Sep 22, 2005 12:57 PM
By Robert C. Rendo
I still read the New York Teacher even though I no longer teach in New York City. I’ve been teaching in a Westchester district for three years now, but I still feel the impact of city school issues, as my wife teaches kindergarten in Queens. The foil of my career and hers is a formidable issue that creeps into our day-to-day living and, at times, our marriage. Still, she was supportive of me when I changed jobs, and I remain empathetic to her, a veteran teacher with a proven track record and a master’s degree plus 60 credits.
I say this with sympathy: I left the city three years ago making about $53,000. I am now up to $83,000 (with a master’s degree only), and I work in an economically diverse district, unlike so many other wealthy Westchester municipalities.
I’ve completed my 11th year of teaching (eight in Queens and three in Westchester) and in the beginning of my 12th, I’m earning about $2,000 more than my wife, who’s taught for 27 years. Talk about inequitable! My district’s budget is far more generous than hers, and as a result, I have smaller groups of at-risk ESL children who succeed because of proper intervention and learning conditions.
In the suburbs, there are better pay and working conditions, respect for teacher autonomy, less top-down management and more erudition and scholarship expected and fostered by administrators for their teachers. Westchester is a suburb that the UFT seeks to compare itself to, and appropriately so! You bet I left the city!
Teaching conditions in all five boroughs still remain deplorable while teachers face more rigorous standards, higher-stakes testing, and underfunded mandates. The Bloomberg-Klein “corporation” is little more than a swift smack in the head to children who attend public schools. Perhaps one of the most diabolical PR campaigns was the touting of recent 4th-grade ELA scores. While they’ve seemingly risen, the fact remains that many of the low-performing 4th-graders, who were retained as 3rd-graders last year, obviously didn’t take the test and could conceivably have lowered the scores.
The truth behind Bloomberg’s retention policy and his use of summer school as a panacea will surface when those retained 3rd-graders are promoted to 4th grade and take the ELA this year. I’d like to see the scores then. But by then, it may be too late if Mr. Bloomberg wins re-election. The mayor pulled this brilliant stunt and is squeezing every last drop of artificially raised scores in an election year.
I readily commend Randi Weingarten and the pedagogues she represents. Weingarten is articulate, dignified, exquisitely intelligent, sensitive and effective. Her political acumen is a rare find, especially in a day and age when so many middle-class parents and teachers are being choked by the agenda of city, state and federal governments. I’d like to continue to support my former brethren. Teachers not only in the metropolitan area, but across the country, must stick together, as the Bush administration and its smaller Mike-and-Joel germs are trying to infect one of the last institutions that upholds a social contract with the family: public education.
Thank you so much for all that you do, and please, for the sake of my wife, teachers, children and parents, keep up the excellent, passionate work. You really make a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people!