Another example of the limits of good intentions, and the very real hurdles new teachers face in driving student achievement in our toughest schools. Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks writes about Ed Morman, a mid-career switcher who entered the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, but is now admitting defeat and quitting the field.
“The [teaching] job was the hardest I’ve had, by far,” Morman wrote, “but the potential for job satisfaction was far greater than I’d ever felt before. I told the kids that I quit teaching because I needed to make more money. This isn’t true. … I quit because of the stress I felt. The main cause of the stress was the kids themselves. I could never rise above the feeling of humiliation that I felt each day when I tried to address 20 or 25 kids and might find none of them paying attention to me. I seethed when I asked a student to stop talking and heard the response, ‘Get out of my face.’ So often I stood in the classroom wishing I could be anywhere else.
“I try to get a class to come to order while one kid is jumping on a second, a third calls out my name asking me for a pencil, a fourth demands that I let her go to the bathroom and a fifth needs to go see Miss Smith, while a sixth needs a pass to the nurse’s office and a seventh starts making silly, repetitive noises. … One day a cheap calculator hit the wall just above my head. Another day, it was a Jell-O cup, whose contents dripped down the wall and stained the picture of Harriet Tubman I had hanging on a bulletin board. …I had a meltdown after seeing how poorly my kids did on a standardized test.
Typically Morman shoulders the blame himself for his failure. “One thing I absorbed from my otherwise inadequate training is that it was up to me to make a difference,” he notes. “And I did make a difference, but not enough to sustain me through the nonsense.”
A sad, achingly familiar tale.
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Nearly 30 years after Seattle’s schools were integrated through busing, the city’s schools have long since resegrated, writes Linda Shaw, the Seattle Times education reporter. Today, about one-third of the district’s schools have nonwhite populations that far exceed the district’s average of 58 percent. In 20 of them, nonwhite enrollment is 90 percent or more. There are fewer nearly all-white schools today than when Seattle began districtwide busing in 1978. But Seattle Public Schools, like many districts across the nation, has slowly, steadily resegregated, Shaw writes.
The Seattle School Board is weighing what, if anything, to do about the situation. As the board plans a major overhaul of how it assigns students to schools, its members face conflicting desires. Do they assign more students to schools close to their homes? That’s what many parents say they want, and it’s what the board (before last year’s elections) voted to pursue. Do they try to ensure racial diversity at every school? Many parents say they want that, too. But if a neighborhood is segregated, a neighborhood school will be, too.
But the school board is more limited than ever in what it can do, the paper notes, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s closely watched desegregation decision a year ago. The court ruled that Seattle and Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky could no longer use a student’s race in deciding where some students attend school.
The paper’s long, thorough report notes that busing “as the numbers might appear to show” with white enrollment dropping as many students left the system. Diversity also did not raise academic achievement, After the district reduced busing in 1989, then ended it entirely eight years later, the racial balance at many schools continued to unravel. “The hard truth,” says School Board member Steve Sundquist, “is that the school district is hard-pressed to single-handedly overturn segregated housing patterns in the city.”
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