A teacher confronts his desertion of the public school system.
School’s out: Brenden Beck explains why he’s giving up teaching..
Philadelphia Student Union president and high school senior, Candace Carter, explained in a recent newsletter the harm of teachers leaving “hard to staff schools” like hers. “If there is a high rate of teacher turnover, and too many first-year teachers, students get discouraged, start cutting class, and eventually drop out,” she writes.
I know this, yet I won’t be teaching this year.
I won’t be going back because I’m exhausted. I rarely knew what to expect each morning when I shuffled up the cement stairs to my classroom, greeted by the smell of the rotting milk that had crusted to the crates lining the stairwell. On any given day, I didn’t know how many students I would be teaching. I had no idea whether I would have a lunch break and a free period, or have five students in detention and a seventh grade science class to substitute. My day could end with a student’s parent hugging me or yelling at me.
My school’s hallways and classrooms are loud, chaotic, grim places. The patchwork of school administrators, for-profit consultants, district middle managers, and volunteer “co-principals” who governed my school did little to help besides recommend I teach more test preparation strategies.
Many teachers overcome these challenges, and serve the children of our city for decades.
I won’t be.
Teaching is hard, and at my best I wasn’t great at it. I didn’t get excited about high test scores and reading level improvement. I didn’t connect with the kids. I rarely made learning fun.
But I never intended to be a career teacher, and the program that recruited me, Teach for America (TFA), told me that two years is enough. It’s not, but it’s all I’ve got.
So I’m deserting the system, and thus my students. After just two years teaching at a Germantown K-8 school, I will no longer be celebrating with students who mastered decimal multiplication or grading essays on “The Most Important Day In My Life.”
This will hurt some students.
Last June, toward the end of my second year teaching, a third grader came screeching into the room as only an 8-year-old can, and excitedly declared, “Mr. Beck, I’ll be in your class next year!”
“Oh,” I replied guiltily, “you’ll be in this room, but you won’t have me. I’m not going to be teaching here next year.”
The boy cast his eyes to the floor. “Oh, I won’t be here, either,” he said, contradicting his earlier statement. “I’m going to a better school.” He was expressing a sentiment I’d heard many times before: The desire not to be left behind at a school that so many teachers and students were leaving.
I got into teaching to promote social justice, mad at the Jim Crow-sized injustice that gives our nation’s poorest students an education much inferior to their suburban peers. I hoped to listen to and learn from people who endured the poverty I’d read so much about in college.
And I needed a paycheck.
According to Torch Lytle, Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the former Superintendent of Trenton Public Schools, “There is pretty good evidence that if students have inexperienced teachers for three successive years, they never recover,” he says.
Two months before I led a classroom, I had no teacher training. In college, I’d studied sociology, environmental policy, and radical social movements, but little of education. After graduation in 2007, I joined TFA, an organization that turns recent college graduates into teachers in high-needs schools.
The chance to go somewhere I’d never been, almost as a tourist, pulled me to Philadelphia. I grew up in a suburb of Denver, surrounded by privileged white people like me, and went to a college that was much the same.
After five weeks of TFA’s intense boot camp, called “institute,” the state of Pennsylvania considered me and the 160 other TFA members “highly qualified” teachers. Two weeks after school had begun, I had my own sixth grade class at a Germantown school. I was to be my students’ “self-contained” teacher for math, reading, writing, social studies, and science.
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1. Sharon said... on Sep 15, 2009 at 09:37PM
“interesting... what is the solution or solutions?”
2. Jason said... on Sep 16, 2009 at 02:56PM
“Thank you for such an honest and insightful article on your experience teaching and your decision to leave. Yes, teacher attrition hurts schools and communities because Mr. Beck was likely replaced by another novice who spent the first few months breaking up fights rather than teaching. Yes, Teach for America can and should do more to encourage its corps members to stay beyond their two-year commitment. And yes, reducing the workload for novice teachers until they master their craft is a sensible policy. The tragedy is that despite your obvious intelligence and hard-working ethos (thus your exhaustion), your working conditions were so difficult and the support systems so inadequate that after 2 years you never developed into an excellent teacher. Imagine how the less competent and hard-working teachers are fairing.
As the powers that be negotiate the teachers’ contract, I hope they negotiate meaningful supports to keep teachers with potential from leaving.”
3. Rose Ann said... on Sep 16, 2009 at 04:53PM
“Education is a tough problem. Thanks for talking about it. As a teacher there is no ONE solution and certainly there is no solution that can be stated in a paragraph. It takes everyone from parents to teachers to communities to make education a priority. I will keep the faith that someday there will be an attempt for a solution.”
4. Paul Jablow said... on Sep 16, 2009 at 05:06PM
“
This is just one more result of asking our schools to do too much.”
5. Anonymous said... on Sep 16, 2009 at 09:33PM
“I think our system of funding schools stinks. All public schools are not equal and many good teachers cannot afford to stay in the system. I am sure brendans experience would have been different had he had a smaller class and a support system.”
6. Anonymous said... on Sep 17, 2009 at 01:20PM
“@5 - That's only part (or perhaps a symptom) of this bigger issue, the deprofessionalization of teaching. Many, many people believe that teaching is something that anybody can do, as long as they "know the material". Therefore teaching is a low-status and low-paying job. That's the assumption behind TFA - if you're bright, you can pick up teaching in a few months, and ed schools are doing it wrong.
What Brenden also demonstrated was that there is a LOT of specialized knowledge that teachers need. They need to not only know the right answer but all the wrong answers (and what those wrong answers mean about student thinking), they need to know how to connect to their students, how to engage and challenge them withtout patronizing them. The list of things teachers need to be able to do in order to teach well is quite long.
Teaching as a profession should be given a lot more respect - proper preparation is important, as is good support for teachers, good pay, and respect.”
7. Mark said... on Sep 17, 2009 at 10:43PM
“Why write this? Really? Sure it’s a “nice” read, but what greater good does this guilt-motivated naval gazing do aside from perhaps creating some catharsis for the author and giving him a writing sample for the MFA program he will likely run to next?
Much, much more importantly, PW, why publish this? Really? What at all does it do to improve our schools or the perceptions of our students? Doesn’t it just suggest that our children are unreachable? That they are like the kids in “The Wire”? That geographical and cultural outsiders to Philadelphia cannot function cross-culturally and indeed see what elementary age students would value about their own neighborhoods?
This piece is more likely to solidify negative stereotypes about our schools and children rather then give a more favorable and deserving representation.
Shame on the author, who still hasn’t learned the larger lesson, and shame on PW for being part of this problem.
”
8. Jen said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 09:52AM
“...Yeah, and? I was a teacher's assistant in an urban charter school. Teachers are already well aware of this situation, and citizens are naive if they don't realize what's going on in underfunded urban schools K through 12. Why did I just read a story about a rich white kid from Denver who got in way over his head (insert goofy laugh here) teaching the poor wittle Black kids of Killadelphia? Go ahead and abandon them so you can go make some money. Better yet, join the masses of self-important hipsters overrunning this city. Nice shot of the author, by the way, not the students. I agree wholeheartedly with Mark's comment.”
9. ragold said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 11:53AM
“@Mark and @Jen, the value of the piece is exposing the public to the hardships of being a new teacher in a poor school, especially through the TFA program, and, hopefully, to encourage remedies to the hardships (e.g. apprenticeships, federally-funding public schools, rebuilding social services we've lost since 1981, etc.). Duh.
@Mark, it's not a newspaper's job to sugar-coat bad news. What you're after goes by the name soft news or propaganda, depending in the intent. Get a clue.”
10. E said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 12:03PM
“Kudos to the author on a sensitive and insightful piece. The more anecdotes I read the more it seems like TFA and similar programs do more harm than good. Participants are often not that committed in the first place, and just bide their time while they apply to grad school, or they get frustrated and leave, as Mr. Beck did. Maybe it should be a five-year program to really encourage a serious commitment and make it more likely for participants to receive real mentoring and get solid experience. Also, if they don't already, teachers' unions like the AFT and the NEA could play a role by negotiating on the job training in the contract, and graduated pay scales to get people to stay. But again, maybe they're already doing that, I'm not sure. But young people do need to be taught to be good teachers somehow, as the experienced teachers will eventually retire.”
11. Anonymous said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 12:14PM
“The last two commenters have misread the author's piece. This is a compelling account of the challenges faced by teachers working at under-funded schools. The author's representation of his students and the conditions of their school may not be favorable to you, but that's because the conditions of many public schools in Philadelphia are really bad. It's easy for a tfa teacher from a privileged, white background to talk about teach for america's ideals. In discussing the nearly intraversable cultural gap between the students and many of the teachers at his school, the author is pointing out a reality that some readers may not want to hear. This subject also serves to support the author's argument that the lack of a student-teacher community is a big part of why many inner city public schools are bad. It's a shame that in our age of political correctness the "favorable" narrative becomes perferred to the truthful one. The author was courageous to write this.”
12. Noah said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 01:10PM
“Mark and Jen seem to be suffering from the misconception that this piece intended to blow everybody's minds with some revelatory truth about race and class inequities in America and how they manifest in the education system. It was one guy's confession that he didn't grasp how to do the job as well as he should have, which may make people reconsider the approach or at least the target of a program like TFA. I'm sorry that it was self-effacing, which one might just construe as responsible, whereas you interpreted it as "naval-gazing." Nothing struck me in this piece as even implicitly begging for validation by anyone. You could also take it as just one opinion piece and not have an aneurysm over it.”
13. Noah said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 01:15PM
“Also, I find it hilarious that Brendan was criticized for being (white) guilt-motivated when he admitted as much himself. Seriously, now.”
14. Anonymous said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 02:16PM
“The unfortunate thing is that while Brenden can leave school as soon as he feels it's become too much for him, none of his students have that luxury.”
15. E said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 02:41PM
“#11 Anonymous - Agreed - this article was compelling and courageous, and it's great that it prompted a discussion here about public education. You stated that you believe that I've misread the piece, but I disagree. I was not objecting to the article's observations, I was proposing ways to address the problems the author writes about by making improvements to the institutions that are in place.”
16. Jen said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 03:05PM
“Compelling? Courageous? What the hell is so compelling OR courageous OR heroic OR mind-boggling about a problem that EVERYONE WITH A GOLDARN BRAIN ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT?
You honkies are despicable. Black children of Philadelphia and other dying inner cities, the world should clap for you.”
17. Anonymous said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 08:24PM
“i totally agree with e. i'm in disagreement with other commenters. sorry for the confusion.”
18. mute said... on Sep 18, 2009 at 09:50PM
“I'm with Mark and Jen (except the 'honkies' part). These sorts of confessionals of former TFAers and other short term teachers are already in abundance. They are almost all fish-out-of-water tales about a proctor who is faced with the impossible task of teaching a class of black and brown kids. I'm not mad a Brendon. I'm glad he tried (I guess). But if you don't think things like this, even inadvertently, affect the way people view Philly's kids and judge whether they're worthy of help and support, you need to make your way on over to the comments section of G.W. Miller's piece on Asian students. (Do it.) Of course there's more work and innovation needed to make it better. Its not about "sugar-coating" anything. Its about balanced journalism. Its about a progressive weekly taking care to not just rely on the same old "I give up" stories.
YO PW! Find that teacher that moved to West Philly High and found a more supportive environment and have him write a piece.”
19. Anonymous said... on Sep 19, 2009 at 05:35PM
“I am a young new teacher and I think this teacher is pathetic. Don't come into school and make kids feel that they are more of a disadvantage b/c they are black. They know that what does reminding them do? It stops them from believing that they can achieve. Its another excuse. Good job solidifying it in their heads. You are a pathetic quitter, go back to academia and write and talk about how people in poverty will get out of their bad situations. You quit on your ideals.”
20. Anonymous said... on Sep 19, 2009 at 08:13PM
“Poor Brendan. His ego really took a beating teaching in Philly. He was so sure he was better than all those other teachers. I saw this during my years as a Philadelphia teacher. TFA young people come in thinking they are much smarter than the experienced teachers. At my school, the summer school TFA teacher put up a poster from their organization that said "If Johnny can't read, blame a teacher." Nice. A week later she was in tears begging for help. The TFA teachers I've known made very little effort to bond with the staff. And as far as support, how much free time should experienced teachers invest in people who will only stay two years?
These quick start teacher programs have got to go. I've found that teachers who haven't spent the time getting prepared simply don't have as much invested, and therefore don't have the same commitment as those of us who took the traditional route.
Brendan is proof that white liberal guilt alone will not help the children of Philadelphia”
21. Daniel Denvir said... on Sep 20, 2009 at 03:38PM
“I think that the negative comments here are misplaced. Brenden did not write up a TheWire-redux pity party; he:
1) highlighted the problems with short-term programs like TFA...
2) ...and the structural problems with Philly public schools...
3) 'ha ha, poor Brenden'? Really, he consistently acknowledged his own shortcomings and weakness. He talks about the structural problem of teacher turnover and how he was complicit in it. He is also very clear about the problem with setting up privileged white kids to save poor children of color...
4) highlighted a place (West Philly High) where things were being done differently...
5) represented his kids in a sympathetic light...
I feel like the critics here read an article other than the one that was actually written and came to the table with a lot of unrelated political baggage.”
22. Pen said... on Sep 20, 2009 at 10:14PM
“I agree with most of Mark and Jen's sentiments, except their use of 'honky' and criticism of Brenden.
I think there a lot of well-meaning, good hearted TFAers (which may include Brenden). But I also think there are plenty who use it as a means of career advancement - whether or not they succeed. Like Mark said, being in TFA creates countless of 'war stories' that builds professional portfolios of already privileged white (and increasingly, POC) teachers who look to put their radical and/or progressive views in practice. There are a billion Jonathan Kozol's out there now.
Being in TFA is the Goldman Sachs for privileged, liberal people. You spend some years getting 'leadership training' in the trenches and then you move on. I have met more liberal/progressive/radical TFA teachers who plan from the beginning to teach, at max, 4-5 years and then get into pub policy, become a principal, etc. But we don't need anymore researchers and leaders - we need lifetime teachers!”
23. Eva said... on Sep 22, 2009 at 09:11AM
“Yes and it is a sad commentary on the state of schools in the city of Philadelphia and around the country. There are so many reasons but one of them is the transient teacher population among the newer teachers. I truly believe that if they could move career teachers into these troubled schools and reward them with merit pay for working under such conditions they could turn the district around. They can pump all the money in the world into the school but what makes it work are the good teachers and hopefully active parents!!! That's one of the reasons I volunteer as a retired teacher of 35 years, not so much to teach but to help an overload new teacher and give encouragement so that they will stay for the long haul and develop into a good teacher.
Excellent article that I will share with others.”
24. Truth said... on Sep 22, 2009 at 11:19PM
“You sound silly. What a bore to listen to yet another self hating-white person. You hate yourself so much you try to accept blame for the sloth of black culture on behalf of the white race. Why don't you just kill youself and do both races a favor.”
25. Anonymous said... on Sep 23, 2009 at 08:23PM
“Well according to Arlene Ackerman the children do not learn because you are incompetent. They need to send you to Masterman and all those good teachers to your school and the kid's problems with magically disappear.(although Nutter's kid might suffer) Maybe Tony Danza can bail out your school!
Haven't you learned anything.”
26. Anonymous said... on Oct 4, 2009 at 10:12PM
“I for one appreciate your honesty and I have always thought the TFA is short changing the system. Knowing content and knowing kids go hand in hand...it doesn't matter what you know if you don't have the knowledge about how to present it to your class. Teaching is not for everyone, especially the weak at heart! You are doing everyone a favor if you realize that early on.”
27. Ben said... on Oct 29, 2009 at 09:49PM
“I'm a white teacher in ny (teaching fellows-similar to TFA) and i'm now in my 7th year. i'm upset that the author quit so soon. i'm sure a lot of his students were too. of course teaching isn't for everyone, but no one can decide in only 1 year.
the biggest problem i have with the teaching fellows and TFA isnt the lack of training or preparation (only teaching experience can help) but the enormity of the social experiment. they take white kids from the suburbs and throw them into struggling schools. we'd never in a million years see the opposite--a program which takes the best and the brightest college graduates of color from the city and throws them into white, suburban schools. but i'd love to see it! and i think it'd be more beneficial than the current program.
and in Truth's posted response to white guilt (which doesnt do anyone any good), the 'sloth of black culture' comment has got to go. nothing like a little good old fashioned racism to counter white guilt, eh, Truth?”