Models of Success
There is a quote on the wall at Newton South High School that I have walked past every day for seven years:
“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” -Steve Jobs
Originally, a version of this quote was spoken by Jobs when attempting to lure the CEO of Pepsi to join Apple. In isolation on the wall of a high school, this quote appears to argue that any career can be lumped into one of two categories. You’re either selling sugar water or you’re changing the world. There is no in-between, and it is clear which set of careers is portrayed as desirable. You’re either a failure doing some meaningless, menial job or a success who is changing the world.
I hate this quote. I don’t think it should be displayed on the wall of any high school, but especially not a high school like Newton South, where many students have heard their whole lives that there is one narrow path to success, and a large number that lead to failure. Do well in middle school, or you won’t be able to take all Honors classes in high school – you’ll instead have to take those sugar water classes. And in high school, you need to get all A’s and take the SAT’s four times to get a good score, or otherwise you’ll end up in a sugar water college. Students are convinced that any slip-up at any point will doom them to the sugar water “track,” from which there is no escape.
Aside from reinforcing the narrative that failure lurks around every corner, ready to seize you if you’re not signed up for thirteen different clubs and skipping two levels in math, the quote also encourages the perspective that there is one, narrow, objective definition of success: changing the world. With a bar like that, almost everyone should be considered a failure.
More realistically, the quote conjures up the definitions of success that Newton worships: wealth. If you’re wealthy, you’re successful. If you’re not, you’re a failure. It’s always struck me as remarkable that the same individuals who propagate this myth of success happily send off their children to be educated by teachers, who, by their definition, are failures.
It didn’t take long for my ideas of success to come into conflict with society’s ideas.
When I shared my goal of being a teacher with one of my own teachers, they told me not to. “You could do so much better!”
When I shared that I would be entering a career in teaching after undergrad, a fellow physics major responded, “That’s cute.”
Whenever someone asks where I went to school, and I tell them I earned a degree in physics from MIT, I get a sidelong look and a question: “Oh… why did you become a teacher?”
Underlying all these statements is the belief that becoming a teacher is a sign of failure. And in accordance with the model that claims success is correlated with wealth, that’s obviously true. But while the wealth model of success is the most celebrated, is the one that underlies the fabric of our society, it’s built on the assumption that all people are motivated by the same thing: maximizing money.
If maximizing money is indeed the underlying motivation of humans, then it makes perfect sense to correlate income with success. If you have income, then, by definition, you’re more successful. But this assumption simply isn’t true. While most are motivated by earning enough money to support themselves and their families, anything beyond that varies wildly. While there are absolutely people who want nothing more than to accumulate piles of money in which to roll around, there are also people who, past getting by, couldn’t care less about wealth accumulation.
It’s this mismatch that leads to problematic ideas about success and failure. The dominant model states that wealth and success are the same, and that model is applied to everyone, including those who work under a different model. This mismatch of models leads to more than bad feelings – it leads to exploitation.
The Exploitation of Teachers
“Teachers don’t do it for the money.” This statement has two primary implications, one true, one false. The true implication is that most teachers subscribe to what I’ll call the Happiness Model (prioritizing happiness over wealth accumulation). Teachers don’t go into the profession because they believe it to be the most effective method of building wealth. They choose it because it’s the most effective method for them to accrue value in the Happiness Model.
The false implication is that teachers place zero value on the money. While it’s a fun, heartwarming fantasy to believe that teachers are in it 100% for the kids, if my salary was cut to $0, you’d better believe I’d be out of here. Under the Happiness Model, money is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for taking a job.
However, this false belief is twisted even farther. Despite the dominant societal view that success and wealth are correlated, there is simultaneously a belief that, morally, those who eschew money in favor of happiness tend to be morally good people. The union of these two beliefs has made it impossible for teachers to advocate for themselves.
The first manifestation of this is in teachers’ salaries. The justification for paying teachers pretty depressing salaries is that we don’t care about the money. We only do the job because we love the kids and we’re good people. Is it true that I enjoy my job and love my kids? Absolutely! Is it the only reason I teach? No! Turns out, being able to pay my rent is kind of important.
But the moment a teacher advocates for higher pay (or literally anything else), they are branded as bad people. This fits with society’s model; if teachers are only in it for the kids, then advocating for more money must mean that the teacher is selfish and doesn’t really care about the kids. Because our work is inextricably tied to children, any kind of work action we engage in will necessarily impact kids, despite teachers’ best attempts to limit that impact.
In this way, teachers’ hands have been tied. We work for bad pay in bad conditions, and teachers are generally hesitant to advocate for themselves in meaningful ways because 1) we really, really do care about the kids and don’t want them to suffer for the sins of prior generations, and 2) I think teachers have bought into the narrative sold to us: that advocating for ourselves makes us bad people, as we should be doing this solely out of the goodness of our hearts. The fact that three out of four teachers are women further explains why our society is so willing to stereotype and exploit this profession.
Administrators, policymakers, and communities have taken advantage of teachers’ unique situation by forcing more and more work onto them with no comparable increase in time, pay, or support. We are frequently viewed by administrators as a free labor force. Need chaperones? Teachers will do it. Need someone to run a club? Teachers will do it. Need large numbers of people to coordinate and shepherd students around for a big event? Teachers will do it. Activities that require hours and hours of work receive either no pay or stipends that are so meager, it feels like they’re laughing in our faces. “Look at how little we can pay you to do this!”
Volunteering is praised as a positive quality, but what kinds of work are voluntary? Feeding the homeless, cleaning highways and beaches, and all things education-related come to mind. Economic well-being, the environment, and education are vital components of our society that should be funded in accordance with their importance.
It’s tragic, not praiseworthy, that these are voluntary.
Schools – Problems and Solutions
The macro-level impact of more and more being expected from teachers with no commensurate increase in resources is that more is expected from schools with no increase in funding.
Today, schools educate, provide mental health counseling, feed students who are hungry, provide college counseling, run sports leagues, house organizations, provide enrichment activities, serve as polling places, work with police, advocate for civil rights, provide technology access and training, run community education programs, pay for transportation to and from the school, seek out struggling students, administer state testing, administer private corporations’ testing, and run a slew of diverse support programs geared toward helping subsets of struggling students.
Is this a reasonable set of tasks for a single organization to provide? Or, a better question, is this a reasonable set of tasks for an organization to provide with no real increase in funding over time? A still better question is whether it is right that many schools in our country cannot afford to do even a fraction of these things.
Our society wants schools to do everything that society doesn’t want to do, and they want them to do it without funding. Even worse, when schools do get funding, the funding is often misappropriated.
People act as though improving education is a great mystery, but it’s really not. Here are some examples from Newton South.
• Over the last three years of teaching Honors Junior Math (six sections total), my average class size has been 27 students. Research suggests that best learning outcomes occur around class sizes of around 15-18 students.
• We do not have enough teachers to teach all the classes that we teach. For around five years, I’ve been teaching half-year classes on special relativity and quantum mechanics for free, in addition to the four classes I am paid to teach. Next year, I have forty students signed up for these classes.
• The Capstone Project, a senior year class for the DaVinci program at South, is taught for free. Without enough teachers, we had to either sacrifice the Capstone, or “volunteer” to do it. As always, a teacher volunteered to run the program for the good of the kids, despite no compensation.
• There is not enough classroom space. Classrooms are booked every block, every day. This makes finding places to work with students when they need additional support impossible. I’ve been forced to work with students in hallways, storage rooms, and in department offices, surrounded by teachers trying to prep for their classes.
The depressing thing about this is that the working conditions that teachers fight for, that we are accused of hurting kids to achieve, are conditions that would benefit kids. While it’s certainly more challenging teaching a class of 27 than a class of 18, it’s certainly much harder to be a learner in a class of 27 than a class of 18.
We need to hire more teachers. Your kids are suffering, the teachers are overworked and burning out, and the school is delivering a worse experience because we are understaffed. Hiring more teachers does not sound as exciting a solution as giving students Chromebooks, but nothing will give the district a better bang for its buck.
Hiring more teachers and building more classrooms will lead to very real improvements. However, there are deeper issues that are inappropriate to address at the school level.
Schools are where symptoms of deeper problems manifest. Homelessness, poverty, violence, and abuse show up in schools every day, and schools do their best with their pitiful resources to help. But it would be more effective, both practically and cost-wise, to attack these problems at their roots.
I used to believe that schools were equalizers, but I now know that to be a fantasy. The best predictor of a student’s adult income bracket is the income bracket they were born into, but that is further warped by race. White students are more likely to remain wealthy if they grew up wealthy, and more likely to become wealthier if they grew up poor, whereas black students are more likely to remain poor if they grew up poor, more likely to become poorer if they grew up wealthier. [See New York Times article here.]
It’s easy to see these effects in communities like Newton. Private tutors, private prep programs, and private counselors are just a couple of the ways that families leverage their wealth to get a leg up on poorer families. When Newton bungled its reopening this year, many families opted to leave for private schools, something not available as an option to poorer families.
Even in the absence of escaping bad situations, private schools themselves are engines of inequality. For exorbitant prices, families can pay to receive an education that, on average, is no better than a public school for a better-than-average chance of buying one’s way into a “top-tier” university. Frankly, it is appalling that private schools exist at all, as they seem to exist only to give rich kids a leg up on college admissions without actually providing a better product. [See The Atlantic article here.]
But even public schools are funded inequitably. Tying local funding to property taxes is a surefire way to ensure that wealthy districts do better than poorer districts. If anything, it should be reversed; federal and state governments should step in to ensure that poorer districts are better funded than wealthy districts in order to close the gap.
All of this comes back to poverty and racism. If we truly want students to flourish in schools, we need robust social programs. Every American should have access to quality healthcare when they need it. Every American family should have access to unemployment benefits when they fall on hard times. Every American should receive far more parental leave than we’re providing now.
We need to focus our police force on policing, and utilize trained mental health counselors and other community supports to work with folks who are struggling with issues that don’t need to be met with guns. We need to ensure that partisan gerrymandering and racist voting restrictions are eliminated and prevented to ensure that every American can have their voice heard at the polls. We need ranked-choice voting to allow for more meaningful voting, and we need to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine to stymy the clutch that misinformation and propaganda have over the airwaves.
We need to break up monopolies like Google and Amazon, impose wealth taxes, and strengthen worker protections through greater unionization. We need stronger restrictions on gun access so that our children don’t need to worry about getting murdered in their classrooms. We need to re-engineer our justice system to stop locking up black men for no reason, and end private prisons.
Education problems are the result of immoral, unconscionable income inequality in our country. If we want to fix education, we need to restore the middle class, fight poverty and racism at their roots, and destroy systems that stomp on the throats of the poor to raise up the wealthy.
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