Editor's File: Superintendent Pia Durkin's nuclear option is a drastic but necessary measure for New Bedford High School

JulieLavoie (sic) beat me up over a column I wrote back on Nov. 17 ("Schools' road to change will be rough") about an upcoming Dec. 13 emergency meeting of the New Bedford teachers union, which was unhappy with new Superintendent Pia Durkin. I wrote about my concern that the meeting would produce a "declaration of war" by teachers and hasten a state takeover of the city schools.

"When have you ever stepped into a school as anything other than a student?" JulieLavoie barked in a written comment on our news website, SouthCoastToday.com. "Everyone wants to put the blame on teachers and not even consider there might be bigger issues at play such as failed policies, bad parenting and a lack of discipline in the schools."

I respect her because she put her name to her comments, which takes courage in the digital world and distinguishes her from the anonymous cowards out there, and because some of what she said is absolutely right.

I have to point out to JulieLavoie that, as I have written several times before in this space, I was, in fact, a teacher in southern Vermont at the start of my career. It was one of the harder jobs I've ever done, and as I also have written, I don't think I was very good at it.

In my four years in the high school classroom, my department head stopped by to observe what I was doing exactly once. Yet all my performance reviews were positive, probably because there weren't a lot of disciplinary problems in my classroom. I just don't know if my students actually learned a lot from me, to be honest.

I had it a lot easier than teachers today, especially teachers in places like New Bedford.

I taught in an all-white town, where most of the kids came from two-parent homes, where everyone spoke English, where there was little crime, not much poverty and almost none of the social disorder that characterizes many urban school systems today.

And it was the 1970s, before the time when standardized testing became the measure that largely decided whether children and teachers were successful.

In other words, before everything changed.

JulieLavoie speaks for a lot of teachers who believe that they are unfairly blamed for the failures of others: department heads who don't guide young teachers, principals and administrators who don't lead, taxpayers who don't have children in the schools and don't want to pay taxes anyway, and irresponsible parents who don't get their children to school every day on time and ready to learn.

I agree with her that it's unfair that teachers feel like they're the only ones in our entire culture being held accountable, that everybody else seems to get a pass and that teachers are the ones expected to fight society's rear-guard action against the forces of societal breakdown, ignorance and national dysfunction.

But really, what other options do we have?

Churches? Love to think so, but in truth, they along with almost every other institutional authority don't shape behavior as they once did.

Neighborhoods? Gone are the days when moms and dads on the block could count on their neighbors to be good role models and help keep a track of all the youngsters. Don't believe me? Try telling your neighbors' kids to keep the noise down after 11 p.m. on a summer night; see how much other moms and dads appreciate your telling them that their son's swearing out the window at his girlfriend in front of your 10-year-old is out of line.

The police? We already lock up 3 percent of the entire population. Any wonder why so many regular people are buying guns? It's not just because they fear the power of big government, neighbor.

Government? Please. Americans hate it at every level, and they don't trust one another either. An AP-GfK public opinion poll last month found that nearly two-thirds of Americans don't trust one another.

And so the schools really are the last best hope, even while every standardized test comparing U.S. students with their peers overseas shows our kids don't fare very well.

And if the schools are the last, best hope, then they have to be good, and the teachers who teach in them have to be beyond good. They have to be great, but the results we are getting from those schools in too many places, including the public high school in New Bedford, aren't close to great. And so they have to change.

Pia Durkin, the school superintendent who has to lead the rear-guard action the schools are forced to fight on behalf of a culture that is failing on so many levels, is doing the most dramatic thing she can do. She is choosing an option the state grants to assist failing schools that involves the replacement of at least half the teaching staff at New Bedford High School.

According to data cited by Standard-Times reporter Steve Urbon in a Sunday Showcase story today, that option is by far the most effective of any available. It is also the most extreme: 150 or 200 teachers could have their lives mightily disrupted.

Teachers get paid pretty well these days in places like New Bedford, but as one who stumbled around his first classroom for the princely sum of $7,000 a year in 1974, I know that most people wouldn't want to do — or have a clue how to do — what urban teachers do for twice the money teachers get paid.

So Durkin's decision to employ the nuclear option at NBHS means a raw deal for a lot of teachers who have served their community for years. But what other choices do we have? Let things go on as they are and hope for better, tinkering around the edges here and there?

That hasn't worked for decades, and there is not much reason to think it will work now.

And so this is the brutal hard truth about where we are as a city, as a school system, as taxpayers, parents and teachers.

It's a rear-guard action, and we have to win.

Bob Unger is the Editor and Associate Publisher of SouthCoast Media Group, the publisher of The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached by email at runger@s-t.com or by phone at 508-979-4430.

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