I found out
a couple of days ago that Barbara Hickman, Superintendent of Flagstaff School
District, is leaving her position to take another job in Colorado. She’s been
here since 2007. She weathered the global recession in 2008, the uptick of charter
schools, the downturn in enrollment, the passage of bills to raise taxes to
compensate locally for funds from which the state had divested. I don’t know
much about her but she seems pretty dynamic, being able to manage such
vicissitudes.
I suppose that
is one thing we, who serve at the pleasure of the state, should understand:
Sometimes, you’re the tail. Sometimes, you are also the tail. Most of the time,
it is you who is getting wagged. You don’t do much wagging. It would be nice to
be the one who wags but teaching for the state has perks: it’s a relatively
secure job, you have time during the summer to devote to research and reworking
your curriculum, and you have some kind of autonomy in the classroom. Sometimes,
you’re not the dog of the budget but you’re the dog of your days. Or, at least
some part of your days, when the kids and the paperwork and the testing and the
evals don’t get you down.
Still,
teaching in this state is its own beast. Bills are on the table to provide
vouchers to kids who go to private school, further decimating the block of
funding districts receive. The pot of funding public schools continues to get
smaller and smaller. Through voucher systems, class size actually increases
because if you take ten kids out of a school, you can afford to pay for one
fewer teacher. The remaining teacher’s class size is that much bigger.
I wonder
how long Superintendent Hickman has been trying to go. Maybe not long but possibly since the
beginning. It’s possibly to want to get the hell out of your job and still do a
good one. Who could blame her for hightailing it to a state that, though not
perfect, doesn’t pretend that the recession of 2008 is ongoing and doesn’t
claim businesses will flock here because we keep the taxes so low? Businesses
really don’t want to move their families or hire from a population whose state
per-pupil spending is 49th in the nation. I understand that it might
be politically smart to keep people under-educated so they keep voting for you,
but business leaders tend to want people who can think critically and who, you
know, know stuff.
Sometimes I
worry that my favorite teachers will leave because they haven’t had raises in
over 9 years, because the threat of budget reductions looms every year even
though the state has a surplus and a rainy day fund, because their class size
gets bigger, but, more fundamentally, because they work for a dog who hates
this very tail.
One of my
favorite teachers takes workshops in the summer, attends conferences, learns
new math-teaching techniques on her own time. She runs an in-class newspaper, elections
to teach the kids how government works and how fractions work and how to think
critically about books the kids read. She makes the kids dig deep into
understanding how a book is composed by asking kids to write their own books.
She makes the kids think math is a choose your own adventure story: you can do
it this way. You can do it that way. There are four ways to figure out how to
add fractions. I will show you each of them.
What if she
left? What will the dog wag now?
I have
colleagues at NAU who are, according to my students, some of the best teacher
they’ve ever had. They serve on
committees. They organize internships. They publish articles and books. They
contribute some of the most cutting edge scholarship in the country.
What if
they left? Who would be the best teachers then? What’s the point of a dog
without a tail?
I love it
here and I love my job. I would have a hard time leaving. I love my colleagues,
the friends I’ve made here, the Flagstaff. I love the work do but I understand why Superintendent
Hickman will leave. It’s hard to stay in a place where you have to fight for
everything and where, no matter how hard you fight, no one listens because
you’re just a tail. Unless, of course, the people who believe in the good work
of the tail rise up and get together and find a way to wag that dog.