Why I didn't sign my teaching contract.
(Other Duties as Assigned, Part III)
This is part III in a series. Here is Part I and here is Part II.
I looked at him over my shoulder. “I've got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!”
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
His boss would certainly come round with the doctor from the medical insurance company, accuse his parents of having a lazy son, and accept the doctor’s recommendation not to make any claim as the doctor believed that no one was ever ill but that many were workshy. And what’s more, would he have been entirely wrong in this case? Gregor did in fact, apart from excessive sleepiness after sleeping for so long, feel completely well and even felt much hungrier than usual.
-Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
None of those assembled there knew his name or what he did for a living.
-Haruki Murakami, “The Seventh Man”
On Tuesday night, I got home from a band practice for a Tom Waits cover show. It was after 11 pm, much later than I would normally be out. I had been oppressed by a phantom weight for most of the day. As the time displayed on my phone screen got closer to midnight, I lay in bed, talking to my wife about our options. We are both public school teachers in Columbia, South Carolina. I’ve been teaching for fifteen years, eleven of those at my current school. My wife has also been teaching for a decade. I really love my colleagues and my students, and she loves hers. Teaching has been deeply rewarding for both of us at times, and difficult and traumatic at others.
On my phone, I opened the most recent email from the district office— this time of year, they come as frequently and as anonymously as political mailers in election season. In my experience, they are more often phrased like exasperated reminders for small children than like expressions of the value a district might place on its teacher workforce. The email reminded me yet again that my contract must be signed before midnight, May 11. I opened the attachment once again, trying to get the PDF of the boilerplate contract to show correctly.
Midnight came and went, and neither of us had signed.
Title 59 of South Carolina law requires school districts to provide teacher contracts by May 1, and requires teachers to return those contracts before May 11. Like everything else in South Carolina’s teacher contract scheme, the protections provided by this law are weighted heavily towards employers (school districts) and against both employees (teachers) and individual schools administrations, which may benefit from the flexibility to, say, hold a position while they give a valued teacher a few more weeks to make a decision. Teachers have as little as ten days to decide whether to accept a contract that has not been negotiated in advance in any way, the terms of which cannot be adjusted other than by a district— which can, after the teacher signs it, reduce pay, move the teacher to a new job location, change the classes or groups of students the teacher works with, and assign “other duties”. There is (evidently by design) little time for a teacher to weigh options, speak with administrators, or apply for other jobs. It’s a simple binary: we own your labor for the next 190 school days, or you’re out of a job.
For over a decade, like most teachers, I signed my contract without thinking much about it, and often, if I’m honest, without even reading it. To people outside of education and similar fields of work, this may seem reckless. In a sense, maybe being an educator is fundamentally reckless, especially in a country which in the past few years has “valued” school buildings enough to open them during a pandemic, but often not enough to pay for needed upgrades to ventilation. Maybe it is reckless to choose to sign a teacher contract in a country— and particularly in states like South Carolina— with a political class that has scapegoated teachers to a degree that is actively insane. But even in a “normal” year, the contract is worth essentially nothing to the employee, and there is no third option, just sign or become unemployed.
No school district is perfect, of course, nor is any other kind of employer. While I like my job, I have issues with my district, as I’m sure every employee of every school district does. Some problems could potentially be addressed by the district, while some, such as aggressive student behavior, may require the larger community to help address. These behavior issues reinforce what we already know: the kids are not alright, and as a society we have not yet begun to address student mental health and figure out workable, healthy, 21st century boundaries for student-teacher relationships.
Outside of our district, many schools have seen much worse violence and disruptions that many schools seem to simply be too short-staffed to address. In my school, which is doing better than I believe the average school is doing in terms of filling positions and maintaining a pool of subs, teachers and other staff members have had to cover around 1500 classes due to a lack of subs.
Those issues matter, and I hope to provide constructive feedback to anyone in power in my district, but they are not the primary reason I decided not to sign my contract. And although state law defines my failure to click the box by the PDF before midnight as a formal resignation, I didn’t really choose not sign it in that spirit. The best I can explain my decision, even to myself, is that I couldn’t take my options away from myself yet again. I preferred to live in a kind of Schrödinger's Cat scenario where I wasn’t “guaranteed” the job which an SC teacher contract doesn’t actually guarantee, and I also hadn’t quit.
In a literal sense, I’m still an employee. Nothing changed at midnight. The stagecoach did not become a pumpkin. I went to work the next day, and I read “The Metamorphosis” with fifteen-year-olds, graded assignments, taught a mini-lesson to my AP Seminar class about validity and reliability (using the South Carolina Department of Education School Climate Survey and an Attitudes Towards Women questionnaire as examples), and started prepping my AP Language students to read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
I have told my principal and the district HR team that I may reapply for my job, with the understanding that it may no longer be available. This was a risk that I didn’t take lightly, and I’m not completely sure I made the right decision. Part of me really hopes that there will be an opportunity to come back next year, and that doing so will seem like a workable option in a few weeks or maybe during the summer. With the historic teacher turnover we are seeing at this moment, it seems likely I could return to my school or get a similar job if I choose to. I may change my mind.
But some things aren’t going to change:
The SC General Assembly’s one-two punch of neglect of schools and assault on teachers is now a settled part of the budget (give or take whatever legislators might adjust during special session). Some of the concepts I taught this week, under the existing budget, might be prohibited next year. (For that matter, a large portion of what Senate Education Chair Greg Hembree and Representative Adam Morgan said to my students, when they separately visited my classroom this semester, would probably cause my district to lose funding next year, if they were school employees and said them next year.)
The House still spent months debating and finally passing a bill allowing parents to report any intentional, unintentional, real, or imaginary attempt of teachers to teach any of the vaguely and inconsistently defined Forbidden Concepts sketched in H. 5813.
Governor McMaster will still likely sign an outrageously cruel and otherwise pointless bill picking on the handful of transgender student athletes who made the mistake of wanting to play sports in the great state of South Carolina.
The House, as I wrote the first draft of this essay, was passing its version of S. 935, the “education savings account” (school vouchers with a loophole) bill. Because the bill has undergone various changes in the House and Senate and because it is unclear how or if legislators will reconcile the different versions passed by each chamber, it’s not clear how much the bill will cost. The original fiscal impact estimated its cost at a maximum of $2,919,509,000 per year. At the same time, the best either chamber has been able to offer public school teachers is a $40,000 minimum salary in a region where that is both tragically and comically noncompetitive. The Senate, for its part, this week rejected amendments that would have prevented private schools from pricing poor students out and discriminating against students on the basis of disability status, as well as an amendment requiring the legislature to fully fund public schools according to state law (something it hasn’t done since 2007) before funding private schools (something that is an explicit violation of the state constitution). (More details here.) The House and Senate versions must now be reconciled, and my only hope is that the petty infighting and political posturing which have defined this session will keep them from passing anything.
A superintendent once told me that teachers would keep teaching because they need insurance. He seems to have literally miscalculated, with a two-decade record number of teachers leaving the profession this year, but for those (majority female) teachers who rely on state benefits, the state also cut back their access to reproductive health this year.
More or less nothing has been done at the state level to address the surge in violence and weapons in South Carolina Public schools. As I write this, at least 78 weapons incidents (most involving guns) have been publicly reported in SC schools. Many, many more have gone unreported.
As I told my principal, who was very understanding, I am “emotionally, physically, and spiritually tired”. For the past several years, I have been pushing myself hard at work, hard in my advocacy, hard as I near forty and consider what I want my life to be about. Along with many of my colleagues, I’ve tried to balance a full-time teaching job with summer work like AP scoring and work on a set of state English Language Arts standards which may or may not ever come out, and with very time-consuming unpaid activism on behalf of students and teachers. It was not extraordinary this year for me to teach all day without a lunch break, go to a Senate hearing or committee meeting until 8 or 9 PM, wake up at 6 AM the next day, and do it all again. Maybe I just need a break, but state law and district policy won’t give me that.
But my spiritual exhaustion is the result of the message, sent loud and clear, over and over again, from political officials at the state and federal level, and from the minority of parents and other community members they have duped into following them, that I am part of a kind of enemy class. That I am “indoctrinating” students, as Representative Morgan said in one of the hearings on SC’s school censorship bills, after he visited my classroom and stood where I stand every day. That I am “grooming” students if I acknowledge the reality that gay and transgender people exist. That I am lazy and don’t want to work, as I have been told repeatedly on social media when I have raised concerns about health and safety in schools. That even in a year with a once-in-a-lifetime budget surplus, I don’t deserve a raise, and that my school doesn’t deserve better funding. Those are hard truths, and I have really struggled with them. I’m glad that others are finding a way to persevere in the face of the attacks and neglect, and I hope I will be able to do it at some point, too, but although I do not regret speaking with legislators and attending hearings and trying my best to do what they, themselves, have told me to do, the process has worn me down to a nub at times. It may be time to let someone else take my place, if there is, in fact, anyone who wants to do my job next school year.
I am nervous about the future— mine, my students’, and my state’s. I feel a slow-growing guilt that makes a lot of sense, because the pandemic years have been traumatic in the most literal sense, and this is probably survivor guilt. There are parts of the last year I can’t remember, and many parts of the last three years that feel like a dream or nightmare. Like many families, during the pandemic my wife and I lost loved ones, and we taught students who lost parents, relatives, and friends, both to COVID-19 directly, and to other unexpected causes that can’t fully be extricated from the ongoing effects of a disease that has somehow become mostly forgotten in my state, even as it has killed around 18,000 people in South Carolina (including well over 60 school employees and students as of last October) and almost one million people in the United States. Public education in South Carolina tilted forward down a steep incline that we all feared and on some level expected, but hope wouldn’t actually become reality.
This week, I have been taking a few books home with me at a time. I envision that my classroom will become more and more bare. I will throw away and give away and take away more and more. Eventually, there will be little evidence that I was there. The faded, laminated sign with my name and the school mascot will be removed, leaving a bleached-looking rectangle. Some students will be glad if I don’t come back next year, some will be sad, and some will perhaps be hurt.
Life will go on.
I don’t know if I will return to teaching during the coming school year, or ever, but I don’t think I’ll ever be fully willing or able to leave behind the compulsion to improve this system. I know I will continue to advocate for teachers in some capacity. I know I will do whatever I can to support Lisa Ellis in her bid to become the first working professional public educator to take office as Superintendent of Education during my career. I know I will try to stay engaged in the struggle against dark money interests with little interest in children or academia who have pushed intentionally harmful legislation this year.
I believe the social safety net is important, and often not even functional, and in need of repairs and perhaps restructuring, despite that fact that it is now essentially illegal for me to teach the theories and history and literature that bring me to those conclusions. We all have a responsibility to one another as human beings, and our responsibility to children is a special one, because not only do they need us, we need them more. They are our only hope for a stable, safe, sane future. They are the only ones who can care for us when we are old and lead for us when we are gone. They are not widgets on an assembly line, as the educational system has more and more treated them, but human beings with decisions to make. We can try to hide reality from them and shape them to our will, but I don’t really think that will work: they will make their own decisions, and we can either help them do that, or abandon them to do it alone.
To everyone who did sign their contracts, thank you. My thoughts and my efforts will be with you this year, whether I am physically in the classroom or not.
I’m currently weighing job options and applying. If you know of anyone in search of a pretty good writer, a highly ethical person, and a person mostly incapable of keeping his mouth shut about what seems most important, please let me know!
I’m going to try to keep these essays free (although that depends heavily on the job market now), but if you’d like to throw any support my way I do make music and it’s available here: Bandcamp (the discerning gentleperson’s choice) and other streaming services.
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