Consulting Teachers on Policy is a No-Brainer
Without a doubt, teachers are the most vital element of education delivery. They should be consulted on policy decisions for two reasons:
1. They are experts. They are in the trenches every single day, working with an incredible diversity of students. They teach kindergarten through grade twelve, they teach every subject imaginable, and they each do it in a unique way. To not put a policy proposal in front of this incredible diversity of perspectives is to shoot oneself in the foot. If a policymaker wants their policy to be successful, they should work hard to find everything that could possibly go wrong in the implementation step, and fix it.
2. Teachers make up the largest part of the district’s education organization. In any organization, morale is important. Leaders want employees to feel valued, safe, and empowered to do their best work. Without employee buy-in on policy changes, leaders are setting themselves up for failure.
By its very nature, the year of the pandemic necessitated a large number of policy changes. The largest of these, of course, dealt with the fact that education could no longer be delivered in-person, a facet of learning that had always been taken for granted.
District Level Failures
In crises, moving quickly is more important than moving perfectly. What we saw in the spring of the 2019-2020 school year was a disappointment. It was a bad model that didn’t give teachers and students enough face time, didn’t do a good job of preserving communities that students had come to rely on, and left teachers, parents, and students frustrated.
However, in the last year, this is the one instance in which I cannot fault the district leadership for the work they did. It feels so long ago, and there have been so many crises in between, that it’s easy to forget the confusion and uncertainty that permeated the world in March and April of 2020. The district first planned for a two-week leave, which was in line with recommendations from government officials. When it became clear that we would not be returning to the building that year, the district had to scramble to come up with something to offer students. The model developed was awful, but I honestly would’ve been more surprised if they’d come up with a model that was good given the over-constrained nature of the problem. Perhaps I’m giving them too much credit, but I think Newton did about average in the set of possible solutions that could’ve been created, none of which would’ve made people happy.
Unfortunately, that was the last time that Newton did anything that could even be argued to be acceptable.
With nearly three months ahead of them, the Newton Public Schools had ample time to solve a problem: what will school look like in the 2020-21 school year? The district wasted that time. They came up with no plan, they did not ask teachers for input, and they refused to incorporate the Newton Teachers Association’s (NTA) completed plan which utilized a phased return to school.
When August hit, with mere weeks before school started, the district revealed just how unprepared they were. They sent out a survey asking families to commit to either Distance Learning Academy (DLA), which may or may not have Newton teachers and “details were in development,” or a hybrid model. To ask families to make a difficult decision with no information, with the district admitting they hadn’t figured out what the option even was yet, is unbelievably irresponsible.
Teachers, too, were blindsided when we received a survey with narrow options for returning. We had to choose between able and unable, with narrow caveats that excluded situations such as a teacher caring for an at-risk relative, but not living with them, or living in the same condominium, but not the same apartment. If teachers selected unable, they were informed that they had only three days to provide proof from a doctor.
All of this had seemingly come out of nowhere, and chaos reigned. Community members and teachers alike were confused and furious, and the NTA, lacking any kind of messaging apparatus, rolled over when the school committee first approved this incomplete, unsafe proposal before backtracking and blaming it on the teachers. As a reminder, the original proposal required 95% of teachers to return, and the district was well aware that they did not have those numbers, but pushed it forward anyways.
This was the first major assault on teacher morale and trust in district leadership. We were bystanders to the entire process, watching as helplessly as the Newton community, while elected leadership made a disaster of things. Instead of taking responsibility for their lack of preparedness, teachers were blamed. Our superintendent blamed “staffing shortages” for the failure of the plan, implying that teachers didn’t want to work or return to the buildings. Our mayor lied to the community in claiming that the plan was developed in concert with teachers. Our school committee ate up whatever Fleishman and Fuller fed them, echoing the same talking points blaming teachers for the district’s failures.
Imagine going on vacation for a couple months over the summer, and letting a friend stay in your house while you’re gone. When you return, you discover that your friend burned your house down. You’re devastated, of course, and you’re furious at your friend, who is standing nearby with a match and a guilty expression. But then you’re baffled when you are blamed for burning your house down.
“But… why would I want to burn my own house down? I was on vacation! It was obviously my friend, he was put in charge of the whole thing!”
The community tells you that they don’t believe you because you’re lazy and you’ve always wanted to get the insurance money on the house anyways. And regardless of whose fault it is, they don’t care! Stop arguing with your friend over who did it and fix the house!
“But I haven’t even spoken with my friend! They won’t listen to anything I say, they won’t even have a conversation with me!”
All this falls on ears unwilling to listen. And this was the cloud under which we entered what would be the most difficult school year of our lives. Understandably, morale was not high.
Building Level Failures – Newton South High – The First Two Weeks
Note: Before I go into building-level failures, I want to say upfront that I respect and, on a personal level, I like our administrative team. It’s a hard job and I do believe they try to do what’s right. Their fundamental problem has been the failure to get meaningful input from teachers and students. Without this input, it is nigh impossible to run a school effectively; leaders can’t lead if they don’t know where their followers want to go. Like all my essays, I truly hope that this is read in the spirit of constructive criticism, of getting a window into what it was like to be a teacher this year.
As we began our roughly two weeks of faculty meetings prior to students returning, I was eagerly anticipating some sanity from our administrators at Newton South. Even if the district’s leadership had set us up for failure, surely the leadership at Newton South would help us to make the best of the district’s awful plan. Having been unable to plan all summer due to the district keeping us in the dark, I was looking forward to concrete policy details. How were we doing Wednesday schedules, which the SC hadn’t specified? What are the expectations around content coverage? How will we be grading? How will we be assigning homework? Essentially, what tools will we have to do our jobs?
Here was our faculty meeting schedule for those first two weeks:
Monday 8/31: Faculty Reconnecting
Tuesday 9/1: Community Building
Wednesday 9/2: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy
Thursday 9/3: Community Building with Trauma-Informed and Anti-Racist Practices
Friday 9/4: No Meeting
Monday 9/7: No Meeting
Tuesday 9/8: Communication Strategies
Wednesday 9/9: Feedback and Grading - A week away from the first day of school, we are told the grading policy for the first time.
Thursday 9/10: Community Building with Trauma-Informed and Anti-Racist Practices
Friday 9/11: Attendance and Closing Thoughts - With 5 days until the first day of school, this is the first time the homework and attendance policies are formally shared with us.
Each of these days included hours of prep time each afternoon, which would’ve been great, except that we were entirely unable to use them. Without knowing any of the specifics for how this year was going to run, planning was impossible. For example, if we’re not giving homework, I need to build more practice time into my classes, which, taken over weeks, sets me back days. Without knowing how we’re grading, how am I supposed to design assignments and assessments? Any work that we did would have to be scrapped when the administration finally handed down actual, concrete policies to us. This meant that prep time provided in these weeks went to waste, and once we received the policies later, we had to do all of our prep work in a short time without built-in opportunities to do it.
Every single individual at South is committed to anti-racist practices and, especially in this pandemic year, trauma-informed pedagogy. Newton’s district-wide commitment to really leaning into this, and not just making it the latest fad, is laudable. I would have happily spent every faculty meeting for the rest of the year on such practices, but in those first couple days, we needed to know what the hell we were doing.
The NTA, the district leadership, and our leadership at Newton South all have the same problem: they do not ask for teacher input. They do not listen to teacher input. They do not value teacher input. This is not conjecture; this has been repeatedly demonstrated by the actions they’ve taken.
The first two weeks of professional development were desperately out of touch with what teachers actually needed, and if they’d just asked us, they would’ve known that. Despite not being asked, teachers still tried to communicate our needs for concrete policy questions so that we could plan, and across the board, we were ignored.
It’s hard to overstate just how out of touch the administrators are with the faculty. Before we officially learned the details of the “no homework” policy that we started off the year with, it was casually mentioned in an off-handed remark by an administrator that there wouldn’t be homework. They carried on while teachers sat in stunned silence, seemingly not understanding that they’d just dropped a major bomb that impacted all of our planning going forward.
With how long it took for administrators to develop a homework policy and grading policy, one might imagine they had time to get teacher input. They opted not to, at least not in any meaningful way. Teachers were again given credit or blamed (depending on your perspective) for the new policies. Parents either wanted to know why we weren’t giving their kids homework and why everyone was getting inflated, fake A’s, or they wanted to thank us for focusing on their children’s mental health over academics via the new policies. Regardless of which side you agree with, it was tiring to once again have to claim (truthfully) that we had nothing to do with these policies.
Building Level Failures – Newton South High – Admins: Smile and Make it Work
And this was the story all year long. Policy after policy, change after change, and community members assumed that teachers were involved in their creation. Honestly, I can’t fault them for that; in a functional school system with good leadership, teachers would be involved in the creation and implementation of new policies. We should be able to speak to the motivations behind why certain policies exist. We should be able to defend what we’re doing in our classrooms to people who are curious, but our administrators do not grant us that ownership over our jobs.
We sat in faculty meeting after faculty meeting where administrators delivered policy change after policy change, seemingly at random, and used the word “we,” inclusive of the faculty, when discussing how excited they were about the new policies. Teachers without significant, outside-of-school connections to their colleagues were left wondering if they were the crazy ones, if they were the only ones who felt left behind by Newton’s newfound top-down policymaking.
Administrators, knowingly or not, encouraged this self-doubt. Teachers who questioned decisions were pulled aside after meetings and scolded for being “too negative.” Requests for feedback regularly began with, “We don’t want criticisms, we just want ideas for how to make this work.” After respectfully asking questions about grading, homework, and meeting times in a faculty meeting, I was publicly reprimanded by an administrator for “inducing anxiety among my colleagues.” Apparently, the administrator was totally oblivious to the fact that it was their refusal to answer our questions, leaving us unable to prepare for the school year, that was anxiety-inducing.
The refusal to acknowledge the reality of the situation we were in was incredibly frustrating. Admin sent us brightly-colored emails with exclamation points and smiley faces. At the start of one meeting, an administrator shared that they were heartened by the “upbeat mood in the school building,” only a week after the latest cohort of teachers had been forcibly dragged back into the building by the district. I began to wonder whether perhaps I was working in a different building than they were.
There’s a difference between trying to keep things upbeat and living in denial, and our administrators were firmly in the latter camp.
Building Level Failures – Newton South High – “Our anti-racist policies are the only anti-racist policies.”
When they did provide answers to our questions, which were always far too late, the policies were presented as though they were the only possible solutions practically, philosophically, and morally. When the no-homework policy was introduced, teachers had very real questions about its merits. The grading policy, as I’ve outlined in my post on grading, communicated absolutely no useful information to the recipients of the grade. But because these policies were labeled as anti-racist, trauma-informed practices, it was hard to argue against them, even if you also wanted to argue in favor of a more anti-racist, trauma-informed practice.
One of the most substantial flaws with our administration’s approach to anti-racist practices is their tendency toward acting like their anti-racist policies are the only anti-racist policies. This certainly isn’t true in any other policy area; people who are in agreement on a goal regularly disagree on the specifics of how to get there. Take the grading system as an example. The A/B/F/NG system we used this year was marketed as anti-racist, despite nearly every grading criteria inviting teacher bias. Perhaps the A/B/F/NG is more anti-racist than the traditional grading system; I’m honestly not sure. But I know that mastery grading is more anti-racist than either system. And as much as I love mastery grading, if someone shows me some other grading system that is more anti-racist, you bet I’m going to get onboard!
Being anti-racist means working to destroy and reverse systems that have propagated or preserved racism. It does not mean mindlessly signing off on every policy that our administrators dictate to us because they slap the “anti-racist” label onto them, sometimes with only a weak justification for how it’s anti-racist.
The final major problem with our administrators’ policies is that they are far too broad. Our leadership has frequently opted for a “one-size-fits-all” approach to issues that should be nuanced and depend on the subject, teacher, and level. In this, our administration confuses equity with equality.
Next year, for example, we’ve been informed that there will be a sixty-minute cap on homework assignments.
This policy does not differentiate among English, History, Math, Science, Foreign Language, or any other department. Should English and Math have the same cap on homework time? Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t; I have no idea, but it doesn’t appear that our administration has even asked the question. Currently, Newton students report that South prepares them exceedingly well for college, not just with content, but in terms of practices. Are we sacrificing this by capping homework in AP Courses, which are supposed to be college-level courses? Students in Newton also complain of high stress levels. Will this policy reduce stress, or is the stress coming from elsewhere? Alternatively, does this policy go far enough in reducing workload? Where did 60 minutes come from, anyways?
None of these questions are rhetorical. These are all questions that require research and time to answer, but our administrators either aren’t interested in asking these questions, or they have asked them, and have chosen not to share any of their justifications with us. Instead, we got a very predictable explanation for these changes.
These are not explanations. These are subheadings under which you explain how the homework policy is in line with these things. It feels like policymaking has been working backward. First, administrators decide to cap homework. Then, they say, “Oh, hey! This is anti-racist! It’s grounded in SEL! Nice!” And you know what, it probably is a more anti-racist homework policy than our old one! But is this the best anti-racist homework policy, or is there a better one? After all, their anti-racist grading system was a failure, and there are any number of more anti-racist models.
The correct direction to move in is, “Hey, what would be the best anti-racist homework policy we can implement? We need to make sure it’s trauma-informed as well. Let’s explore lots of things: caps on homework, types of homework, homework’s connection to grading, etc.”
Building Level Failures – Newton South High – Teachers are Not to Be Trusted
Where does all of this come from? Why are administrators so reluctant to involve teachers in decision-making? Why do they choose to work in what seems to be an echo-chamber of a small number of people who “don’t provide criticism, just ways to make it work?”
At the district level, we know why. We know that Fleishman, Fuller, and the School Committee have no respect for teachers. They’ve proven it through their actions time and time again. They’ve lied to us, endangered us, ignored us, and refused to work with us. They make off-handed comments denigrating us and encourage conspiracy theories that the NTA is behind all of Newton’s problems.
As much as it pains me to say this, I wonder whether our building-level administrators have not internalized some of this worldview from their bosses. While district-level officials degrade us through policies, building-level officials infantilize us through implementation of policy. Instead of being treated like hard-working professionals, we are not trusted to be outside the building. Heaven forbid a teacher Zooms into a meeting from home to dodge traffic in the morning! If a teacher wants to Zoom into a meeting because they don’t teach any classes that day, too bad! They’re going to have to throw away two hours of sorely-needed prep time to make a round trip.
A prime example of the lack of respect shown to us by administrators was during the part of the year when Wednesdays were half synchronous and half asynchronous. This was done to allow teachers to have more prep time, as teaching remotely or in the hyflex model, especially for the first time, required way more time than we currently had. Teachers were staying up all hours of the night (on weekdays and weekends) to plan for these impossible models.
The first opportunity they got, the administration scheduled a meeting during our asynchronous time, when teachers were supposed to have the opportunity to prep. When it was pointed out that they couldn’t actually do this, the meetings in following weeks became “optional,” but optional in name only, as they covered topics like safety, schedule changes, and other vital nuts-and-bolts.
Was this an accident? Just a result of administrators being pressed for time and trying to squeeze in extra meetings? This screenshot from the administrators’ meeting agenda suggests otherwise. These were some notes for a half-day of professional development that took place in the afternoon.
As soon as they thought of flexible unstructured time, which would have been enormously appreciated by all teachers, they walked it back, fearing what might happen if they’re not keeping tabs on us. Imagine having such a low opinion of the professionals you hired, the educators whom you trust to work with children, that you feel the need to conjure up busy work to keep tabs on them.
Taken together, I know that I am not the only teacher who feels that I have lost agency within my school. I have no input into policy creation, no input into policy decisions, and minimal agency over how I implement policy. All of this despite the fact that I am the teaching expert, not the policymakers. Instead of being empowered to use my skills to create the best school and the best set of policies for my students, I am a cog in a machine. I grit my teeth and smile when the same administrators who placed in my way a bevy of obstacles congratulate me on overcoming them. It’s as though they’re holding my head underwater and complimenting me on how long I can hold my breath.
Rebuilding Trust – Can it Be Done?
So it has come to be that I, and every colleague I’ve personally spoken with, have lost all trust and confidence in all levels of leadership in the Newton Public Schools. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Though it is a long road forward, I believe that there are real steps to be taken to rebuild the relationship between teachers and leadership at both the building level and the district level.
District Level
• Replace David Fleishman as superintendent. He has demonstrated, time and time again, that he is not the superintendent that Newton needs. Let him find another district to strip away teachers’ medical accommodations and send out terrible news to teachers every Friday at 5pm.
• Vote out Mayor Ruthanne Fuller. She has lied to the city, and she lies to teachers every time she opens her mouth to thank us and tell us she appreciates our work.
• The only two individuals on the school committee who I believe sincerely value the contributions of teachers are Matthew Miller and Tamika Olszewski. The rest of the committee should be replaced with individuals who value teachers. I honestly don’t even care what their policy perspectives are; simply valuing teachers as people would be an enormous step up from the current group.
Some Newton voters firmly support Newton teachers, and I appreciate them enormously. Others make no secret of despising us, baking us brownies when things are good, but calling us unhinged, incompetent, and kid-haters when we ask the district to check the ventilation. It’s the voters who are in the middle who have some reflecting to do, given that only they have the power to accomplish the three bullets above.
Newton wants to have their cake and eat it too – they want to be an anti-racist, progressive, pro-teacher community, but every time they have the opportunity to prove it, they decide that the sacrifices that would be required to live out their supposed values are too high of a cost. We saw it with the housing issue in the city council election, and I worry we’ll see it again in the school committee elections. Will voters choose Shawn Fitzgibbons, a principled individual who believes that teachers have rights? Or will they choose Paul Levy, who claims to love unions, but literally wrote a book on fighting them? I beg you to choose Shawn, along with any other candidates who break the two-faced “say nice things/do bad things” mold of so many Newton politicians.
(And please, somebody, anybody, run against Fuller!)
Building Level
• If administrators want teachers to feel they meaningfully have a voice in policy-making, it’s no longer enough to claim that they’ll get feedback from us. They have failed to keep their word on this matter for too long. As such, for non-working condition policy issues like grading and homework (working condition issues are still negotiated by the NTA), each building needs a group of faculty, which I’ll refer to as the Faculty Senate, that has actual power over policy in its respective building. No policy change should occur without some majority of the Faculty Senate. A launching off point of what I’m proposing would allow either the Faculty Senate or the admin team to propose policies/policy changes, and approval would require majorities of both groups. The Faculty Senate would have representatives from each department to ensure that all voices are represented. (Yes, it’s essentially a beefed-up Faculty Council that has actual power.) It doesn’t have to be this exact model; the key is that faculty need to have formal, institutionalized influence over policy.
• The student government (at South, the South Senate), needs to be given seats in the room when policy discussions are happening. The student government, like teachers, is forced to be reactive because they are not meaningfully included in policy decisions. We need their input and advocacy while we are making decisions, not after we’ve foisted those decisions on students.
Anything short of this is just talk. The admin can promise a new start going forward, they can promise that they’ll listen to us, they can promise that we really are valued, but that would simply be a continuation of what they’ve been saying for years. If they mean these words, they need to prove it by taking actions.
I hope this essay gave you some sense of the psychic scars that this year has given teachers – not from the pandemic, but from our own leaders. If you’re reading this as a teacher, I encourage you to remember that the people in charge are wrong. You are valuable, you are a professional deserving of respect, and nobody else will every truly understand the love and dedication it took this year to get up every day, fight through all the BS that our own leaders were throwing in our way, and educate the truly wonderful young people who we work with.
In the end, that’s what it’s all about. Our kids deserve the very best, which means they deserve school leaders who can hold a candle to the school’s teachers.
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