ANYBODY Can Teach Newcomers, Says Mulgrew

As, once again, he throws quality to the dogs

Hey, how would you like to make an extra five thousand bucks a year to teach newcomers? All you have to do is pass a test. You don’t have to worry about that costly and time-wasting coursework. Once you do that, you can teach ENL for five years, or maybe even eight, without bothering with all that inconvenient training and expensive coursework.

Mike Mulgrew says you don’t need it. There’s an influx of newcomers, and anyone who passes some test can teach them. You know, it’s learn while you earn. Fake it till you make it. Get in there and hope for the best. And hey, the kids won’t complain. They don’t even know English. And anybody can teach English to speakers of other languages. Easy as 3.14159 and so on.

And we know they’re competent because they passed a test. After all, anyone can teach. Grab an accountant, give him a book and he’s ready to teach math. Well, that may not always be the case.

But hey, Michael Mulgrew doesn’t care. Five thousand bucks extra a year for you, if you can pass the test. The best part is you don’t have to bother with the coursework for five years. And if you still don’t have it, you can get a three-year extension. By then maybe you’ll be ready to retire, with a sweet extra 40K drawing interest in your TDA.

And if you already are an ENL teacher, well, the joke’s on you. You spent all those years studying bilingualism, language acquisition, structure and techniques, and it was all for nothing. You could’ve just gotten a different license, passed a test, and swapped out your license with no penalty or loss of tenure. Not only that, but you’d have gotten a raise. Because you are such a sap, because you studied, because you wasted your time preparing for this job, newbies will make five thousand bucks more than you.

Suckers!

Actually, though, according to the Memorandum of Agreement, not all teachers are eligible to swap licenses and get and get that sweet bonus. The bonus is only available to math, science, social studies, English, common branch, or those who hold ESL certification or a bilingual extension. Do you know who that excludes?

Well, it excludes teachers of languages other than English. So Spanish teachers, for example, who speak the actual language of most newcomers, are out. In fact, all world language teachers with actual experience in teaching language to people unfamiliar with it are excluded.

Because anyone can do that, evidently. I’m waiting for the day they grant me a 5K bonus to teach physics, or math, or Chinese, or whatever.

I spent years working with the UFT trying to fix Part 154, which degrades the education of newcomers and relegates many ESL teachers to wanderers who rarely spend time with those who need them most. Instead, they are supposed to magically acquire the language via the old sink or swim method. I was assured by officials in UFT and by then-Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa that we’d fix it.

Instead, we’re doubling down on letting anyone teach ENL, or letting subject teachers do whatever and hoping for the best. When I was trying to work with UFT, I kept hearing about a “white paper” they had which would help the situation. I never saw it. I wasted many afternoons at 52 Broadway listening to happy talk about how we were going to fix it. After a while, it became clear we were not going to fix anything, and the UFT employees simply stopped discussing it.

In fact, the last time I attended the ENL work group, one of Mulgrew’s most loyal Unity members spoke for a full hour about how he was going to get a full-time job at AFT. (While that hasn’t happened, I have every expectation Mulgrew will give him a full time gig, having observed his persistent obsequiousness and many meetings thereafter.) At that point I stopped fooling myself that my presence at these meetings had meaning (at least beyond the fruit plates they put out for attendees).

There are a lot of ways to help incoming newcomers. Demeaning the qualifications of ENL teachers is not one of them. Sticking them in English, science, math and social studies classes where teachers passed a test is not a substitute for direct language instruction.

Hey, I know your grandfather came here and learned English with no help. So did my grandfather. They just dumped him in the class and hoped for the best. We can do that as well. Some kids will be fine. Some will excel.

However, more would be fine, and more would excel if we actually placed them with people who knew well how to help them. I’d argue that language teachers, next to actual ESL teachers, would be the most understanding and sympathetic. But they, of course, are excluded. What the DOE wants is for incoming newcomers to pass Regents exams the first year they’re here. (The fact that this won’t help at all is neither here nor there to them.)

When I became an ESL teacher, I spent several summers in Mexico. I spent a lot of time studying Spanish. I thought it was important, if I were to support people trying to acquire a language, that I went through it myself.

But Michael Mulgrew, who you can often see at the Delegate Assembly struggling to sputter out a coherent sentence, doesn’t think you need to bother with any of that stuff. And he makes at least triple your salary, so he must know better than you, or me.

And that, of course, is why he made this agreement with no participation whatsoever from rank and file. So take that test, and grab that 5K a year while you can.

Once Mulgrew outlines his new health plan for rank and file, you’re probably gonna need it.