5 Demons of the Classroom

Additional reporting by

Damon Hodge

This is not about teacher salaries. It's not about how much of their own money teachers routinely sink into supplies or their own continuing education. Nor is it about the Legislature's failure to dutifully fund education, or the politics of the teachers union, or seniors' woeful reluctance to support schools.

This is about what actually happens in the classroom, as told by a variety of elementary school teachers. It's a small sampling, to be sure, but they had similar things to say, which suggests that their sentiments are widely shared—anyway, this isn't a scientific survey; it's more like a pulse-taking.

Teachers are frustrated. Most insist they do it for the love of education, but complain that red tape, unrealistic directives and ungovernable kids are making classroom life increasingly difficult. If it's not the state or the feds telling them how to do their jobs, it's parents. Respect for teachers is in decline, they say. And when they get home, teachers read in the papers about studies like the one released a couple of weeks ago by the conservative Nevada Policy Research Institute, which blamed teachers' desire to "entertain" their students for the high number of college entrants needing remedial classes. Bitterness curls the edges of some teachers' voices when they talk about the state of the classroom today.

A few notes. This essay is unabashedly sympathetic to the plight of teachers. (Members of the R-J editorial staff can check out now.) No wonder; its author is married to one. Indeed, hearing her stories about the ups and downs of classroom life inspired this piece.

Teachers whose comments and observations provide the foundation for this essay are presented anonymously for the obvious reasons, but also because none were granted cover to snipe at their bosses (this is about the texture of life in class, not the foibles of individual administrators).

For the most part, school district officials, academics, activists and education experts have been left out; we hear from them all the time. Teachers get their say somewhat less frequently.

Some teachers fed up with the No Child Left Behind Act recently passed around a parody titled "No Child Left Behind: The Football Version."

"That's exactly what it's like," one teacher sighs.

Maligned, debated, thoroughly mocked, President Bush's education initiative emerged early as the classroom hindrance easiest to tear into. (One teacher who submitted written responses for this essay scrawled NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND in large letters that emphasized her exasperation.) It can't be said to have polarized teachers unless polarization means pushing everyone to the same position.

No Child Left Behind became the law in early 2002, requiring states to increase achievement among all students, regardless of social, economic or other factors. It mandates a lot of testing (by the year 2005-06, they'll have to test grades three through eight every year) to measure "adequate yearly progress," and allows states to punish low-performing schools.

"We're supposed to treat every single kid like one child. Teach them the same things, the same way. They're all supposed to achieve the same, regardless," says a teacher. This goes against what we've always expected of educators: the subtle modulations of instruction that allow each student to (theoretically at least) reach his or her individual potential.

Education has always been a volume business, largely geared to move masses of kids through the system, with additional programs for the slower students and a paltry few for those racing ahead. But No Child Left Behind aims to get everyone with the program—its title signifies an almost naive, feel-good ambition. The act seems like an attempt to refashion education on a business model—set productivity goals, establish rewards and punishments for compliance. Yet, for the same reasons that third-graders would make lousy employees, they're not exactly ideal subjects for blanket instruction—30 kids, 30 levels of achievement. "It won't work," one instructor says flatly. "Some kids just won't read by the third grade."

"I've had third-graders who couldn't read above a first-grade level," another adds. "But if you read something to them and asked them about it, they answered comprehension questions at a sixth-grade level."

In the classroom, teachers complain, No Child pressures them to teach to the test. Indeed, the act's emphasis on testing—and the way in which districts, schools and teachers will be judged according to the results—is perhaps the most irksome part of the whole program. Teaching to the test certainly works against some of the explorations, digressions and questing that enrich the learning process.

Even teachers acknowledge that No Child Left Behind had a good goal—making educators more accountable—and has, in part, accomplished that. "There certainly have been teachers who were lax," says one—long-timers who mail it in, newcomers overwhelmed by the job, ineffective teachers who eased into the profession thinking it would be easy or because they couldn't think of anything else to major in. Teachers who undeniably need accountability. "But," this teacher says, "[No Child Left Behind] went overboard."

"There's no autonomy to being a teacher anymore," one observes. No Child Left Behind is only the most nationally visible of the efforts to systemize education. There are other teach-by-numbers programs out there—teachers interviewed singled out Trophies, a scripted reading program, and Saxon, a uniform math program.

Think back to the influential teachers in your elementary years. They are undoubtedly the ones who had a distinctive teaching style, a knack for making the material seem interesting, worth learning—for following a lesson to interesting places. It's difficult to imagine an educational consultant scripting those qualities into a uniform reading program. Teachers spend years learning methodology, teaching techniques and child cognition, then feel frustrated by programs that render that knowledge beside the point.

The intent of the uniform programs is understandable: to help maintain educational continuity across the district—especially vital in a school population with as much turnover and mobility as this one (according to one official, the district's east region, for example, sees a 40 percent to 60 percent rate of students changing schools in a given year, making some uniformity desirable).

But the reality in the classroom is that many teachers feel forced into teaching in ways that don't benefit individual students. Trophies, for example, is a textbook filled with readings and exercises that prescribe how to teach grammar, reading skills, composition. Significant deviations—regardless of how beneficial the teacher might think they are—aren't allowed. "As a teacher, you know what's best for each kid," says one, "and one-size-fits-all is not it."

"There's so much incorporated [into the lessons], it's hard to do in just a half-hour," says a teacher who sometimes finds herself doubling the time allotted for the Saxon math programs in order to help stragglers keep up. "You have to stay ‘on task,'" she says. "‘OK, kids, gimme a second, I have to read the script.' And if one of my children isn't getting the math, that's just too bad. There isn't time to pull a child aside."

School district officials say such programs have examples that suggest how lessons could be taught—but that teachers don't have to follow it word for word. "The textbooks are not curriculum," says Augustine Orci, deputy superintendent of instruction, insisting that the programs don't stifle teacher creativity. "They are a tool ... intended to get across certain concepts. Teaching creativity is not harmed in any way. That was not the intent of the publisher [of the programs]."

But he also acknowledged, albeit in a roundabout way, that there's a pressure to stick with the program. "There's nothing worse than having an expensive program and not following the rules of the program."

Certainly, no teacher we talked to felt anything but straightjacketed by scripted programs. Which even Orci agrees is problematic. "If the people that are using the program don't believe in it, it's going to be very ineffective."

"I had good teachers and bad teachers," says one interviewee, advocating greater teacher latitude. "But they all brought something to me."

It's in the nature of bureaucracies to generate reams of self-protecting paperwork, to document every aspect of every official process. Schools aren't immune. Every kid arrives in class bearing a long paper trail. Teachers say they have to turn more and more of their attention to paperwork. To the traditional—and already time-consuming—tasks of paper-grading and lesson-planning, "teachers have to document everything," one complains. "We have packets of materials that take weeks to complete for any student being referred for special services, behavior problems, etcetera." Problem kids, for example, require reams of documentation; if a teacher thinks a student needs special ed, there's another stack of paper. "We have to complete forms for uniform compliance, report cards, progress reports, parent communication logs, and so on ... We just want to teach the kids."

In the classroom, this means plenty of time spent on form-filling or non-instructional tasks. For example, three times a year, every kid must be pulled aside and tested for his or her reading level—a necessary task, but one that can be difficult to weave into the flow of an educational day.

It's the rare teacher who can get all of this done during work hours. "I take paperwork home almost every night," says one.

In some ways, this is probably an insoluble problem. Excess paperwork is a fixture of modern life, and teachers don't disagree with the need for such things as reading-level testing or some of the documentation. That doesn't make it any less intrusive or frustrating.

"There are just so many things I don't know how to deal with," one teacher says. "When people talk back to you in class, I've never been faced with that." No surprise that it's a new teacher talking; education majors don't get a lot of instruction in handling discipline problems when they're in college, so the rowdy realities of contemporary classrooms are an immediate shock. The teacher mentioned above is already wondering about the wisdom of her career choice. "There are four or five kids," she says. "The rest are perfect. If it wasn't for those few, the rest would get a much better education. It makes me sad because they're entitled to it."

The decline of ruler-wrapped knuckles has combined with a general drift toward child-centrism in our society to limit teachers' options in dealing with problem students. "More and more, it's like we're supposed to be building their self-esteem," one teacher says. Teachers can't threaten to take away a kid's recess, since the school district has already done that; more and more, teachers say, calls to parents yield no results; and laws protect some of the most difficult students—"If a student has a documented condition, and his bad behavior is linked to that diagnosis, our hands are tied," one teacher says. Look at a kid the wrong way, teachers grouse, and you'll have a lawsuit on your hands. A recent survey of teachers and principals by Harris Interactive found that 82 percent of teachers agree that legal concerns have forced them into what's called "defensive teaching"—running their classrooms in such a way as to prevent lawsuits. A roughly similar percentage thinks that the abundance of legal options for pissed-off parents have hampered their ability to do their jobs. (Not that you'd expect them to say otherwise, of course.)

Teachers also say the growing fear of legal action has made some principals reluctant to take aggressive action against problem kids. Students sent to the office are often sent back, their only punishment a stern talking-to.

"It's common for a teacher to spend more time each day dealing with one or two students individually than the rest of the students combined," one says.

"The only thing we can refer for are violent acts of aggression," a teacher says.

Meanwhile, contemporary America is breeding a strain of discipline-resistant youth, for whom self-esteem doesn't seem to be a problem. In other words, they can be cocky little bastards. Says one teacher, "They'll say, ‘I don't care if you write me up. It doesn't mean anything.' They know you can't do anything." And so teachers' shop talk is full of stories about disruptive kids—students who will wander the room, shouting, breaking things, harrassing other students. Kids who disrespect teachers with impunity. Because what's the teacher going to do? The worst that's likely to happen is that he'll be suspended and sent home—where he'd rather be, anyway. In the face of such eruptions, and feeling that neither the principal or the law has their back, teachers have to rely on some combination of charisma, charm, intimidation and classroom management to defuse problem situations. That's a hit-or-miss tactic.

Teachers were quick to add that most kids don't pose serious problems. That's precisely the point—they're the ones being deprived of a better education by the few kids who are trouble.

According to teacher lore, a parent recently asked a local teacher what she, the parent, could do to help improve her child's grades.

See that homework gets done, the teacher responded, perhaps review it with the child, and read with the child.

The parent's response, according to the teacher: "Yeah, if I get half your pay! That's your job."

"This," says the teacher who relayed the story, "is more common than you think."

Even more than No Child Left Behind, the issue of parents—lazy parents, careless parents, disrespectful parents, abusive parents, absent parents—gets teachers going. We have become glorified baby sitters, they'll tell you. Parents have abdicated their roles as partners in the teaching of their kids. "If education is not important at home," one educator said, "it will not be important in school. Teachers can only do so much." ("Please don't make it sound like all parents are bad," another cautions. "Everyone has a few bad parents, but all of us also have some really remarkable ones, too.")

Every teacher has jaw-dropping stories of parental misconduct. The mother who kept her elementary-age daughter home for several days to baby-sit the toddlers while she worked around the house. The mother who made her young daughter change grandpa's colostomy bag in the middle of the night because Mom didn't want to get up. Stories of physical or sexual abuse that will make you angry. Kids caught up in drug deals or drug busts. Imagine teaching multiplication tables to a child who'd been held at gunpoint the day before.

While it saddens and horrifies them, teachers sometimes tell these tales with a certain grim relish because such stories make the point that there's much more to education than what happens between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.

But those tales—horrible and depressing as they are—obscure the smaller but more widespread and also devastating ways parents upend their kids' educations. One teacher sums up the general view: "They don't value education. Attendance isn't a priority. They let their kids watch Jeepers Creepers, a movie that's too scary for me. And on days when they don't want to get in the car or don't want to walk to school, they just don't take 'em."

This neglect shows itself in various ways. "Using deodorant; I had to teach a kid about that," a teacher reports. Others have bought clothing—including underwear—for students who didn't appear to have a change of clothes. "I have to teach them manners, ethics ... what it's like to do the right thing."

How do these factors show up in the classroom? In disruptive students acting out their domestic dramas in class. In kids taunting less fortunate kids. In children with erratic attendance who require a proportionally greater amount of the teacher's attention when they are in class. None of it conducive to teaching.

If problems flow from home to the classroom, they can also reverse course. Teachers tell of being afraid to inform parents of their children's problems lest the parents take it out on the kids. "There are definitely situations that you keep between you and the student," says a teacher. "But sometimes that will help develop more of a respect and they might work harder for you." It's another tightrope to walk.

The peculiar circumstances of Las Vegas play their roles, too—because so many parents work late shifts in this 24/7 town, teachers say, many kids go home to empty houses and are left unsupervised for long stretches. The Valley's transience and residential churn—the thousands of new residents moving in, moving out, moving around—has created students who are unsettled, uncommitted to school.

There are, of course, parents who go overboard in the other direction. One teacher offered this rule of thumb: At at-risk schools, you have to deal with the children because the parents aren't around. At schools in affluent neighborhods, you have to deal with parents.

These are broad generalizations, of course; there are affluent parents who ignore their kids and poor parents who smother them—not to mention that most parents, regardless of class, haven't abandoned their kids to video-game baby sitting, slasher films and general aimlessness. Most do the right things (more or less) for the right reasons (generally), even if they do have bouts of inattentiveness. But how many kids need to manifest their domestic dramas in class to disrupt the proceedings?

It would be a mistake to consider this merely a bunch of whining by teachers. They were, after all, asked for their gripes, not their joys, so this essay is necessarily weighted toward the negative. But if the frustrations are real, so are the upsides. The experience of seeing understanding dawn in a kid's eyes. The knowledge that you're contributing to the community. Summers off.

One teacher, after a longish spiel about kids losing their attention spans to X-Boxes, and how parents should have a greater respect for teachers, abruptly paused in mid-sentence. "On the other hand," she said, "I love it."