To Live and Work in Criteria

(((Ahem. Pardon my absence. I have been working.)))

I cannot be the first person to ever wonder why teachers from preschool through high school do not get the same benefits that people in the military get, or that older people get. I want to be clear; I think that most things are overpriced and should come with some sort of benefit for everybody, excluding people who are up in the upper-middle class, or who are wealthy, rich, or filthy rich. I think about this often in terms of the rationale for giving military service members discounts, and the rationale is simple — they serve their country, they put their lives on the line, etc. I say this next piece with no hyperbole intended. I would argue that teachers and teaching assistants and operational staff who work in schools put their lives on the line regularly. They may not be running into gunfire all the time, but they are certainly subject to gunfire and other weaponry. They may not be charged with physically putting their body in between a weapon and a citizen, but still, they often do. And while educators and others working in schools may not need the same type of comprehensive therapies that veterans often dude (physical, psycho-social, etc.,) most of us in the educational professions from preschool to high school do regularly take in the traumas of other people, and are sometimes traumatized by the work we do. We, like veterans and older folk, carry these experiences in our bodies and spirits, and there’s ample objective research that proves that over time, stress has negative and deleterious effects on the body. To be clear, I am speaking specifically about the work that people do in preschools through high schools.

So, while I wonder about benefits, and why I cannot roll up to a Target and be all “I’m an educator,” and get a 12% discount on dish soap and tampons, I also consider other ways in which school-based work is devalued. Currently, most schools deploy a pay-scale that offers more or less money based on a set of criteria that relies almost exclusively on years of experience and number of degrees held by said applicant. There is a usefulness for those scales I suppose, a hope that these things will work to weed out folks who are absolutely unqualified to work with or around kids. Having worked in and around education for decades now I have also seen where these prerequisites do not preclude someone completely inept from hopping from school to school, leaving untold damages (this is a different story for another time.) However even when the application and the resume and the in-person interview align with the perfect job description (which doesn’t exist, good lord!) there are many instances, many positions, where those criteria are simply too rigid and cannot encompass the ever-expanding space that social-emotional learning continues to rightfully take up in school curricula. For instance, I work with the mission to guide people who work in schools toward building relationships that last, using nonviolent and peaceful strategies in and out of the classroom that are proven to work, and to employ a lens to the work that offers caretakers and families and students a chance at dignity, a chance to understand accountability and integrity, and to know what it is to be respected. While these values have been at the core of why I work with kids and families, much of the work I had to do to develop synthesis and praxis happened outside of wage work. I organized with my community members and outside of my communities, I volunteered, I read, I took courses and workshops unaffiliated with universities or school districts. I literally clawed my way into positions in educational settings hoping that I could “be the change,” for what it’s worth. I believe that if your values and your practices align and if there are people out there who can vouch for you, then those should be at least equal to the criteria by which educators and school-based workers are currently hired and later assessed. We know really smart and capable people may not test well and vice versa, but there are no alternative criteria to measure effectiveness and goodness of fit. These measures don’t speak to the pieces of education that actually land and stick; they omit the humanity and wholeness of a person.

I’m not saying that humanity is all an educator needs; they need to be effective, they need to know their craft and to know their subject, and they need to have great ways to deliver it. I’m saying that we need to move criteria away from this static, two-dimensional way of thinking that says, “if you have a degree and have been paid to work then you are worthy of a living wage, however if you don’t have the degrees, or your work has been volunteer then good luck to you, but we’re not paying a living wage.”
These simple criteria leave so many people to the whims of a precarious and exploitative economy, and it does not have to be. All school-based workers are worthy of a life lived with dignity, and of being respected for the work that we do. Some of this work starts by (obviously) giving all educators and school-based workers cost-of-living-adjustments plus 10% raises. Another important criterial intervention is to widen the scope and allowance of experience and skills on a person’s resume so that folks who may not have an exact degree or years of paid work experience can still have access to the same job opportunities as someone whose resume may look perfect, but may actually omit some of the humanity and flexibility required to work in a school-based job.