the teacher-administrator relationship

...sucks.

In fact, it can be summed up in just three key points.

1. Drama.
Grades were due Friday. Finals ended yesterday. You do the math. So, many teachers, myself included, were a bit late with their grades. I turned mine in midway through this very morning, as a matter of fact, and as of this afternoon seventy-four of our 220-odd teachers had not completed the grading/verifying process. How odd, then, that my cohort-friend Anne, while turning in her grades first thing Monday morning, was verbally reprimanded by one of our numerous APs, and rather rudely reminded that now she was going to have to verify everything "by hand," as though anyone has ever given the first-years copies of District grading software. In fact we all found out about it, like most things, from veteran teachers. Anyway, Anne is middle-aged and has been a sailor and a limo driver and a theater director and she is not about to take unwarranted shit from anybody, so she rather acidically thanked her AP for the pat on the back. This morning Anne found a page-long, single-spaced memo waiting for her in her box, reminding her that grading - which, as you may remember, she had already finished - was her professional responsibility, and that oh, by the way, the AP would be conducting her instructional evaluations next month, just as soon as we got back from the break.

2. Drama.
Attentive readers and web-untanglers will recall that my school, for being in its sixth recorded year of steady decline, was about to be taken over by the state under No Child, but negotiated a deal in which we split into Campus North and Campus South, expertly helmed by Principals North and South, and allowed an outside organization (henceforth The Org) to come in, hire away our admin (my AP = no instructional evals for me!) and make "reccomendations" to us, which we are "under no obligation" to follow, all funded by the nonprofit arm of a certain unnamed tech gajillionaire. Read as: we are getting restructured.

The Org, you may also recall, has great success in places like Missouri and Texas - places whose English Language Learner populations are largely migrant, whose idea of a "large campus" is less than half the size of ours, which do not have year-round schools, which are not restrained by California's "A-G" college prep requirements, and which otherwise bear little or no resemblance to our school. To paraphrase Grandpa Simpson, it will be a cold day in hell before we recognize Missour-ah as our model. Especially considering The Org's latest, strongest reccomendation: that CALA - my beloved, supportive, successful small learning community- be disbanded as soon as it is feasible. English learners are to spend one year segregated into an English-intensive "Newcomer School," at which point they are to be mainstreamed. ESL and primary-language subject teachers will be divided between at least two tracks, if not all three.

The Org's problem is that having ESL students all on one track violates their civil rights - which, unfortunately, is true. Even more unfortunately, all alternatives to our current situation, apart from tripling our ESL/primary language faculty (RDRR), violate their civil rights while decreasing the quality of their instuction as an added bonus. For example: we are one of the few schools in the area - in fact, the only one I am aware of - that has enough bilingual teachers to provide Spanish-language instruction to its lowest-level ESL students across subjects: history, science, math, even health. If we split up CALA, that will no longer be the case, and students with the most basic levels of proficiency will be taking, say, chemisty in English. As for ESL classes, without all our students in one learning community, we won't have enough students of any level at any given time to fill single-level classes, meaning a move to the dreaded split roster. This is something like the old schoolhouse style of teaching, wherein students of all different levels all sit in one room together with only one teacher. I could, quite plausibly, have a class with five students who are two months away from mainstream English classes, essay-writing, etc, five students who cannot ask where the bathroom is or when we get out of class, and twenty-five students somewhere in between.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Admin is siding with The Org on this one. Not outright, of course, but they keep talking to us about "being open-minded" and assuring us that they're "really trying to understand how the ESL program works." Then they come to our meetings and insist that it's really for the best, and make it sound like we're being openly defiant - which at this point, I guess we are. We're rabble-rousing, stirring up support across all the other SLCs, and getting a huge percentage of SLC design meetings to come to consensus that CALA should stay. This was possible for a variety of reasons, in part because nothing unites teachers like a common enemy, but perhaps more truthfully because of our de facto slogan: CALA. We teach English Language Learners...so you don't have to.

3. And more drama.
A brief history of the English department's war with administration: The District requires 9th and 10th grade English teachers to give "periodic assessments" - read as, yet more standardized tests. Our department (rightly) decided that we couldn't waste the time and more or less refused, unless there was something in it for us: the return of our computer lab, appropriated by Campus South. As not administering the assessments would jeopardize our compliance and thereby jeopardize our funding, this was agreed upon - until the assessments were administered, at which point a closed-door meeting was held, sans English department representation, deciding that we would not get our lab. We, in turn, withheld the assessments. It is now basically a balls-out war between our head of department and The Principals, growing increasingly more abstracted and petty. How petty, you ask?

School let out today at 2:11. We're supposed to work until 3:24 anyway, the pupil-free time being built in for department meetings. The English department decided to have its meeting/social at a restaurant off-campus. Ordinarily this is fine; CALA did it yesterday. But if CALA is in the doghouse, the English department is in exile, and thus any enjoyment and/or freedom on its part is to be thwarted, priority one. So admin got wind of this off-campus meeting and took decisive action, scheduling a whole-campus meeting at 3pm solely to ensure that the English department could not leave. The English department sent around a memo stating that since we did not have 24 hours' notice, we were not contractually obligated to attend, and that our head of department would in fact buy drinks for the first person or persons to arrive. Apparently Admin got wind of that too, because a second memo was sent around stating that there had been a "mistake" and that the department meeting had in fact always been scheduled for 3:50! How silly of them!

So the whole campus goes to this 3pm meeting, and do you know what it is? It is a "working meeting" with "no set agenda" that lasts ten minutes, during which time they wish us all a happy holiday and remind us that our grade verifications were due this morning. We have been held, according to Principal South, "for [our] convenience."

It really was quite convenient, in the sense that all 220-odd of us could sit in the same room and bask in the warm glow of our collective hatred. Usually, the dual-campus split precludes such things.