The Blame Game...and Why We Lost It

I am a student of Matt Polazzo, and I respect him deeply for his involvement in our school, both as a teacher taking on an Advanced Placement (AP) course and an elective course of his own and as an advocate of student involvement in the Stuyvesant community. As a Coordinator of Student Affairs (COSA), he was heavily involved in our school's student government and even devoted class time today to discuss how our education system works and how different forces play into the education we receive.

I do not wish to add more fire to an already heated debate, especially with the shocking amount of ad hominen attacks that have risen from both sides of the field. There have been comments calling my teacher an "idiot" and a blog post accusing him of being "Joel Klein's parrot." The extent to which this debate has gone has surprised many people, including some of my peers, but this struggle is barely new. Since its inception in 1960, the UFT has fought a 40-year brawl to protect teachers from "the powers that be." Mayor after mayor, protest after protest, the UFT has asserted its support for seniority pay, social promotion (that is, allowing students to continue their education in spite of low standardized test scores), and smaller class sizes under the monicker of "don't let our kids down."

This may be what is really causing our education system to fail. Teachers in my school (our local UFT chapter representative in particular) and teachers across the city believe this is their good fight. They believe that the tensional talks between their union and the DOE are grown-up talk and believe that we are just children. Their fights over pay and education reform--or lack thereof--should, they believe, concern only the adults. Each faction believes they know what's best for us while we stand aside and watch money that could be going to more classes, more textbooks, and, in some cases, more chairs go to teachers sitting in rubber rooms.

When student government representatives in my school recommended the administration start a course (not teacher, but course) evaluation system, the teachers immediately rejected the proposal, citing union regulations, in spite of the fact that we found no provision that specifically bans the use of student evaluations in determining teacher performance. They worried that this would subject teachers to ad hominem attacks (much like Mr. Polazzo's article has spurred ad hominem attacks from other teachers who haven't even met him, let alone know his abilities as a teacher). They told us that concerns like who to fire, what pay they receive, even how they teach is their business.

The issue of "student revenge" may be a problem in many schools, but it needs to first be understood that we, as students, deserve a good education and that we, being the ones receiving the education, should have the right to decide whether it's working for us. This means that the teacher-student relationship needs to be reevaluated. While we understand that teachers are also employees, that still does not mean they should ignore the fact that they are also mentors. Too often, I hear students complaining of teachers who have been burned out by a system that favors seniority over merit. Some complain of teachers who simply lecture in class and refuse to see students during their free time or after school for extra help--and these are usually the teachers who have been in the system for 20-30 years.

While teachers try hard to hide the UFT-DOE debacle from their students, there's no question that this fight over merit pay vs. seniority pay or mayoral control vs. BOE does directly affect us and the education we receive. But before we can discuss teachers' contracts and union negotiations and the like, teachers need to think about the position they are in (and not just follow the old union adage of "for the children"). It is demeaning to say we are just children giving our input in a matter that concerns grown-ups when we are the ones receiving the education. What needs to change is the way teachers see us. Teachers need to see us as students first and sources of their paycheck second. They need to see us as their protege and trust our involvement in our education. My fourth grade teacher refused to call us kids and would rather refer to us as "young adults." Because that's what we are.

At the same time, we need to show them that what we are receiving is a valuable gift and show them that we care enough about what we receive that we would involve ourselves in their "grown-up matters." The UFT complains that there is no definition of "quality teaching," that there lacks a scale to determine when a student truly succeeds. They argue that the mayor's determination through test scores is wrong. Perhaps the missing link here is the student.

Amid the arguments of teacher contracts, mayoral control, and the like, the student is the one who has really lost the fight. Instead of focusing on improving our quality of education, the UFT and the DOE have chosen to squabble over money and politics (making up such clever nicknames as "Mayor Doomberg" and "King Klein"). I look back to the years Mr. Polazzo was our school's COSA (in the form of a movie "Frontrunners"), when student input in our school was taken more seriously. Those were the days, they say.