mistake was in appealing to logic and common sense...
...The bureau, in typical fashion, always seems to demand such oaths from the people least likely to know of the candidate's worth...
...In the mid-1960s I answered a newspaper plea for people to become high school English teachers...
...Nor do I doubt that the High Priests will rise to the challenge of figuring out how to certify them...
...begging the assistant principal not to expel the big, disrespectful man-child who writes like a dream...
...a decade ago, when my application to be certified as a secondary school teacher had been absolutely straightforward, it had taken more than a year of sending forms back and forth in the mail before I was approved...
...I could almost see the state troopers blocking me from the classroom door, protecting innocent children from my incompetent clutches should I try to foist myself upon them without those six units...
...They began going through my file, making copies of documents to build a case as to why 1 had to remain in secondary school...
...So I helped establish a curriculum for a new, alternative high school for students who had dropped out of the regular program...
...At that time an administrator who had a way with words informed me that I'd been "liquidated ." Doing the Transcript Tango It was at this point that my problems with the High Priests of Certification really began...
...In fact, if there'd been some ulterior, sinister motive—say, fear that my decision would establish a precedent that the administration could use against my colleagues—I at least could have given my friends an explanation...
...So I completed my education classes and was certified by New York City to teach English...
...But I doubt that anyone unfamiliar with the inner workings of our schools can fully appreciate how byzantine the system really is, or how debilitating the innumerable irritations of daily life...
...I was further certified to teach reading to anyone...
...Later, I found a job teaching college English...
...But something else has driven me to distraction—more specifically, a group of people I'll call the High Priests of Certification...
...Policemen on guard in our cafeteria...
...The transcript copies I'd brought weren't good enough...
...The first was that I'd taught college English...
...But it turned out that wouldn't do, either...
...I don't know...
...I was certified to teach high school English...
...I went home every night and cried, but I survived the year...
...It wasn't long before he'd spotted a problem...
...But as I think my experience amply demonstrates, the High Priests are often obsessed with everything except these things...
...He got a tuition-paying body so that the university could pay his salary...
Vol. 16 • April 1984 • No. 3
