Emergency Teacher

9781602391932

I
t was eight years ago when Christina Asquith, my young colleague at
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
told me she was taking a leave from reporting and writing to teach a sixth-grade class at a troubled middle school in North Philadelphia.

It was a bold move. Christina was an extraordinarily talented and ambitious journalist, and in the two-year internship program she was completing at the paper, she was already launched in what had become a very competitive field. But Christina was passionately interested in education, which meant that she had both the itch to teach and a desire to write about it. She wasn't sure which would ultimately win out. If she decided to stay with teaching, this would be a good way to start, she told me, and if she decided not to teach, but instead to report and write about education, the firsthand experience would greatly inform her writing.

She got more than she bargained for.

Philadelphia's school system was so desperate for teachers in 1999 that they were willing—and this is only slightly stretching the truth—to take anyone. They had a program for “emergency” certification. Typically, teachers spend their college years preparing for a classroom and then log many hours working and observing alongside veteran instructors before taking over a class of their own. Christina had none of this. She even signed up too late for the one-week instruction course. The school district recruiter was unfazed.

“Can I really teach without any experience?” she asked.

“Believe me, we need you more than you need us,” he said.

Christina was set before a class of sixth graders at Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School, then in a massive gray stone building with all the charm of a nineteenth-century prison, on the corner of Eighth Street and Lehigh Avenue. Christina had thirty-three rambunctious early teens (most of them mature well beyond any sixth-graders she had ever known), all of them fluent in Spanish but less so in English, from some of the most troubled neighborhoods in the city. There was minimal to no support from school administrators. The whole experience, from the existence of an “emergency” program to lure the naive and idealistic to the reality of Julia de Burgos, was like a bad joke. This heartbreakingly earnest, slender, blond, pretty, twenty-five-year-old woman from the suburbs of New Jersey was being offered up cynically. The job was hard to fill because no one wanted it. She had no lesson plans, no guidance, and, as it turned out, no books (she would eventually discover boxes of old, outdated, and undistributed books on her own). It was like someone was playing a trick on her. The bigger trick, of course, which Christina was quick to see for herself, was on the kids.

“I hate the fact that untrained teachers are being assigned here,” said one veteran teacher at the school who remembers Christina and noted that the program that lured Christina is still in place today. More than ten novice teachers were handed classes this year alone. Only an experienced teacher at this school could fully comprehend the folly of the emergency certification program.

It's more than a folly; it's a disgrace. That and the general condition of public education in parts of Philadelphia and other big American cities is as clear a statement as society can make that children in certain neighborhoods— most of them Hispanic and black—simply don't matter. Christina's starting salary that year was $30,000—less than half of what her internship paid at the newspaper and $8,000 below the starting salary of her suburban counterparts, who were teaching at schools that were not hiring people off the streets to teach and who had, among other things, actual textbooks. In a society concerned about the escalating violence and lawlessness of inner-city neighborhoods, or a just society that paid salaries commensurate with the level of a job's difficulty, any teacher willing to tackle Julia de Burgos would be making top dollar.

Many of the untrained recruits take a quick look and flee. Christina watched as her fellow recruits dropped out, dumping their classes in midsemester on the teachers who stayed. She also saw something even worse: teachers who had given up long ago, but who stayed in place, going through the motions, waiting out the years to qualify for a pension. There were varying degrees of abdication, from those who simply threw their most difficult students out of class, leaving packs of unsupervised teens to roam the halls, to one male teacher who simply ignored his students altogether, spending class periods reading the newspaper at his desk. “Failure is not an option,” the school principal had intoned impressively in a staff meeting at the start of the year, which sounded firm and inspirational, and turned out to be literally true, as teachers were encouraged to simply falsify grades on exams and report cards in order to meet assigned goals.

Christina was tougher than that. She battled her way through the full year, never more grateful for her fluent command of Spanish, buying books and supplies for the children out of her own thin wallet—her parents helped with the rent—and finding a small network of skilled teachers inside the school who inspired and counseled her. Along the way she fell in love with her students.

I visited her class midway through that year. I had sent three of my children to public schools in Philadelphia, but nothing prepared me for Julia de Burgos. The only thing that struck me as normal about the school was her class. It was warm and boisterous and fun. There were kids in the back of the room who were off in their own worlds, and there were brassy kids clearly unconvinced that being in school was worth their while, but Christina had the full attention of a core group of smart, focused, genuinely curious children eager to learn. As I left that day, Christina asked me what I thought, and I didn't have a terribly coherent response. I was shocked, but I didn't want to jump to any conclusions—I didn't know if the herds of wild children in the halls were a temporary problem or the status quo—and I didn't want to discourage her by being too critical. I told her that, at the very least, she had a great story to write. I was moved by her courage and accomplishment.

I also encouraged her decision to keep notes and to think about shaping the experience into a book, which, much to my surprise, she did. Here is the remarkable result. I was lucky enough to be one of this book's first readers, and I love it for reasons apart from its startling revelations about a deeply troubled school system. It would be a good enough book if that was all it did, but it does much more. It captures Christina's heart, the sheer tenacity and decency she showed in refusing to abandon her idealism. In it are portraits of teachers both heroic and appalling, and of administrators right out of some black comedy about bureaucracy. Most captivating, though, are the loving stories of her students whose sweetness, helplessness, and neediness is heartbreaking. Her battle to be the teacher they deserved is inspiring. It is a fascinating story of stubborn ingenuity and courage, and as warm and revealing a portrait of a troubled urban school as you will ever read.

Christina left after that year, after months of painful deliberation. I know how hard the decision was for her. She had taught herself how to control a class and to teach in the worst of circumstances, and she knew the island of sanity and learning she had created for her students would very likely disappear once she was gone. She went on to earn a masters degree in education at the London School of Economics, and then covered the war in Iraq as a stringer for the
Christian Science Monitor
and other newspapers, writing about education issues in that war-torn place.

Since she left, Julia de Burgos has moved into an impressive new building at Fourth and Lehigh, but still suffers the same problems. Classes remain very challenging and overcrowded; there are fewer classroom supplies than there were seven years ago; teachers are still quitting (both those who walk away and those who stay in place); and wild children still roam the halls, preying upon the kids who are trying to learn, and occasionally their teachers—in one recent and heavily publicized case, a substitute filling in for an “emergency” teacher who quit was assaulted so severely that he landed in the hospital.

I hope
The Emergency Teacher
is a wake-up call. The only real remedy for challenging urban schools is not to recruit brave volunteers like Christina, but to offer salaries that equal or exceed those paid in the suburbs. Why would anyone who is not a saint take a harder job that pays significantly less? Schools like Julia de Burgos don't need novices, even ingenuous and dedicated ones like Christina; they need the most resourceful, experienced, and dedicated teachers money can buy.

T
he statistics are staggering and hard to imagine in any other industry: Almost a third of all new teachers leave the classroom after three years, and close to 50 percent leave after five years. Each resignation can cost the school district upward of $50,000. The turnover is a primary cause of the chaos in underachieving school systems like Detroit where less than 25 percent of high school students graduate on time—if ever.

How can a team of teachers and school staff prepare, plan, and sustain a functioning, effective school program with such instability?

“The exit of teachers from the profession and the movement of teachers to better schools are costly phenomena, both for the students who lose the value of being taught by an experienced teacher, and for the schools and districts, which must recruit and train their replacements,” says renowned University of Pennsylvania education professor Richard Ingersoll.

“There is a growing consensus among researchers and educators that the single most important factor in determining student performance is the quality of his or her teachers,” he says.

In
The Emergency Teacher
we have a captivating case study of a new teacher's experience illustrating why so many are driven from the profession. This makes the book an excellent new-teacher training tool. Fast-paced and well-documented,
The Emergency Teacher
gives names, faces, and emotion to those alarming statistics. This true story relates the experience of young Philadelphia journalist Christina Asquith after she quits her newspaper job to become an emergency certified teacher. She is sent into the toughest school in the city, Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School, and assigned to be the sixth grade teacher for English, social studies, and reading.

Christina was just like so many of the new teachers I meet and train each year. Full of energy and determined, she did not go into teaching to make money. She dreamed of giving low-income children a chance in life through education. She writes of her motivation to quit her newspaper job and teach:

Her idealism and high expectations are so common among new teachers. In the book I've written with my wife, Rosemary,
The First Days of School,
I call this stage “Fantasy.” All teachers go through it. Christina watched movies like
Lean on Me
and
Stand and Deliver
and fantasized about rescuing a group of students through sheer will, ingenuity, and pluck. Her enthusiasm ought to be applauded, but enthusiasm is no substitute for knowledge and experience. So often, though, these positive expectations collide with the sober realities of the job, and teachers move from the fantasy stage into what I call “Survival.”

Within weeks, Christina realized that she was wholly unprepared to actually teach, and she received no support from her administration and few supplies. The honeymoon period between her and her students wore off, and her disorganization made the students anxious and rebellious. Here, she describes the desperation both she and Ms. Rohan, her team teacher, were feeling by October: