It’s been over three weeks since I put on my red City Year jacket for the last time. The 2016-17 Corps graduated on May 9th, and I’ve been planning to write this blog post all year. Yet, I’ve been putting it off.
I know I must address some of program’s critical flaws. The mission of City Year is to “put idealism to work” in the nation’s school system, but this self-sacrificing idealism doesn’t always help the children.
At the same time, I know that Donald Trump’s proposed budget puts nearly every national service program on the chopping block — and, imperfect as City Year is, I have seen how much the schools we work in depend on our service. I don’t want anything I write to be used as an argument in favor of City Year’s elimination. (Here’s a post that outlines all the arguments in favor of keeping the program.)
So I’ll frame this post with two big caveats.
- These criticisms apply only to City Year New Orleans, not the City Year programs in 27 other U.S. cities. We’re the only City Year site that works exclusively in charter schools (New Orleans has almost no traditional schools left), so our work is quite different from what City Years do in traditional public school systems. I won’t assume that other sites are like ours, or even that Corp Members at different schools in the city had the same experience I had.
- The people I’ve worked with at City Year, including both Corps Members and the staff members who oversee us, are the most selfless, driven, and compassionate people I have ever met. Everyone truly cared for the well-being of children above all else. My criticisms are directed at the implementation of the program, not the people working for it.
Here’s the issue: I signed up for City Year specifically because I did not want to be a teacher. I knew I didn’t have the right experience or training to excel in that role. However, I did want to assist teachers in the classroom in order to lighten their workload and to give students more personalized attention. That is how the role of a City Year Corps Member was advertised, but that wasn’t the reality.
City Year is an organization where idealistic young people (the maximum age is 26) sign up to work full-time at an under-served public school for 11 months. You know in advance that you’ll be working 10 to 12 hour a day and making next to nothing, but you do it any way because, it’s only a year, and you’ll be making a difference in the world.
Corp Members, as those who serve in City Year are called, are not supposed to replace teachers — they are there to help teachers. It is impossible for a teacher to give personalized attention to every single student. Corp Members, on the other hand, are given “Focus Lists” of students with the highest need. They pull these students out of the classroom for one-on-one instruction, to help them improve their attendance, behavior, or course grades (the “ABCs”.) A Corps Member from Milwaukee told me that she was required to document at least 1,000 minutes of one-on-one tutoring or mentoring with each of the students on her focus list.
I made it very clear during my interview for the position: I was joining City Year to help teachers, not to be a teacher.
Then I got to City Year, and they made me a teacher.
Technically, I was an “interventionist” — I had very small classes made up of four to nine students each, most of whom scored in the bottom 10th percentile in math. It was a lab class, so the students spent the entire period working through programs like Think Through Math and ST Math on the computer and I didn’t have to teach any whole-class lessons.
Still, I oversaw six 45-minute periods per day, in addition to other duties like running after-school clubs, lunch duty, hall monitoring duty, or any other task that came up. (I say this not to complain about the work load, but to show how much the school depended on City Year Corp Members to fill in any possible need.) There was no one-on-one time with students unless I skipped one of my breaks to do it.
There were other math and English interventionists at the school who were real, salaried employees. They did almost the exact the same work I did, though their students were supposed to have slightly higher needs than ours.
One of the ELA interventionists was a qualified literacy expert who had decades of teaching experience. The City Year interventionists had nothing more than a month of training that summer. Could we really say we were helping children learn when we were learning on the job ourselves?
I pointed out to my supervisors that City Year’s guidelines forbid using Corp Members to replace teachers. They replied: this school can’t afford to hire more interventionists. You aren’t replacing anyone because without you there’d be no one. But this is a ridiculous excuse, because that means that Corps Members could do any job if the school claimed they couldn’t afford to hire more teachers. (Also, the school announced at the end of the year that it wouldn’t use Corps Members for intervention classes anymore anyway.)
By October, I was having stress-related panic attacks and torturous stomach pains every morning before school started. My supervisors were sympathetic and helped me out, even stepping into the classroom for me if I felt like I couldn’t handle it that day. (It wasn’t a classroom, actually; I spent all day in a windowless storage closet, since there wasn’t any other room for me to work with the students.)
Still, it was clear that I could not run a class by myself for six periods a day, and I said I would have to quit if my schedule did not change. The other City Year who was a math interventionist had already quit.
The administration said that, once a new City Year came in to replace the girl who had quit, I could cut my schedule down to four periods a day and spend the end of the day assisting the teacher in a core math classroom. I was still working the same number of hours, but not having to spend the whole day in the closet did lessen my stress significantly and I made it to the end of the year.
It took until around February for me to feel like I really knew what I was doing. It was only at that point that I could confidently say that I was helping the children instead of hindering them with my own inexperience.
I became more adept at managing the classroom, at keeping calm under pressure, at understanding the best way to present the curriculum to the students. Most importantly, I started building really strong, loving relationships with my students. I wasn’t just tutoring them on math; I was working to build their confidence and help them persevere through hurdles, or I was comforting them if they had to deal with bullies.
I ended the year with mixed feelings. My fifth graders were hugging me and refusing to let go, demanding, “Why are you leaving?” I couldn’t say that the year was wasted or that the school would be better off without City Year. But how much more of an impact could we have made if we didn’t try to put Corp Members in roles they were totally unprepared for?
City Year must crack down on sites that try to replace real educators with Corp Members. If barely-trained recent college grads with no experience can be teachers, we’re not “making better happen,” as the hashtag goes — we are being complicit in the de-professionalization of teaching, and that ultimately harms the entire education system. No amount of idealism or good intentions replaces actual training and experience. Otherwise, our year of service is nothing more than a disservice to children who deserve better.
Pedamagog 