LOTS OF PRESSURE. LITTLE RESPECT.
Millions of children attend America’s schools – and the glory and blame for their education fall on America’s teachers. Thirty journalists from the USA TODAY Network spent a day with teachers across the country to chronicle the conditions they face. Here’s what we found.
This story was reported by Beatriz Alvarado, Thyrie Bland, Jason Gonzales, Leigh Guidry, Rick Hampson, Bracey Harris, Lori Higgins, Joe Hong, Austin Humphreys, Kristen Inbody, Annysa Johnson, Byron McCauley, Amanda Oglesby, Kelly Ragan, Meg Ryan, Lindsay Schnell, Devi Shastri and Alden Woods and written by Hampson It’s shortly after dawn when Edward
Lawson, one of America’s 3.2 million public school teachers, pulls his car into the parking lot of Julian Thomas Elementary in Racine, Wisconsin. He cuts the engine, pulls out his cellphone and calls his principal.
They begin to pray.
Lawson is a full-time substitute based at a school with full-time problems: only one in 10 students are proficient in reading and math.
That may be explained by the fact that 87 percent of the students are poor and one in five have a diagnosed disability. Blame for test scores, how- ever, often settles on the people who are any school’s single-most-important influence on academic achievement – teachers.
Lawson says a prayer for the coming school day. He says a prayer for the district, the students, the upcoming state tests. He says a prayer for the secondgrade teacher who had emergency back surgery and for the sub taking her class. He says a prayer for all teachers – a fitting petition for a profession in crisis.
The crisis became manifest this spring when teachers in six states, sometimes without the direction or encouragement of any union, walked off the job to protest their own compensation and school spending in general.
We think we know teachers; we’ve all had them. But the suddenness and vehemence of the Teacher Spring suggest we don’t understand their pressures
and frustrations.
To try to understand, 15 teams of USA TODAY Network journalists spent Monday, Sept. 17, with teachers around the nation. We found that teachers are worried about more than money. They feel misunderstood, unheard and, above all, disrespected.
That disrespect comes from many sources: parents who are uninvolved or too involved; government mandates that dictate how, and to what measures, teachers must teach; state school budgets that have never recovered from Great Recession cuts, leading to inadequately prepared teachers and inadequately supplied classrooms.
It all may be exacting a toll. This year, for the first time since pollsters started asking a half-century ago, a majority of Americans said they would not want their child to become a teacher. Yet teachers everywhere say that if only the American people – the parent, the voter, the politician, the philanthropist – really understood schools and teachers, they’d join their cause.
Public school teachers’ economic prospects have worsened since the beginning of the Great Recession, especially in poorer states. The average national salary has decreased by more than 4 percent since 2009, adjusted for inflation. Yet nine in 10 teachers buy some teaching supplies, spending an average of almost $500 a year.
About 18 percent have a second job, making teachers about five times more likely than the average full-time worker to have a part-time job. No surprise, then, that 8 percent of teachers leave the profession each year, compared with 5 percent a few decades ago; that 20 to 30 percent of all beginning teachers leave within five years, the Learning Policy Institute says, and two-thirds of teachers quit before retirement.
Those are the numbers. Here are scenes from the lives of teachers, before, during and after school.
ARRIVALS: Hope and heartbreak
The sun is rising, and teachers are arriving. “Ordinary men and women,” as educational reformer John Dewey put it, of whom we expect the extraordinary.
DEERFIELD, MONTANA – In a remote valley in central Montana, there’s a scene from teaching’s past: A solitary woman approaches a gray clapboard, one-classroom schoolhouse and unlocks the door. Instead of lighting the stove, like her 19th-century predecessors, Traci Manseau makes sure the internet is up.
The public school has 17 students from prekindergarten to eighth grade, up from a total of three when Manseau came here 19 years ago. Montana has less than 80 such schools; about 20 closed in the past decade. It’s hard work, Manseau says, to wrap your brain around first- and eighth-grade math at the same time.
Each of her students comes from one of five families, all surnamed Stahl. They’re Hutterites, a religious sect that speaks a German dialect and shuns modern ways. The students wear a sort of 19th-century uniform: the girls in black headscarves with subtle polka dots and modest dresses, their hair parted in the middle and twisted behind their ears. The boys wear Western shirts, black pants and suspenders.
To work on the small Hutterite colo- ny’s communal farm, students leave school when they turn 16.
Even in this idyllic setting, teaching comes with its own little heartbreak.
CINCINNATI – A half-continent away, another teacher approaches another school. This one is a vision of neoclassical elegance modeled on the University of Virginia’s Rotunda. Walnut Hills High School is the top-rated public high school in Ohio. Its trademark subject is Latin, required in grades seven through nine. Its motto is “Sursum ad summum” – “Rise to the Highest.”
The classical college preparatory school is another American educational archetype. But here, time has not stood still. Just ask the teacher at the door.
Laura Wasem, 43, has taught Latin here for 17 years. She makes an annual salary of $77,000, a third more than the average teacher. Yet she is as nostalgic for the past as any Hutterite. Today, for example, she’s distressed that there will be no classes because of a daylong professional development program to improve standardized test scores.
“All these mandates from the administration and the state are just an extension of what’s going on nationally,” she says. She blames “people without a background in education … who have no idea what to expect walking into a class of eighth-graders. It’s completely different when you have to keep an eye out for kids using phones or redirecting a child with a special-education plan or registering if what you are saying is actually being understood.”
She’s just getting started: “I used to be able to teach Latin and not have to worry about all the testing and extra work centering around our evaluations.” That was long ago.
DETROIT – Felecia Branch, 51, arrives at Mackenzie Elementary-Middle School an hour before classes begin. She’s a product of Detroit city schools and has taught in them for 25 years. Branch pops the trunk of her Jeep Compass and pulls out a rolling crate with materials for the day’s classes.
Her self-sufficiency is a reminder of the district’s troubles, including the near-decade it was under state control. Teachers went for years without a raise; their base pay was cut, and many dipped into their own pockets for basic supplies. Three years ago, Branch says, “I didn’t have any sixth-grade materials. None.” She says she bought them herself – and did a lot of photocopying.
A new superintendent is trying to reverse course. Last year, teachers got a raise: 7 percent over two years, plus bonuses for those near or at top scale. This year, Branch has almost all the materials she needs. SINTON, TEXAS – After a two-minute drive from home, Christine McFarland pulls up at Sinton Elementary School, where today teachers are wearing the paraphernalia of their alma mater. The 45-year-old English and social studies teacher sports a jacket from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, of which she’s a proud 2001 graduate.
The jacket is also a reminder that, despite her $50,000 salary and a second job as a supermarket cashier, she long has been delinquent on the $300-amonth payments on her 30-year student loan, leaving a debt in the high five digits. “We’re not making a living wage. Teachers, especially single teachers trying to live off our salary, are going paycheck to paycheck,” she says.
She’s a single mother. Three years ago, one of her two kids qualified for reduced-price school lunches. “I’m a teacher. And I qualified for reduced lunch. What does that say?” It says she’s thinking about leaving her calling.
PHOENIX – As Rebecca Garelli drives up to Sevilla Elementary SchoolWest, her Nissan sedan’s stickers make the car look like a political billboard: “#StillInvested … #RedForEd …. #EdWave2018 … #RememberInNovember”
In March, this 37-year-old middle school science teacher started a Facebook page that helped spark the teachers’ uprising in the state. She’s driven an hour from her home at the other corner of the metropolitan area. Her long commute helps explain her activism. Her family moved here from Chicago two years ago for the Southwestern lifestyle. When she interviewed for teaching jobs, she was startled: “On average, I was going to take a $35,000 pay cut.” So she took a relatively well-paying job a relatively long way from home in a school with relatively large class sizes.
And it’s exhausting her.
ABSENT: Not teaching anymore
Some teachers are not teaching on this day, for reasons that underlie the profession’s crisis discontents.
Halston Drennan, 32, is in class at the University of Wyoming, where he’s pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. He resigned at the end of the past school year as a high school math teacher in Fort Collins, Colorado, where after three years, he was making
$39,000. He loved teaching but realized he’d never be able to afford to buy a home. Unless, his mother told him, “you marry up.” Amber Ball, 26, is driving back to Columbia, a tiny town (pop. 390) in northeast Louisiana where she teaches junior high language arts. No school today – her financially strapped district is on a four-day week to save money. That’s good, because she gets a three-day weekend. And it’s bad, because she takes home just $2,300 a month, even though she has a master’s degree.
FIRST PERIOD: Adjustments
❚ DEERFIELD: 8:23 A.M.
Traci Manseau has only 12 students (albeit in eight different grades). Several of the older boys are late because they’re needed on the colony’s dairy farm. She uses a standard public school curriculum, even though it’s designed to prepare pupils for a life much different from the one hers will lead. The girls will grow up to cook, sew, clean and garden. The boys will farm and ranch and work in the dairy. Some of these kids are so smart that, especially at first, it bothered their teacher that none would even graduate from high school.
“I’ve just learned to accept it,” she says. “That’s their way of life.”
❚ SINTON: 8:26 A.M.
At a planning meeting with other teachers, Christine McFarland promises to work on adding some questions to a worksheet. But her schedule is already packed. She goes, she says, “from one thing to the next to the next to the next, with few breaks in between.” And today she has a four-hour shift after school at the supermarket.
The supermarket offered MacFarland a full-time management job. It has her thinking about quitting what she loves – again.
Ten years ago, she says, when her exhusband fell behind on child support because he was laid off, she left teaching for three years to sell insurance. She tells a story about what triggered her return. She was grocery shopping when the father of a former student came up and asked, ‘‘Are you still doing insurance?’ … He goes, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ And I said, ‘What?’ He goes, ‘ Because you have a gift. You’re a teacher. … You’re wasting your gift that God gave you.’ ”
She started crying, disappointed
Teachers are worried about more than money. They feel misunderstood, unheard and, above all, disrespected.
with herself for quitting. The encounter, she says, “made me feel like what I needed to do was go back. So I took the pay cut” – about $30,000 – “and I jumped back into teaching.”
She also took the part-time job, even though a survey of Texas teachers’ union members indicates that those who work a second job are more likely to say they’re considering leaving the profession and that working an extra job hurts their teaching. She says she wonders if she made the right choice.
❚ DETROIT: 8:29 A.M.
Felecia Branch greets the sixthgraders filing into her classroom like – her words – “my babies.”
To watch her is to realize how much some teachers love their students, how some teachers are able to function without much interference and how some have actually seen their prospects improve. She gives hugs, high-fives, fist bumps. One student gets a kiss on the cheek. “Hello, gorgeous,” she greets another. “Good morning, Mr. Chambers,” she tells a third. “How are you? Did you have a good weekend?”
Her effusiveness has a purpose. She says that without a personal connection with a student, and preferably with parents, she can’t teach effectively.
❚ DEERFIELD: 10:05 A.M.
Second-grader Clint Stahl flies off a swing, lands hard on the ground and, after a second in shock, starts to wail.
Traci Manseau runs over, picks him up and carries him inside the school. When it looks like his arm is broken – for the second time this year – she loads the sobbing Clint into her car and drives him up the gravel road to the colony. She’ll look for a parent to drive the child to a hospital 30 minutes away. “Everyone go in and work on your math,” she tells the other students before leaving them for a few minutes with her aide.
She moves quickly and calmly. In an age of specialization, she is the school’s janitor, nurse and mother. “I wear a lot of hats every day,” she says later, “all day long.”
LUNCHTIME: The teachers’ room
For those without cafeteria or playground duty, lunchtime is a break in a day of breakfast eaten standing or sometimes walking, of undrunk coffee, of always feeling like you have to pee. There are nonacademic tasks, such as wiping down desks and handing out tampons; countless intercom announcements, many unintelligible; school assemblies and department meetings, some also unintelligible.
Now teachers can talk about what makes them fume – such as disrespectful parents. “Kids tell their parents they have a problem with the teacher, and the parents throw a fit,’’ says Laura Wasem of Walnut Hills High. When a parent demanded to sit in her classroom and observe her teach, Wasem said she’d agree – if she could come to the student’s home and see how the parent helped with the homework.
AFTERNOON: ‘Aha’ and ‘Oh no’
❚ PHOENIX: 1:45 P.M.
As fifth period ends, Rebecca Garelli escorts her class to another building for “specials” – art, music or band. She stands for a moment in the shade out- side and lowers her sunglasses. She’s drained. It’s the repetition. In the Sonoran Desert, using a 2004 climate science textbook that lists “Katrina” as a name for a future storm, she’ll teach the same lesson about Hurricane Florence and hurricane preparation four times.
She explains that, despite her boredom, she can’t mix up the lessons because she has only this one free period in which to plan. Then there are the standardized tests, where she is measured by her students’ performance. She fights to keep her passion for the job. “I am overwhelmed,’’ she says. “Overwhelmed quite a bit.’’
❚ DETROIT: 2:10 P.M.
For Felicia Branch, the day’s last class includes an “aha” moment and an “oh no” moment.
The class is discussing “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” a fantasy adventure novel it’s been reading. Branch points out the lead character’s comment about not feeling normal. One student says Percy is “kind of disowning himself.” She says, “I don’t disown myself because I’m not normal, and I don’t fit in with a lot of other people. I actually like who I am.”
“I really love that you said that,” Branch replies. “Sometimes, it’s kind of cool to be the oddball. I’ve always considered myself somewhat of an odd bird. … So how many of you felt that when Percy said, ‘I’m not normal,’ that he was dissing and putting himself down – not really owning who he is?” Several hands go up.
Moments such as this are why you teach.
“That goes beyond reading a complex text,” she observes later. “That’s synthesizing, that’s analyzing it, that’s relating it to herself.”
About 40 minutes later, Branch notices a dispute developing between a boy and a girl over a note. The girl says the boy took the paper, so she took it back. When Branch tells the girl to give her the paper, she refuses – three times. Branch tells the girl to step out into the hall to calm down. The girl refuses. She stares straight ahead. “This is what I mean about making a mountain out of a molehill,” Branch tells her.
Branch sends a student to get the girl’s homeroom teacher. When the man arrives, the girl gives him the silent treatment. Branch calls the principal’s office and finally the girl’s home. Her stepfather says he’ll come in.
After class, Branch rues how, even with her experience, she was unable to defuse the confrontation. “When did it get to be so serious that a teacher could ask you very nicely to do x, y and z, and your first response is still to be defiant?”
Postscript: The stepfather never arrives.
SECOND SHIFT: Side hustles
❚ SINTON: 4:18 P.M.
Christine MacFarland leaves school to drive to her job as a supermarket cashier, only to find that her 2013 Ford Explorer, which has more than 100,000 miles on it, has a flat tire. She slumps behind the wheel and puts her hands over her face. “I don’t have time or money for a flat tire,” she sighs. She calls her brother to take care of the flat while she gets a ride home to change for her 5 p.m. shift.
5:11 p.m. H-E-B Grocery, Register 5. One of MacFarland’s first customers is a former colleague, also a single mother, who left Sinton Elementary last year for a better-paying job in the oil and gas industry. Teacher turnover is a problem in Texas, where the annual rate is 16 percent. The Sinton district’s rate last year was 20 percent.
“It’s sad, because she was a good teacher,” MacFarland says. “She flat out just could not make ends meet. … It’s aggravating to go to college to be a teacher, take the classes, undergo staff development and then give it all up. We’re highly trained. When one of us quits, that’s man hours, money and experience out the door.’’
DAY’S END: Still at work
Ed Lawson is one of the last teachers to leave. That’s how he likes it. He’s an ordained minister, and he takes a proprietary interest in the school; he considers it his pastorate.
Amber Ball gets ready for bed around 8:30. She’ll be out the door by 4:50 the next morning – the only way to get in a workout at the gym before the start of her 10-hour school day.
Christine MacFarland finishes her supermarket shift at 9. She still hasn’t written the questions she promised at the faculty meeting 12 hours earlier.
Rebecca Garelli has put her kids to bed and can finally turn to all those messages about #RedForEd. That can take until 2 a.m. Felicia Branch retires for the night, not knowing that she will get through to the student who wouldn’t give up the note. In the days ahead, the girl will pay attention, follow instructions, even volunteer to be “laptop captain” when the class’s new computers arrive.
Traci Manseau is home, 30 miles from school. She has papers to correct and an online course to take. It’s a grind, but at 45, she has no plans to stop. Another Stahl, William, was born at the Hutterite colony in December. “If I can finish him through school until he’s 16,” she says, “then I can retire.”
EPILOGUE: Respect and disrespect
Teachers hold our hands and wipe our noses, tell us we can be more than we are, maybe more than we think we can be. In return, we tell pollsters that they’re underpaid, without being sure what they actually make; that we endorse collective bargaining, yet often resist higher taxes; that we support their right to strike, preferably in someone else’s district.
A day with American public school teachers ends with this irony: These people, whom opinion polls show to be among the nation’s most respected, feel disrespected. This year, that dichotomy led to revolt. Where it leads next is a matter for speculation or – in Edward Lawson’s case – for prayer.