The Harrison Bergeron Effect

Guys like Rafe Esquith could really screw up a new teacher like me, once upon a time.

Afire to become an energetic, creative, effective teacher as quickly as possible — I said new teacher, after all, not young teacher — I devoured every book Esquith wrote about his teaching practices and philosophy.

He is an amazing, too-good-to-be-true teacher at a public elementary school in a low-income neighborhood of mainly Korean and Latino communities near downtown Los Angeles. Or was.

After being removed from his classroom last spring after a career of some 30 years, Esquith was fired this month by the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Now he is part of a $1 billion class action suit against the district, alleging that it uses intimidation and baseless charges to fire older, higher-paid teachers. The district confines suspended teachers, the suit alleges, to so-called "teacher jails," administrative rooms where teachers can't teach and do little or no work at all.

The teacher jails are designed to break teachers' spirits and make them leave, the suit says.

The district has not responded to the lawsuit or to Esquith's firing, citing personnel privacy.

News reports indicate that a joke Esquith told to his class mushroomed into an investigation of alleged inappropriate touching of minors, suspect material on Esquith's home computer, and mishandling of funds for a nonprofit group that helps pay for theatrical plays his class stages.

Maybe I should back up a bit. Here's how amazing Esquith is (or was; or will be again, I hope; I'm using present tense, nonetheless):

• His class of fifth graders each year produces and performs a full-length Shakespeare play, as the Hobart Shakespeareans (Hobart Boulevard is the name of the school).
• The plays have attracted high-level attention, and Esquith has been able to secure theater lighting and other equipment that transformed his classroom into legitimate theater. He has support from actors Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf of The Lord of the Rings) and Hal Holbrook, among others, who continue to stand by him.
• Esquith teaches a group of students to play musical instruments, and they form the band for the Shakespeare play, performing rock music they choose as appropriate to back up the play.
• Keep in mind, this is all after-school stuff: He teaches a full day of school in general subjects.
• He teaches math through baseball, showing students how to keep score and calculate batting averages and earned-run averages and other statistics, and takes them to Los Angeles Dodgers games to hone their skills.
• He gives all students jobs as part of a long arc in teaching them responsibility. With the classroom currency, students can rent or buy their desks. The closer the desks are to the front of the room, the higher the rent, and students with money-management savvy can buy up desks and charge rent to other students.
• He provides after-school and weekend tutoring not only for Hobart students but for high schools who had moved on from Hobart.
• Esquith leads students with a simple guiding principle: Work hard. Be nice.

Now you will understand the context of this "joke." Esquith was reading "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" with his class (which by itself is unusual for fifth graders today) and got to the part where a character appeared on a stage naked except for painted stripes on his body.

Esquith apparently told the students that if they weren't able to raise sufficient money to stage their Shakespeare play that year, they might have to perform on stage just like this character. Someone — a teacher, apparently — took offense, and one thing led to another, which led to Esquith's dismissal.

His work has attracted notoriety and national acclaim. His books reveal a world in which Esquith seemingly works 24/7 for his classroom, where Room 56 appears far and above what his colleagues can (or are allowed to) do, and has led to tensions not only in his school but across the district.

I asked Esquith as much after reading most of his books.

"I may have misread important parts of your book," I told him in a 20-questions letter, "but I get the idea that your relationship with some or many teachers at your school (and with the administration) is tense and often cold and combative; I don’t see how many or any teachers at Hobart can compete with you, and I wonder about the fallout from that, and how and whether you team up with your colleagues; moreover, upper grades must often seem a letdown to many of your students. I’m certainly not criticizing your work; I’m just wondering how others can carry on the quality you exhibit."

Esquith answered me. By phone. In addition to all the tasks he undertakes, all the entitities and interests that require his attention, he took the time to call me.

Many of his answers have blurred in memory, but he was as on fire with encouragement of me as he appears in his books. He told me to work within the system as a new teacher, and get my feet under me, eventually working toward creative ways in my teaching career. Rafe Esquith took time out to give a stranger a pep talk, to raise me up the way he emboldened his students.

For better or worse, my teaching career didn't go far.

I found it extremely challenging to carry out the duties of teacher as outlined by the principal of my school, let alone try anything that was not directly related to testing. Don't tell anyone, but I did read children's novels to my class — after lunch, with the lights turned off so students would have a calm place, but also so the principal wouldn't be able to see right away that I was reading unauthorized books, should he pop in unannounced. He had advised me that reading novels would take away from the language arts instruction I needed to provide students.

Sure, I recognized I was just starting out and not to beat myself up about not mastering my new profession right away. But it was hard to remind myself that my warm-hearted colleague, who helped me immensely my first year, had been teaching for 30 years and knew a lot about being a teacher and an adult leader of children.

I will never forget having a really bad day — and it seemed everyone on campus was having a bad day — and carrying the world on my shoulders when I retrieved my class after lunch recess. While I was grousing to my students about not standing in a straight line, after all these days of instruction and expectation, I looked over my shoulder to see my kindly mentor playing follow-the-leader with his class, hopscotching and imitating an airplane as he led his students to their class. He had, in his wisdom, defused the tensions of their day.

If I couldn't see my way to that kind of spontaneous wisdom, how was I going to come anywhere close to the level of Rafe Esquith and what he could do? Esquith was inspiring and defeating at once; he gave me the same elated depression I get from great illustrators when I gaze too long at their work and wonder why I can't do that.

Should allegations against Esquith prove true — and would we ever know? I wonder — then all bets are off, of course. Action against Esquith was part of a new quick-response program to ferret out child abusers and molesters among the Los Angeles school district's teachers.

Getting rid of molesters is paramount, but I suspect the program was used against Esquith in what I call the Harrison Bergeron Effect.

The title character of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s short story, the gifted and athletic Harrison Bergeron was literally weighted down and hamstrung by devices meant to make him equal in ability with the rest of society, whose minds were too distracted by their own devices to raise a care of thought about him or anyone else. All were burdened equally and made equally ugly in this future world — except for those in charge.

I suspect that the district not only didn't want to pay Esquith the salary due him, but that they wanted to bring him down because they couldn't elevate all the other teachers, all the resources and nurturing, to his level.

Remove arguably the most famous public school teacher in the country, and the curve is no longer skewed.

As a short-time teacher, as one who had to unlock repressed memories from childhood in order to muster a spine as teacher, I suspect that public education began as good ideas and good intentions. When I was a kid, I suspect that teaching was still a creative art, and that the most creative teachers could thrive; I'd like to think that my brilliant sixth grade teacher, Loren Jackson, was the shining example of public education, not an outlier, that he demonstrated his creative lessons in full view and favor of the district supporting him.

Since then, I suspect that the good intentions layered and folded in on themselves, and money and power corrupted as it always does, and that public education now is a playpen of money and power and internecine war and byzantine rules, and the relentless demand for data and pressure from worldwide perception, that students, frankly, get in the way.

The very people public education is supposed to help, for the sake of our future, is the least important part of the machine. Great teachers are great despite the system, not because of it.

The system seeks to grind Rafe Esquith to dust, and I hope he emerges free to teach again, dignity returned, for fortunate children to come.

I hope you agree. Don't think of Harrison Bergeron then, who broke free of his encumbrances and danced as his body bid, only to be killed by those in power. And no one could muster a care or thought for his death.

Crunching numbers

Maybe I wouldn't have amounted to much of a teacher, after all.

I may not have gone where I intended to go,
but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.*

Maybe this is a bizarro "It's a Wonderful Life" story, wherein George Bailey, granted a chance to see a world without him in it, finds little difference.

Maybe some soothsayer could have talked me out of an expensive four-year rollercoaster ride that dropped me right where I'd started.

I mean, numbers don't lie … ?

Under ideal conditions, I'd be rolling toward the end of my fifth year as a teacher right now, my severalth career.

Hopped up on high stress, I'd be prepping students for the all-important state test (known as STAR in California, for Standardized Testing and Reporting) to which teachers must teach these days, because results mean so much to the future of each school. But I'd accept the stress, just as I had chosen this profession, and its myriad competing expectations.

Right about now, I'd be congratulating myself at the organizational skills I'd amassed in the last five years — and cursing myself for forgetting to photocopy the one worksheet I would need for the morning.

In a few moments I'd be racing to the school, hoping the custodial staff had unlocked the campus so I could be first to the photocopier, praying the machine wouldn't jam mid-job.

Right about now — the Ides of March — I'd receive the letter telling me my services won't be needed for the next school year. It would likely have been the fifth consecutive notice; with receipt of each one, I'd have sweated out the coming months like thousands of other teachers statewide.

Having survived — having had my termination rescinded — like as not I'd been teaching a different grade and at a different school from when I started. Maybe even a different district, where I'd start all over on the seniority ladder. But I'd be lucky and happy for a teaching job. I might have cut my workday to nine or 10 hours, and finally stopped falling asleep on the classroom floor trying to put the next day together and defuse the landmines.

Right about now, I'd dare to entertain a half-thought: I just might get the hang of this teaching thing one day.

These aren't ideal conditions, though, in case you're the last to know. The economy, to use a term economists have employed, sucks. California's economy suffers from its own poison brand of suckage, eating away at the infrastructure to provide for even the most standard needs, especially public education from pre-Kindergarten to graduate school.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, is bracing for $400 million in cuts the next school year, eliminating adult education and cutting 11,000 jobs. That's in addition to millions of dollars and thousands of jobs already cut from the budget since bleeding began in full in 2008.

(More than 20,000 California teachers this month have received their pink slips; it's an annual ritual, more widespread in the last three years. Though many will be able to return to teaching, more and more will not. School districts will wait until November — two months after the school year will have begun — whether voters will raise taxes to prevent a $4.8 billion cut to public K-12 education in Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed budget. Isn't that a fun job, predicting whether or not your school district will have enough money to pay for teachers, staff and resources? Over whose heads will hang the sword?)

Twin Rivers Unified School District in the Sacramento area, where I last worked as a full-time teacher, would be spared cuts under a tax initiative proposed by Gov. Brown for the November ballot. Twin Rivers would get special treatment as a new district, even though it's really four districts swallowed into one and given a new name.

Frustrated by an array of similar initiatives designed to enhance or obfuscate his own proposal, Gov. Brown has been trying to wave off the other initiatives, and just this week agreed to join forces with another initiative, if for nothing else to simplify the ballot.

But maybe all this bleeding is a good thing?

I mean, Del Paso Heights Elementary School, where I last worked, had 19 teachers on staff in 2011, the latest public figures show. Those teachers served 478 students.

In 2008, the year I worked there, Del Paso Heights had 28 teachers, who served … 478 students.

Fewer teachers — nearly a third fewer — the same number of students. I have to conclude that some or all of the classrooms became more populous, that state laws to cap enrollment to 20 students per class from kindergarten through third grade were lifted. I know that the classroom in which I taught was re-fitted the next year to accommodate students with severe disabilities who came from another school, so general education students were consolidated into remaining classrooms.

I may have been one of those 28 teachers in the 2008 figures; I'm not sure. The data released by the California Department of Education, and made available by the news media (in this case The Sacramento Bee) lists staffing by year, rather than school calendar year. So instead of listing 28 teachers in the 2008-09 school year, it lists 28 for 2008. I'm confused, you see.

Five teachers were let go that first year, nine total since then.

The conventional thinking is that a lower student-teacher ratio is best for students; students get more attention, more instruction, more correction, more chances to make mistakes and learn from them. But the STAR results — the results that officially matter — for the same 2008-2011 period suggest the students are doing no worse, and in some instances are doing better with fewer teachers and more crowded classrooms.

(Full disclosure: I'll never be mistaken for a statistician. Glaring poorly thought-out analysis may soon ensue.)

Look at STAR results for the third grade, where I taught, in 2009, the results from the year I taught them (those poor students!) In language arts, only 5 percent were considered advanced, and 18 percent proficient. These are the holy grail levels teachers strive for. A third of third graders tested at the basic level for language arts, 22 percent were "below basic," and 21 percent "far below basic."

Math was far different: A third of the students tested as advanced, 22 percent as proficient, and 18 percent as basic. Seventeen percent finished at "below basic," and 9 percent as "far below basic."

(Why math comes out so much better is a puzzle; maybe numbers are the truly universal language, and since at least six languages were spoken in my classroom, and about a third of the students were learning English as a second language, numbers made more sense to more students; maybe the math lessons of a more experienced colleague enriched we teachers who deployed them in our classes.)

The next year, after five teachers on staff were dismissed, the percentage of third-graders listed as advanced in math dipped to 25 percent, but those labeled proficient ballooned to 41 percent. The percentage for basic students stayed the same, while those for "below basic" and "far below basic" shrunk.

In language arts for 2010 STAR results among third graders, a higher percentage scored in the advance and proficient categories than did the year before — from 5 percent to 17 percent for advanced, and from 18 percent to 29 percent for proficient. The percentages of students scoring basic and below shrank.

By 2011, with four fewer teachers serving the same number of students, STAR scores for third graders moved more into the basic (37 percent compared to 27 percent the year before) and "below basic" levels (25 percent, up from 18 percent the year before). Those "far below basic" held steady at 9 percent.

Math scores held fairly steady, except that a higher percentage of students moved up into the upper three groups. Only 7 percent of third graders tested in 2011 scored "below basic" in math, and only 3 percent "far below basic."

Though I'm not privy to the herculean battle teachers waged to help their students, I don't doubt the remaining teachers and their principal girded up and bonded over the challenge of improving test scores. Their effort, at least in the case third grade, defies conventional thinking. As crowded as the classrooms may have gotten, the teachers found a way for more of the students to grasp the concepts they're supposed to know at that grade.

Results for the other grades show their own vagaries, but nothing to tell me that the loss of nine teachers spelled academic doom for the same number of students.

Getting laid off dismayed and disheartened and discolored me. I had gone back to college (an education in itself, and not just in the classroom) to embark on a new career path, to find I have horrible timing. Since the district did not give me any official credit for time served as a teacher (I was a 0.0), and I was under temporary contract, the teachers' union couldn't do more than bid me, "Good luck with … whatever."

I was lucky to have something else to do to make money. Not so with some of the other students who went to teacher school with me. And since then I have had some teaching opportunities, most recently teaching art to students in special education through a third-party program. I enjoy the challenge, as I had when I was teaching full time. I was committed then to being the best I could be, to figuring out how. I was in it, as they say, to win it.

I was willing then to give up most of what my life had been to that point. Teaching, at least for me, was all or nothing. I would have to give my all to become good at it, and give up freelance drawing, give up swimming regularly, give up the fun of being a tour guide and doing side jobs, give up the lack of a regular schedule, in exchange for good (I thought so, anyway) consistent pay and a career pursuing teaching mastery.

But maybe these are all sweet lemons. Maybe this rocky short-lived teaching career was an elaborate way of demonstrating I was not meant to be a teacher. For all my willingness to become good at teaching, I have to admit I'm not good at it now.

I teach for an hour at a time now, and I look at the second-grade teacher, standing aside for my time, ready to assist, her students wound up from a long day, being second graders, unable to sit quite as still or be quite as quiet as my lessons really need — and me really unable to settle them — their room redolent with their sour playground sweat. And I think: I could not do this all day, day after day, and worry about my shortcomings each summer day until school resumes, and worry about where and whether I'll be when school resumes, to try and do better.

It's hard not to think, based on the numbers I just crunched, that students can get along OK without me for a teacher.

This will not be a post I'll return to for inspiration.

* Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul