There was a time when calling a teacher a martyr was a cliché compliment. It meant that you attended football games in the cold and brought food for the hungry kids and planned the next great lesson and left school in the darkness. The teacher martyrs were the leaders--the devoted, the beloved--and we looked at them with admiration and envy.
But now teachers are literally dying in their schools. Now being a teacher martyr means confronting a gunman with military grade weapons and deciding to become a human shield to protect your kids. It means opening the door, facing the unknown threat, and pulling kids who are running for their lives into your classroom. It means hiding in a closet for hours and watching your kids send goodbye texts to their families.
How did this happen? How did we allow the possibility of death to become an unspoken and predictable part of every teacher’s job description?
Part of the answer is undoubtedly the American gun culture. We allow citizens to purchase weapons like the AR-15 even though we know their only function is to kill people. We watch the news coverage of mass shootings in schools, churches, malls, movie theatres, concerts, night clubs and offer our support with a hashtag. We hate the uselessness of sending thoughts and prayers, but we don’t actually expect anyone to do anything.
Gun control is the obvious place to start and I stand with the Parkland students who are demanding legislative action. I don’t mean to diminish the important reform that is needed to our gun laws, but there is something else lurking in the shadows.
In recent years, the political framing of the teaching profession has slowly eroded its core purpose. Instead of being viewed as specialists, teachers today are seen as utilitarian workers who are expected to demonstrate a functional competency in everything from social work to psychology to school safety. Like the erosion of any institution once revered, it happened with a series of half-truths that sustain themselves through circular reasoning.
Phase 1: Demand Teacher Accountability
The pursuit of teacher accountability started with a few seemingly harmless comparisons to the business world. If corporate professionals are evaluated on their productivity and results, shouldn’t teachers be evaluated in the same way? Since so many workers face job insecurity, why should teachers land a job with tenure? What evidence do we have that teachers are growing professionally, especially if they have an entire summer off? At this point, enough people outside of education start nodding along. Why are teachers awarded so many benefits that I don’t have? Ultimately, we stripped teachers of their professionalism in the name of fairness.
The rhetoric around professionalism offered the foundation for the policy changes. We needed a way to rank teachers and identify the low achievers. Soon, communities searched for ways to link standardized test scores to teacher evaluations and merit pay. In many cases, these metrics were used to make public announcements about teacher rankings so that parents could seek out the good teachers.
Accountability measures continue to evolve but the mechanisms themselves are not nearly as damaging as the prevailing suspicion. As long as the public suspects that a slacker teacher is hiding out at their local school, we will continue to see new ways to micromanage a teacher’s work hours, instructional practice, professional development, and career options.
Phase 2: Redefine Teachers as First Responders
With teachers’ professionalism already challenged, the time had come to redefine the role of teachers. The new approach was a quick 1-2 punch: widen the breadth of teacher responsibilities and raise the expectations. Teachers today are expected to play the part of first responders who can identify, report, and manage a growing list of student concerns. A common sentiment that I hear from teachers is that they feel overwhelmed looking for so many different potential pitfalls.
Teachers are supposed to catch any of the red flags for mental illness, report suspicions of child abuse, detect the signs of drug use, manage medical situations in the classroom, monitor the student chatter for any drama popping up on social media, respond to the physical and emotional needs of students dealing with trauma, etc., etc.
With the list of expectations growing each year, no one was surprised when teachers were tasked with saving their kids from an active shooter. In fact, our president now thinks that teachers hiding their students during a code red isn’t enough—he’d rather see teachers carrying concealed weapons. Depending on the day, you’ll see teachers screening students as social workers, counselors, psychologists, nurses, and security guards. This new definition of the teacher as a first responder is a far cry from the teacher who was an instructional expert.
Phase 3: Maintain the Financial Ceiling
As long as teachers are first responders, there’s no rush to fully fund schools. Our schools don’t have the books and technology they need, so there’s no money for more psychologists or social workers. The stunning part of Trump’s proposal is that he’s willing to fund a program that would offer guns, training, and bonuses for 20-40% of the nation’s teachers (yes, that’s over 1 million teachers). If you accept the paradigm of teachers as first responders, it almost makes sense; after all, we only need teachers to keep kids safe and healthy.
The financial ceiling means that teachers cannot thrive as instructional leaders. The lack of funding creates obvious deficiencies in programming and personnel, critical gaps that are often felt most by vulnerable student populations. Some teachers do what they can and hope that it’s enough while others begin to feel complicit in supporting a flawed system. Either way, when the test scores don’t improve enough or a student meets a tragic death, we want to know why the teachers didn’t do more. And now we’re back to the beginning, wondering aloud about teacher accountability.
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I know that this reads as a bleak analysis, but teachers are inherently hopeful beings. Much like the Parkland students who are demanding change, teachers need their own call to action. Perhaps all of those incremental changes over the last several years have finally brought us to a place where the new image of the teacher simply feels wrong. Should teachers have to die to save their kids? Should teachers really have to go on television to say that they don’t want to carry a concealed weapon in their own classroom? Should teachers need to start an #ArmMeWith campaign to prove that they don’t want guns? (Here are some responses from my Twitter feed: #ArmMeWith books not bullets, a working heater, smaller class sizes, autonomy, trust, counselors and psychologists, librarians, music, microscopes, resources and funding, notebook and printer paper, glue sticks. You get the point.)
I believe that we’re better than this and that we can change. Let’s choose to remember who teachers used to be and who our children need them to be once again.