The other day I went to visit the school where I student taught last year. Last year, half of my students were English Learners and many of my students received free or reduced-price lunch. It is an urban public school which has been struggling to raise standardized test scores, having been designated for ‘Program Improvement’ and threatened with No Child Left Behind “consequences”. It is also full of super-cute (and insightful, and exasperating) students.

Lately, there has been a lot of focus on the scourge of bad teachers. According to some  politicians, movie makers, and entire newspapers, bad teachers are the biggest obstacle to the success of public school students everywhere. While I wholly believe that there are teachers out there who are failing their students, I find this focus, to put it nicely, misguided. I want to tell you about the teachers at the school I visited.

In the middle of a school day last spring, teachers from every single grade-level team received a pink slips in their boxes. In order to facilitate these lay-offs, the district upped class-size limits: kindergarten through second grade would go up to thirty students per class. (Have you spent time with a five-year-old lately? Imagine that kid multiplied by thirty. Imagine being the adult trying to reach each of their individual learning needs for seven hours at a time.)

In response to this and other cuts, the teachers (organized by the teacher’s union) voted to take several unpaid furlough days, and to give up the in-service days dedicated to professional development. The teachers chose to lower their salaries and reduce their training so that their students could be in a more reasonable situation. Note that the teachers at this school are also expected to provide all of their own paper - they have to bring blank stacks with them when they use the copy machine.

While they were able to bring kindergarten to a “mere” 28 students, the fourth grade I visited on Thursday had 34 students and 32 desks. (Compare: my private school class has 24 students, two full-time teachers, and a side room with seven extra desks for small-group instruction.) The class includes several students who seem to have special needs and have been waiting for over a year to get assessed (the maximum wait for the student study process to get rolling is supposed to be two months). Last year, the school of over 600 students had one special education coordinator to organize and assist all of the students who have or may have special needs - it seemed like too much for one person to do. This year, due to budget cuts, the district decided to cut that role into a part-time position.

This school is not an anomaly. I have colleagues who get one half-hour prep period the entire week (at the private school, I get at least one prep a day), and are expected to teach art, music, and P.E. themselves. They and their co-workers often spend 12-hour days at school. They spend their weekends scoring homework, talking to parents, sleeping, and considering how much more they can do.

These and other teachers I know are dedicated, hard-working, and gifted. However, there is no question in my mind that they are not serving students as well as they could be. Many teachers give so much of themselves, and it is not enough. It is hard for teachers to reach maximum potential when:

• They are not given the supplies they need to do their jobs.
• They have lost opportunities for professional development.
• They have ridiculously large classes.
• They lack the resources to properly serve their students with special needs.
• They lack adequate time for planning and grading.
• They are expected to push themselves to the point of burnout (so that even if they are excellent teachers, we do not expect them to last long).

If people are truly concerned about bad teaching, then we need to stop setting teachers up to fail. We would have to start by raising the budgets of urban public school districts. But of course it is easier to blame a few individuals than to reckon with how we as a nation are choosing to fail many of our children.