That year, I had twelve or thirteen students, depending on the day and the weather. Half the students came from one family and when it was cold, those students showed up to stay warm because their house was unheated. In fact, from what I could understand, the house was a falling-down wreck with animals, pets and livestock, running in and out of the open doors.

When I looked at the texts available for students to use, I found a set of history texts that had been published in 1920. The other textbooks were just as out of date and unusable, so I made a trip to a school supply store in Kalamazoo to stock up. Even so, I couldn’t fill all the gaps in the material I needed to do a decent job of teaching.

I did the best I could that year, however, trying to teach the two first graders to read and eighth graders to understand algebra. I had no idea how to teach kids to read or how to tackle the intricacies of higher math. I did somewhat better with the students in the higher elementary grades because they could already read and the math was basic enough for me to be able to teach it.

As the school year progressed, it became obvious to me that I was doing those students no favors by my earnest but incompetent attempts to teach them. So before we had the spring picnic that celebrated the end of the school year, I turned in my resignation. The parents hired another woman to teach the next year, but the following year the school closed and the students were bused into Decatur where they got into a school system with competent teachers.

I say this to say that I recognize an incompetent teacher, having been one myself. I also recognize a school system that fails to meet the needs of the students, having taught in one. I finally got a college degree, a teaching certificate, and a full time job teaching journalism and English at Winfield High School, Winfield, Kansas. My three children were also students in that school district and I witnessed some excellent teaching among my colleagues there.

When I read that the entire staff of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island was fired without benefit of evaluations or a chance to challenge the firing, I think of all those excellent teachers I worked with through the years. It saddens me that Pres. Barack Obama, whose candidacy was endorsed by NEA members around the country, and Arne Duncan, secretary of education, think that firing was a good thing. Apparently, with the Obama administration’s blessings, this mass firing mentality is taking hold all over the country, with school districts taking advantage of the bad economic times to do their dirty work.

I joined NEA as a student and I’m now a lifetime member of both NEA and KNEA. I was an officer in the local and on the negotiations team at both Winfield and at Butler Community College. I also represented teachers who filed grievances against administrators and was active in other ways in the Association. NEA is not a union, but it has many of the characteristics of a union. In Kansas, teachers are not allowed to go on strike, but they are allowed to picket. We have the right to negotiate our contracts and to file grievances. These union-like actions give teachers some leverage in a system that often favors school boards and administrators. It also protects teachers from the whims of administrators with whom they have personality conflicts.

For the Central Falls teachers, these contractual protections went by the wayside. Teachers were in negotiations with the school board to settle differences over what they would be paid if they gave up their lunch time to eat with students and stay for a longer time after school to be available for students who needed help. These are typical types of issues that come up during contract negotiations between teachers and the board. When I was on the faculty negotiating team, one year we negotiated extra pay for teachers who did lunch duty and other kinds of overtime duty.

People who don’t teach may wonder why teachers would want pay for these duties, given that we are, after all, public servants. Shouldn’t we be happy to serve the students in any way we can? Yes, we are happy to do that and most teachers go out of their way to do that. However, let me spell out what a typical day is like in a typical high school. Most contracts require teachers to be in their classrooms thirty minutes before school starts and thirty minutes after school ends. This is no problem for most teachers as many of them have to come early and stay late to complete their work. High school and middle school teachers do get a planning period, something elementary school teachers do not have. I used my planning period to work with students on the yearbook, newspaper, or the broadcast journalism class, all time-consuming enterprises that usually required us to be there after school and in the summer. Most teachers use their planning periods to plan and to grade papers.

At Winfield High, we had twenty minutes for lunch. By the time my lunch period rolled around, I needed to get away from students for awhile. I enjoyed joining other teachers in the teachers’ lounge. We joked around with each other in ways that we could never do in front of students and that mid-day cup of coffee gave me the zip I needed to get through the rest of the day. I’ll never forget the day one of my friends, a newspaper reporter, came to talk to my students about her job. Around 10: 30 in the morning, she asked me when we got a break. I laughed and told her we would get a short break at lunch time.

Most states have laws governing teachers’ job conditions. Teachers gain what is called tenure, but isn’t, after a certain number of years in a school district. In Kansas, if a teacher gets through the third year without being non-renewed, that teacher then can be non-renewed only for cause. Up until then, a teacher can be non-renewed without a cause being given. Administrators base teacher renewals on evaluations, which by state law right now must be completed in time to notify non-renewed teachers before May 1.

Right now the Kansas state legislature wants to change the non-renewal date to May 15 and extend the probationary period from three years to five years. What these changes mean is that teachers will have less time to make other plans if they receive a non-renewal notification later in the year. Also, administrators and school boards will get the advantage of keeping a teacher on board for five years, then firing that teacher when his or her salary starts to go up. If that teacher finds a job in another district, he or she starts at the bottom of the salary schedule once again. Surely, administrators are able to figure out in three years which teachers are going to make it and which aren’t.

Diana Ravitch, who was undersecretary of education under Pres. George Bush, and who once supported No Child Left Behind reforms, now says that these reforms and those promoted by Pres. Obama and Arne Duncan in their Race to the Top proposals, are designed to kill teacher unions and to create non-union charter schools.

Recently, In Education Week, Ravitch responded to a Newsweek article, “Why we Must Fire Bad Teachers,” thusly: “The story itself is a parody of a right-wing rant. It seems that the nation's classrooms are overrun with ‘bad teachers,’ pedophiles, ‘weak’ teachers, ineffective teachers, dumb teachers, and others who remain in the classroom only because they have ‘lifetime tenure.’ Evil teachers' unions protect these people who are harming our nation's children. Researchers now know, the writers say, that if we could fire all these malingerers, the notorious achievement gap between the races would soon close and America would once again lead the world in education.

She continues, “Nowhere does the article mention that the highest-performing state in the nation is Massachusetts, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions; nor does it mention that the highest-performing nation in the world is Finland, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions. Nowhere in the article is there an example of a non-union district or state in the United States that has achieved high academic performance.”

Never mind that the research on teacher effectiveness on which they rely is highly speculative and highly contested. Never mind that non-union charters, on average, do not outperform regular public schools. Why bother with such details?

Ravitch said, “Newsweek, it seems, speaks for the Jack Welch School of Management: Fire the bottom 10 percent every year. A friend said the other day, ‘If Newsweek is so smart, how come the magazine is in such deep financial trouble? Maybe they need to fire 10 percent of their staff every year.’ A dose of their own medicine?”

On the March 11, 2010, Diane Rehm show, Ravitch said,“Any leader who wants to attack the teachers is making a huge mistake.”

I agree with Ravitch. I also think teachers are going to have to rethink their blind allegiance to the Democrats who have taken them for granted for so long. Teachers have to be accountable, despite what the Newsweek writers think. We need to hold politicians we helped elect accountable as well.