Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story

by Brendan Halpin

  In February Rachael comes back, but this time she brings Spencer Hackington, who is on our board and whose big claim to fame is that he’s a serial political appointee. He keeps getting Republicans to appoint him to run stuff—slate agencies, city departments—and I wonder how, aside from obviously kissing a serious amount of ass, one gets into the political-appointee business. It seems, to judge by Mr. Hackington’s record, to be a pretty sweet gig.

  Anyway, as you would expect of a guy who is used to running stuff (and who is picked by the party hostile to government employees to oversee government employees), this guy is a total asshole, and he spends the meeting yelling at us and belittling our concerns. This is really not a good sign. I state my concern about how the priorities of a superintendent are frequently at odds with those of teachers, and how I am afraid that having a superintendent—oh, sorry, president—is going to mean that teachers’ priorities will be sacrificed.

  To his credit, Hackington doesn’t really dispute my point or my conclusion—he just points to a chart he has about how much money needs to be raised for the school to grow. Ugh.

  So we are all feeling kind of queasy about what the board is doing, and this is doubly troubling because the board is chaired by Rachael, who lives in New York, and otherwise consists of people who never set foot in the place. They also do all kinds of sleazy maneuvers like going into executive session for two hours, then opening the doors at 10 P.M. SO that the vote they are taking about the direction of the school can be, as required by law, “public.”

  Almost the entire faculty starts having secret meetings, and we draft a no-confidence motion, and a bunch of teachers go to a board meeting and read it, and it feels really great—we all get together to fight the power, and then we actually do something rather than just talking about it. Though what we really should be doing is starting a union, but many of my colleagues have been brainwashed by the whole idea of the “charter school movement,” which is something we hear about a lot around here. It’s this idea that charter schools all over the country represent a revolution in public education, that these small, nimble start-ups are the future and big behemoth “regular public schools” (a derogatory term here in the halls of Better Than You) with unions are the past. So many of my colleagues, because this is the only place they’ve ever worked, believe, despite their own long hours, inequitable class assignments, and substandard pay and benefits, that unions are the embodiment of evil. It’s pretty clear to me that Rachael and Hackington are the embodiment of evil, and that a union would help us have a voice in decisions that are going to affect us, but most of my colleagues aren’t buying. Lisa tries to start the union-election process and gets a whopping six signatures.

  So that’s bad. Also bad is that somehow this clandestine fight-the-power stuff has gotten linked to “diversity” stuff, and that we can only have one if we have the other, and we have to talk about “these issues” if we are going to really work together. It’s not exactly clear to me what “these issues” are. I know that there is a history of racial tension here, that the departure of the African-American principal added to the tension, and people are always saying how all the “staff of color” leave, though from what I can see, the staff of whiteness pretty much do too, but okay, all the people who’ve been here since the beginning, or even any longer than me, except for one, are white, and maybe this is not as warm and fuzzy and loving a community for everybody as I think it is. And clearly the departure of Kathleen and Wilhelmina hasn’t actually helped.

  So we meet once to discuss this stuff, and it mostly consists of people talking about their pain, and nobody is really talking about much of anything work-related except for the occasional vague, accusatory reference to “some people,” until Trish, our college counselor, starts crying and says that none of her colleagues ever come to talk to her. The meeting breaks up not long after that, and I’m feeling dubious about this whole process, and then we have another meeting, and we have no process or facilitator or anything, and Trish starts yelling about how some Jewish teacher in New York just did something horrible to some black kids, and some Jewish staff ask why it always has to be about Jews, and Erik, the vice principal, says that he is really outraged because the students in town meeting voted down a resolution favoring reparations for slavery, and this really shows that we have a lot of work to do, and that we are really damaging these kids. (I think it has more to do with the fact that nobody pays the slightest attention to anything that happens in town meeting and that most of our black students are of Jamaican, Haitian, or Trinidadian ancestry, and might perhaps have different feelings on this issue from students whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States.) Roberta tries to disagree with Erik, and she is shut down by Trish, who is screaming, tears in her eyes, that Erik is a black man and we must show him deference.

  That pretty well kills the meeting, and I go down to the basement as angry as I’ve ever been at work. I am literally throwing stuff across my classroom, because my feelings are hurt. Because, if I understand Trish correctly, my job as a white man in this school is to shut up and take orders from the black people. Because I have to sit through these bullshit meetings and listen to people prattle on about their pain. Because my presence here somehow makes me suspect. The fact that I live in the city and work in the city and grew up in the city means nothing—the fact that I am white in this place means that I have to get a big ration of shit because of my skin color. Well, hooray for diversity.

  I rant to a couple of people I trust about this, and one of them runs back to Trish and tells her everything I said. I have no idea why. I feel like I’m in the seventh grade. I send an e-mail to the entire staff saying that I am through having these conversations without a facilitator because I don’t want to be yelled at. I get a raft of responses about what an evil reactionary I am, and how this school is not ready for “this work.” I end up having coffee with Trish one day to try to smooth things over. Trying as hard as possible to be politically correct and using lots of “I statements,” I say that I felt anger in the meeting when Trish was screaming at us because I recall how, in my family, when someone is yelling at you, they want you to shut up, that to me, yelling like that is a way of ending a discussion, not starting one.

  Trish is also hip to the I statements, so she informs me that in her family, yelling at people is just the way they have conversations, which makes me damn glad I didn’t grow up in her house. I say how I understood her to be saying that she thought that the white staff should pretty much shut up and let the black staff tell us what to do, and while we do end up having a cordial coffee, she never really tells me that I misinterpreted her.

  The diversity committee ends up hiring some diversity consultants to help us “do this work” (what is the work? What is the goal? Nobody can tell me) next year, so the whole thing dies down, and the next thing we know we get a letter from Rachael saying that the two finalists for the president position are Trish and Brian Watkins, the principal who got me my first interview with the fingernail lady at Court Street.

  We all talk feverishly about this for weeks, and the faculty decides that we favor Trish. Trish has done a top-notch job as the college counselor and has tons of experience, and Watkins is a guy who goes into failing schools and kicks asses and takes names. Parents and teachers go to interviews with both Trish and Watkins, and everybody agrees that Trish gives a much better interview, she knows the school and has ideas about it, whereas Watkins just talks about how great he is, sometimes even using the third person, like he’s James Brown or something.

  It should go without saying that Watkins is the one who gets hired. We, including Trish, find this out by seeing an article in the paper that comes out on graduation day. It has Watkins’ smiling face, and a big, laudatory article about what a great job he did at his old school, and how he is excited to lead this new school, especially because he doesn’t have the constraints of a union.

  We’re all pretty outraged and demand a meeting, and the
y trot out Spencer Hackington again, and he says, yes, it’s a terrible shame that the paper knew before Trish did, that she had to find out from the sound guy at graduation, but that we have no way of knowing who planted that article, a lot of people are mad at him for leaving the Boston Public Schools, any of them could have dropped a dime, et cetera. It’s probably pretty unlikely that Watkins’ enemies got this fawning story printed, but I guess anything is possible.

  So as the year ends, I am, as I say to the kids, feeling incredibly happy to work here, really warm and loving about the entire community, but I am also scared about both the racial fault lines in the faculty and the turmoil I know is coming next year.

  And the two feelings are intertwined—because we all work so hard and so closely together, and because the school is still, after seven years, a kind of new thing, a work in progress, I have felt supported by a community here in a way I never did before. We are, after all and despite our differences, united in the belief that we are part of something important and that we get to build it. But because we all work so hard and so closely together, and because the school is so new, there is no culture or structure to insulate me from administrative turmoil. The principal and vice principal were new in my second year of Northton, but I was far enough down the food chain at a thousand-student high school that it didn’t really affect me much. Here, though, if there is a shit storm at the top, we’re all going to get dirty.

  51

  The new regime does not begin well. I stop in before the school year starts, and Roberta, who is now the lead teacher of English, explains how we now have eight administrators. In a school with two hundred students. There is the president, of course, and then the president’s assistant, who is his secretary that has worked with him for seventeen years. Then there is the president’s assistant for parent and community relations. She has also been with the president for seventeen years. Then there is the vice president. This, in a master stroke of political genius, is Trish. So rather than having her just running around perhaps attracting her own power base, a shadow presidency, Watkins has co-opted her. Fantastic. There are also now four “deans”: the vice principal, the head of special ed, a new “dean of history, science, and eleventh and twelfth grade,” and a new “dean of math, English, and ninth and tenth grade.” We seem to have a dean for just about everything now, so I ask which one is the dean of my left one. Nobody can ever tell me.

  Significantly, what’s missing here is a full-time college counselor. If Trish isn’t doing it and nobody’s replaced her, then what exactly are we going to do about getting these kids into college? Apparently this will be another responsibility of the clean of history, science, and eleventh and twelfth grade, who just happens to be another Watkins crony from his former school.

  Then Roberta informs me that we are going to have several days of mandatory training at the beginning of the year from the Buzzword Institute. Now, starting the year with mandatory staff “training” is bad enough, but we had the head of the Buzzword Institute here last year, and he was slick and insulting and such an asshole that I walked out of his presentation, marking the second time I had ever walked out of a meeting. Apparently he is a good buddy of Watkins, so the Buzzword Institute has landed a cool twenty-five-thousand-dollar contract to “train” us this year. I’m thinking we could have probably bought half a college counselor for that.

  So I am already feeling a little nervous and desperate, but then something weird and wonderful happens. I run into Gordon Stevens, my old mentor and professional hero, in the hallway here at Better Than You. It seems like divine intervention. We have a nice conversation—he is now mostly out of the classroom and doing some kind of work training teachers for the district and kind of getting ready to retire. He tells me nice things about how much he enjoyed working with me, and he says of Watkins, whom he has worked with (though not under), “He’s good, because you can argue with him and he’ll listen to you. He won’t always agree, but he does listen.” I reserve judgment about that, but overall, it’s tremendously rejuvenating to see this guy. See! He’s been at it for close to thirty years! And he’s still as smart and committed as ever! And he believes in me! Maybe I can keep doing this.

  Then I see the president’s assistant in the hallway, and she says, “I saw you talking to Dr. Stevens.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I did my student teaching under him. He taught me everything I know.”

  “He’s been working with us, you know. He was here to see Dr. Watkins.”

  “Uhhh, yeah, that’s what he said.”

  “Yes. He was here for us.”

  Okay then! This is so weird. It’s like my having a freaking conversation with this guy was some kind of threat, and this woman felt like she had to assert that the encounter didn’t really belong to me—it was just an unfortunate by-product of Dr. Watkins’ encounter.

  Now it’s time for us to have our big beginning-of-the-year meeting with the Big Man himself.

  The day starts pretty much like most first days of school in most regular schools, which is what this is now. The superintendent—sorry, president—is here to tell us about his vision, our mission, and stuff like that.

  Only, of course, this meeting, unlike the ones at Northton, will not have our union president telling us how many days till the first day off, ha-ha (this is the only real innovation).

  He begins by bullying us—write down the number between one and ten that shows how much you want this school to succeed, write down yes or no to “are you willing to work hard,” blah blah blah. It’s standard education-administrator bullshit and therefore really nothing to worry about, but it makes me angry and sad. First of all, this guy just walked in here and is asking me to quantify my commitment to the job I’ve been doing for two years. Like he’s the one who cares, and we’re the ones who need to be whipped into shape. Second, for all its flaws, this used to be our school.

  Now it’s his school. What the hell, he’s probably better at running it than we were. In the end maybe it will be a good thing, but, you know, I’m standing here watching the dream of a school in which teachers make important decisions dying in front of my eyes. Maybe it was too weak to live—it’s pretty clear now that Rachael never believed in it, and Kathleen bailed out before it came down to fighting for it—but I miss it. I hate to see it go.

  But the Watkins show gets better as it goes along. He lays off the bullying tone and asks for questions, which he then doesn’t answer—most notably, what we are going to do about the fact that we have twice as many seniors as last year, and essentially no real college counselor. He answers that one with, “What did you personally do to help students get into college last year? You’ll just have to keep doing that!” I wonder how his vice president might feel about the implication that she basically did nothing last year as the college counselor. Still, he gets more and more charming as the time goes by, and by the third hour, we are all eating out of his hand. Me included. I am ready to dance on the grave of the vision of this school if I can only be allowed to work for this wonderful man.

  He’s got skills. He’s very charming, he makes us laugh, and he probably hits the favorite button of everyone in the room at least once. For me it’s when he pooh-poohs all of our diversity efforts. The president informs us that we have lots of rules written down about appropriate communication, and that we should address the problem of people breaking the rules. But why should we take up everybody else’s time with this? It would sure be nice if we all worked out our issues and everything, but how can that compare with serving the kids as a focus for our time?

  Like I said, I am eating out of his hand.

  So much that I forget his weird, non sequitur answer about the college counselor, and the fact that this means that I as a senior advisor will have to step in and do this college counseling I’m not trained for, and my advisees will suffer as a result, and if I complain about the workload, I am not a team player willing to do whatever it takes for these kids. I will also forget what
it says about his priorities that having all these cronies on the payroll trumps having a college counselor.

  Well, we’ll see. Like I said, I have seen a lot of these meetings. At Newcastle, and then for the first couple of years at Northton, they always scared the shit out of me, because administrators just love to talk about their new initiatives and programs and ideas and I always got intimidated by this stuff until I realized that it very rarely has any real impact on what happens in my room. Basically if you’re doing your job, you’re okay. Actually in most schools you’re okay even if you’re not doing your job.

  At the end of the day we go for our picnic/barbecue. It’s not at Al’s house. They say this is because we should be partying in the city we serve instead of the suburb where Al lives, but I think Al being the official party guy gives him a power that is threatening to the new folks. So we go to Franklin Park, which is a spot I actually love to walk and bike through, but we are in perhaps the very shittiest, most depressing part of the park—a sad cluster of picnic tables between a busy road and some tennis courts, and sitting in the shadow of a giant public hospital. It is a pathetic, desultory affair. In years past these events were real parties. At least, they were to me. They really felt like family get-togethers, only without the weird, forty-year-old resentments about who told Grandma when Aunt Betty ate too many cookies.