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My principal was cut from the same cloth. The NEA account describes a principal who “seemed to revel at people being driven out of education or to another school,” a situation in which “people suffered dramatically at her hands.” My own mother, a teacher with some 40 years experience, used to drag herself home from long hours of ritual humiliations at the hands of an out-of-control principal. Dana Goldstein in her book The Teacher Wars has written “there should be a principal quality movement that is as aggressive as our teacher accountability movement has been.” In LAUSD, accountability for principals has been slow in coming and teachers in LA (and nation-wide) suffer for it. But I have a voice and resources other teachers don’t always have. Perhaps if I relied on teaching as my only source of income, I’d not tell this story. And yet the district, which knew of these complaints for a year, has made no change, allowing the principal to remain in charge and continue with the intimidation and debasement of teachers and staff members alike.
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But despite the things I experienced, the principal’s biggest act of aggression didn’t even involve me, but a staff member and the things she did in that regard bordered on the illegal. A story by the National Education Association quotes one state union representative as saying, “the phenomenon has been overlooked far too long and should be brought to the surface quickly.” If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t have believed it. When I reached out to the district to have my principal’s actions investigated for violating district provisions against adult-to-adult bullying, the superintendent promised a “prompt and thorough investigation.” Instead, she oversaw the public school equivalent of a kangaroo court. At the end of the year, she did just that. Even more unsettling, my principal did not just have the power to fire me, she also had the power to bar me from seeking employment with any of the other 1,000 schools operated by the district.
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Without tenure, the principal was essentially free to say and do anything she wanted to me but, even so, tenured teachers suffered under her hand, as well. I wasn’t yet a protected member of the union, so there was nothing they could do to help me. I was hardly the only teacher who was treated this way.
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Despite the many promises of support, I was, instead, regularly berated in front of students, colleagues and district-level employees paraded through the school while having my inadequacies pointed out in full view of teachers and students openly accused of plagiarizing ideas and passing them off as my own characterized as “deceptive” in front of my students then ultimately fired and removed from my classroom during the last month of school, despite all my efforts to improve.
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I was one of those new teachers hired into an LAUSD Reed School, Audubon Middle School, during 2014–2015, my first and only year as full-time public school teacher.
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Placed, as most new teachers routinely are, in the toughest classrooms where teacher turnover, poor resources, difficult student behavior and spotty parental support can be widespread, that additional support, which consisted of mentoring, extra time for planning lessons, and classes in professional development, was something desperately needed. Many believed that the schools (and the teachers in particular) were being unfairly targeted for problems far beyond their control, like “ineffective administrators, unsafe conditions, lack of intervention for struggling students, and other problems.”īut who or whatever was ultimately to blame, the one provision that all parties agreed on was the need to provide greater support to new teachers coming into the profession. In the course of the proceedings, the court designated 37 schools what became known as “Reed Schools” and asked that LAUSD address the lack of quality instruction brought on by, among other things, high teacher turnover. In 2014, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) settled a 4-year-old lawsuit brought on behalf of students in low income areas that questioned the way mostly black and Latin students in LA’s public schools were being educated. Unprincipled: My Year Teaching Public School Under a Brutal, Out of Control Administrator