Save Our Teachers

Growing up in the K-12 school system in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District (PVPUSD), I received an excellent education, which I attribute to my near-completion of a degree at the University of Southern California. The environment was one where I knew my success mattered to my educators. So when Governor Schwarzenegger cut $3,700,000 from the PVPUSD annual school budget in 2008 and 60 of our teachers were at risk of being given the dreaded pink slip, our community returned the favor, starting a $1.2 million fundraising campaign called “Save our Teachers” to disallow for their layoffs – because they mattered to us.

It would be nice to say that the teachers of the nearby Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) were as well cared for, but the recent distribution of 9,000 pink slips has proven the opposite: education is not at the forefront of Los Angeles’s priorities. Though PVPUSD does have an advantage over LAUSD because its community is more monetarily endowed, the $1 billion that LAUSD could receive from the federal stimulus package could still be used to create jobs, not to eliminate them. The worst part of these cutbacks is that they not only decrease the quality of students’ learning environments and eliminate current teachers’ careers; they also discourage aspiring educators like myself from entering the field. Everyone loses.

Those currently at risk for being laid off are some of LAUSD’s brightest – and youngest-- teachers. Lacking tenure rights with only two years of work experience, the threat to their current jobs sends a message to recent college graduates that there is no incentive to pursue a career in education. LAUSD has thus set itself up for long-term failure by eliminating the opportunity for our new teachers - the futures of education – to make an impact on our youth – the future of our nation.

I speak on behalf of the “do-good” generation that truly wants to improve America in these most desperate of times. Those of us who have found our calling to make a difference by teaching in the communities that need us the most – not the PVPUSD’s of America, who are fortunate enough to have financial community support, but the LAUSD’s of our nation, which boast graduation rates along the likes of 44% –are finding that our dreams to enter professions that value educational progression over personal paychecks are dishearteningly difficult.

Even those who do not consider teaching as a full-time profession still look into post-graduate, short-term programs that allow us to make differences in peoples’ lives. I considered applying to Teach for America, a program that allows recent college graduates a two-year opportunity to teach in inner-city schools with the overarching goal to close America’s achievement gap. However, with cutbacks in education, it hardly seemed fair to me to take the position of people who depend on teaching as full-time careers when I would be more of a temporary band-aid to a greater educational problem. In fact, the Boston Teacher’s Union currently feels this way toward Teach for America 2009 participants as they are fighting a bitter battle of entitlement that could easily arise in Los Angeles. Sadly, because education has become a scarce resource, teachers who are at risk of being laid off have come to see such programs as threats rather than assets and improvements to America.

I have often been told not worry about my limited post-graduate career prospects, for in the midst of this economic chaos comes the opportunity for me to step up to the plate and lead America out of the mess that we are in. While this optimism is indeed inspiring, the reality is that my classmates and I literally cannot enter careers that would afford us the opportunity to put our idealism into action, and there is nothing we can do about it.

PVPUSD worked to save its teachers. It is my hope that LAUSD will follow suit, for if it does not do something to recover these jobs soon, the knowledge and energetic flame that young educators crave to share with America’s youth may burn out indefinitely – and the moral consequence will be far more detrimental than any financial crisis our country has ever seen.