So this is MY problem with education right now, and no I’m not going to talk about the budget. I have been at my school for five years. For four and a half of them, I have been “co-teaching” in some form or fashion. What this means depends on who you ask, what model you are following, etc. The truth is, it doesn’t really work well unless both teachers buy into it, you have full administrative support, AND if you have common planning time, which has never been my situation. Maybe my problem really lies in the fact that I have always had my students in a class by themselves… they hate it because they are pulled from an elective, and I hate it because I don’t have much planning time at all and never get to actually meet with my co-teachers. But I have been too afraid to let it go because I have been afraid that I will never be able to develop a rapport with my students if the only time I see them is in the classes that I co-teach. Part of this is because of my two VERY different co-teaching experiences.

In two of my co-taught classes, I could easily be a special education paraprofessional. That’s pretty much how I feel most of the time. I sit in the back of the room watching the lesson and at times I might help my students with some of their work. Is this valuable to them? Is it an effective use of my time? It’s difficult to determine. In some ways it benefits them because at least I am more familiar with the day-to-day curriculum and can understand their assignments. Also, they are very often more comfortable asking me questions than the “regular” teacher. But then I ask myself, why is that? Is it because they know me better because of our small group classes? Again, I can’t answer that. All I can say is, I am a certified teacher, and I am sick of feeling like a damn tutor.

So, to put a brighter light upon the situation, I do share classrooms where I am treated as an equal. From day one, I am introduced to the students as the “ESL teacher”, yes, and I participate in the get-to-know-you activities, and from the first day, the other teachers and I tag-team the lessons. We may not plan together all the time, but we make more of an effort to plan together, and we become so familiar with each other’s teaching styles that we can switch off in the middle of a lesson with no notice. And when I ask myself, in these classes, is this valuable to my students? Is it an effective use of my time? The answer is always, always YES!! Not only do my students benefit, but because it is OUR class, I help other students besides just mine. They know me as well as the classroom teacher, and in the long run, they all benefit—they have twice as many teachers to help them learn the material and develop their thinking strategies and everything else that students need.

When I first suggested the idea of co-teaching years ago, saying I truly believed ELLs benefit from being in classrooms with native-English peers, I caught HELL from my then-boss, who has now been demoted. I did get support from my school administration, but only minimally. Basically, I was given the, “There’s no common planning time so it’s not a true co-teaching model” speech. BULLSHIT. If you want to make it work, you can make it work. How else have we been able to do it for half of my time? Over the years, I have talked to several administrators at my school about the disparity between the two situations, and the only thing I’ve heard them respond with is, “Well, the eighth grade teachers feel a heavier responsibility in getting the students ready for high school,” or, “Some teachers like to know that they are in control.” Is that even an answer to ANYTHING?? Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we here to EDUCATE our students? Shouldn’t we be using our teachers to the best of their abilities? How can this happen when the administration is SO disconnected from the classroom? Has an administrator EVER ONCE come into a classroom that I co-teach? Never. In five years, not once.

I am very angry today for a multitude of reasons. The first stems back to a year and a half ago when the special ed teachers were no longer doing pull-out, and the administration mandated how they would co-teach. Somehow I was forgotten in this. The beginning of the last school year was probably the most demoralizing part of my career. Not only were the SPED teachers up at the front of the room on the first day of school, sharing the lesson with their “co-teachers,” but they had their names laminated with the classroom teacher at the front of the room, when the students asked, “Who is the teacher?” they replied, “We both are,” and guess where I was? Because no one had communicated ANY of this to me, I was in the back of the room, as always, in the same co-taught class, schedules already butchered for an entire school year of humiliation.

But that is not all. I had to fight tooth and nail with my school district’s ESL coordinator to even be allowed to do co-teaching in the first place. For years she has given me nothing but hell about it. And even though she has been “demoted” to an “ESL coach” whatever THAT means, she still has some say… So when I got a book in the inter-school mail last week for our inservice today called Co-Teaching, I about puked. Now, apparently, co-teaching is the appropriate model for ELLs. Not only did we spend all morning discussing this book, she had the ESL coordinator from another school district, a much more competent leader, come present some shocking research. Basically, by pulling students out of class for any amount of time, we are putting our already-at-risk ELLs at a much higher risk of dropping out of school. The difference between students who were pulled out and students who were in co-taught classes was an 11% risk of dropping out compared to a 60% risk.

Why does this piss me off? For one, because of massive budget cuts, all this information right now is probably a waste of time. What are the chances that any of the ESL teachers will be in similar positions next year? But also, WTF???? After all these years of giving me crap, this woman now is shoving it down our throats and telling us the pull-out model she insisted upon before is ineffective?

Here’s the problem with education: the administration is so out of touch with what actually happens in the classroom that they don’t know what’s best for kids. And when teachers try to talk to them, they need real support, not a brush-off statement or a direct denial. Teachers know. We are there every day, dealing with those kids. Give us some credit. And support us so that we can support them. Teach us how to co-teach and SUPPORT it. Treat us as equals to each other. Is that too much to ask?