THE EXPERIENCE OF THE INEXPERIENCED: THE PILGRIMAGE OF ALTERNATE-CERTIFICATION TEACHERS IN HIGH-NEED SCHOOLS A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of The School of Continuing Studies And of The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Liberal Studies By Roger Garfield, B.A. Georgetown University Washington, D.C. April 10, 2014 THE EXPERIENCE OF THE INEXPERIENCED: THE PILGRIMAGE OF ALTERNATE-CERTIFICATION TEACHERS IN HIGH-NEED SCHOOLS Roger Garfield, B.A. MALS Mentor: Frederick Ruf, Ph.D. ABSTRACT The increasing prevalence of alternate-certification teachers in American schools – especially in high-need areas – has made their presence in the classroom a hot-button topic. While programs like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project continually recruit talented men and women to educate our country’s neediest students, important voices in education reform question why the least experienced educators are teaching in America’s highest-need schools. There are clear drawbacks: large numbers of these teachers fail to withstand the rigors of teaching in our country’s lowest-achieving schools, where the many social needs of the students present countless challenges in the classroom every day. There are benefits, however: a high percentage of these inexperienced teachers bring optimism and energy to classrooms where other, more experienced teachers are unwilling to go. Yet while they often excel, they do so for only a short-term basis, frequently departing the urban or high-poverty schools in which they have agreed to teach after a year or two. This thesis will concentrate explicitly on the experiences of these teachers – the ups, the downs, the good, the bad and the ugly – with a distinct focus on the teachers’ lives, livelihoods and their respective journeys. In many ways, teachers who take jobs via non-traditional certification in America’s toughest schools embark on a modern-day pilgrimage, where their daily sights, sounds, successes and failures challenge them to the core. This paper will analyze the teachers’ experiences specifically in view of the ii anthropological idea of liminality – which posits essentially that individuals on pilgrimages will be disoriented in the middle of their journeys, so to speak, and linger at a threshold of sorts that straddles their previous ways and a new set of ways. Liminality was originally articulated by Arnold van Gennep, a Frenchman whose 1909 work Rites de Passage introduced the concept of a liminal period in pilgrimage for the first time. Six decades later, Victor Turner’s close studying of van Gennep resulted in an even more thorough examination of liminality. When discussing liminality, this paper will use ideas from Turner, who – in the late 1960’s until the 1980’s – examined and evolved the concept first created by van Gennep. The ultimate intention in this study is to prove how liminality initiates new ways in these teachers – ways shaped by the extreme social circumstances that define poverty- stricken America – and how those ways are often a far cry from what previously defined the men and women who have bravely chosen to venture into the high-need classroom. iii This thesis is dedicated to the teachers who care deeply about their students and do everything they can to help their students learn, mature, improve and be good people. An enormous thanks to Dr. Frederick Ruf, who introduced me to the theory of liminality and whose tremendous patience and thoughtful feedback – during this project, and throughout my career at Georgetown – helped me grow as a thinker and a writer. Thanks to Anne Ridder, whose paprika dots helps finalize this all. And thank you to Mom, Dad and Faren for your support throughout this undertaking. Finally, a special thank you to my grandparents – Amy Garfield, Sol Garfield, Marie Hayes and Walker Hayes – who each taught me plenty in their own unique ways. They each had strong convictions, born partly through what they endured during the Great Depression – and they each had a distinct way of connecting with people that was authentic and straightforward. They were all principled people who would have exceled as teachers in the high-need school. Rest in Peace, Grandma, Papa, Grandma and Grandpa. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT ………………….………………………………………………………… ii DEDICATION ………………….…………………………………………………...… iv INTRODUCTION ………………….………………………………………………….. 1 CHAPTER 1: THE STATE OF EDUCATION IN AMERICA …………………….. 5 CHAPTER 2: ALTERNATE-CERTIFICATION PROGRAMS AND THEIR IMPACT ………………….…………………………………………………………… 28 CHAPTER 3: TEACHING AS PILGRIMAGE: THE THEORY OF LIMINALITY EXPLAINED ………………….…………………………..…………. 41 CHAPTER 4: ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM………………….…………………. 61 CHAPTER 5: TO LIVE AND LEARN IN L.A. ……………………………………. 89 CHAPTER 6: UNPACKING THE PILGRIMAGE: AN ANALYSIS OF LIMINALITY IN TEACHING ………………….………………………..………... 106 CONCLUSION ………………….………………………………………….……….. 132 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………… 137 v INTRODUCTION The three main objectives of this thesis are to show the experiences of alternate- certification teachers in high-need schools, to prove that their journeys in the classroom are pilgrimages and to provide a glimpse into the state of American education. Showing the experiences of the teachers whose daily task is to educate the country’s most troubled young men and women, to me, was imperative – and far more important than simply telling abstractly, with statistics, how effective Teach For America or The New Teacher Project has been in its attempts to close the prevailing achievement gap in America between high-poverty students and low-poverty students. People should be able to see, hear, smell and feel the classroom, the hallways, the students, the daily grind that define these schools. In showing that experience – and in analyzing it with the theories of Victor Turner, whose ideas on liminality reverberate strongly here – I will prove that teaching in the high-need school is, especially for those who stay for about two years, a modern-day, secular pilgrimage. And through it all, the systemic problems that plague urban education will come to the fore – perhaps shaping or reshaping thoughts for the country’s best course of action in education reform. By examining so closely the experiences of seven specific teachers in high-need schools – who taught in different secondary settings over the last decade – it’s inevitable for me to spend time recounting my own teaching experience in northeast Washington, D.C., from 2009 to 2011. My full-time job was at Youth Services Center – a juvenile detention center that brought in young men and women from all over the city for an average of 23 days at a time. We tried our best to operate a traditional school inside an 1 altogether non-traditional setting, and for me, it was undoubtedly the greatest challenge of my life. As a teacher, to set your expectations high – and to keep them high – seems important when you begin. It was my attitude that, no matter where I was teaching, all of my students should be learning as much as possible – and as much as any other student in America. So, for me at YSC, it looked like this: printing off one worksheet for each of my 40 students (about 13 in each of my three, 70-minute classes) every day. Never did all 40 get used. I kept the blank, untouched worksheets in a drawer at my desk that quickly reached capacity. After a two-month stretch where, most days, only 15 or so of those copies were used, I considered running fewer copies. (The frustrating truth coinciding with this story is that paper was limited at our school, and when each teacher exceeded his limit, he had to buy his own.) But I couldn’t bring myself to run fewer than 40 copies every day. What if, by chance, one day all the students were into the lesson and wanted to do the work? I had to have a worksheet for them. And even though it never happened, I kept running my 40 copies. (The convenient thing was that, after awhile because of all the turnover, all my students were new – so I could just recycle the old lessons, copies I had already made that were sitting idly in my drawer.) There were days I left YSC with a smile on my face because a handful of my students had chosen to focus and had shown their brightness. So many of those boys and girls were incredibly bright. Incredibly bright. But the reality most days – the overwhelming, headache-inducing norm for me – was that I begged students to do work, I broke up fights, I struggled to keep up with the continually changing classroom rosters, and I let those perpetual frustrations affect my attitude. After a while, the begging 2 stopped and the fights lessened. I planned more lessons as the year progressed that commanded their attention – lessons they were invested in. We read Redskins stories from the Washington Post. We read scripts of movies they knew well, like Friday and Life . We read the book Push, by Sapphire – my real breakthrough moment in the classroom, in March of that first year, where all 11 of my students sat on the edges of their seats and listened. But the quality of my lesson honestly had minimal bearing on the type of day I would have. So much was beyond my control. And when the boys and girls were released from YSC, all was beyond our control. The saddest truth for many of those students is that they were safer when they were incarcerated than when they were released. Inside, they had three warm meals, a warm place to sleep, protection from harm – and they were forced to go to school. Outside, they had lures, dangers, little support. In my two years at YSC, three of my former students were murdered after being released from the facility.