Image from FridaKahlo.org
This is indeed a thorny and difficult topic to broach, the limbo land of working as a substitute, whether as a certificated substitute teacher or classified substitute aide at Bozo School District (BSD).
Anyone who is hired a BSD is initially very grateful because it signified they have jumped through all the hoops---and believe me there are many---and are able to get into the system.
You are grateful you now have a school account, your own email address, and access to the computer log in, where you can schedule your own work. In fact, many substitutes are grateful and can afford a part-time, temporary status forever. For instance, they are financially secure or have care-giving responsibilities or even work another preferably related job.
Snags around references
However the snags about working as a Substitute circle around the potential for transitioning to full-time, and in particular garnering adequate references or letters of recommendation.
In fact the former is mostly addressed in the plethora of transition to educator programs available through night-school. They also include government sponsored programs such as Teach for America. And many school districts (partnering with the local university) run Teacher Certification programs as well (even BSD offers this).
Both of the snags are somewhat interrelated. In order to qualify for a program, you must have adequate teaching experience and letters, for instance, a letter of offer to teach at a school.
The problem is, especially if you are an older worker, that it's very easy for Substitutes to become overlooked. Although marginalization is often couched more politely for certificated workers, there is nonetheless the stereotype of the Substitute somehow being not up to snuff.
In particular, if you are only on campus a few days a month, the principal or staff doesn't seem to remember you very well, meaning they are unlikely to furnish you a letter of evaluation. Conversely, if you do not manage the classroom well or responsibly, they have the power to instantly write you up. Even if you have only had one bad write-up in the past 4-5 years, it may count against you.
(And believe it or not, if you have the audacity to complain about anything, they will invent a write-up about you or set you up for a bad situation).
This means that Substitutes (especially long-term ones) are often extremely willing to conform with any and all school district expectations. That wouldn't seem bad, but what if the expectations are somehow a bit unreasonable? For instance, every child must finish a 20 page classwork packet in 4 hours? At BSD, someone had the audacity to point out that the reason local test scores at one school might be low is because most permanent teachers at the school site are lax regarding assigning homework, especially on weekends.
Someone did not have the audacity to discuss the elephant in the room, which is that BSD sits in the middle of a city that is quite segregated, pitting the well-to-do north against the larger poverty-stricken south. The vise on social civility can be quite aggravating. You observe how nice the teachers are to the students, but then playing cat-and-mouse with the parents. The teachers are proud that they may be receiving extra pay for working in a low-income neighborhood for 8 hours a day, at the end of which they race back to where they live on the north side of town.
These are the type of teachers who have more money to spend on Starbucks than time to volunteer for the local food bank. These are teachers who worry about the high test scores of their children, while covertly discouraging after school study programs. You get the persistent, nagging feeling these types of teachers don't or can't take civic order too seriously, since the only neighborhood that really matters are the ones in which they are able to socialize among their peers.
Recently this came home to roost in that the BSD pointedly told someone they cannot furnish any kind of letter of reference, since they are only responsible for administration. Mark, these are the same characters who hire, evaluate based on employee data, and conduct substitute teacher training.
It was really the same snag we ran into earlier, but we thought that it had somehow disappeared.
Snags don't disappear
Here is more evidence that the snags of being in Substitute teaching limbo can land you in jeopardy.
If you are seeking support from the local substitute teachers union that you pay minuscule dues to, you can just about forget about it. At BSD, the substitute teachers union representative is none other than someone from the HR department at the BSD office. You file a complaint at your own risk when it basically is filing with the HR at BSD.
Are there national unions for substitute teachers? Sadly, they are somewhat few and far between. NSTAsubs.org seems to be running something resembling that, and they have conferences only once every few years. In fact, ironically enough, the site is now advertising jobs with Bain Capital, since Enservio seems to detect a similarity between teaching and becoming a claims adjuster for the insurance industry.
In fact, the possibility of you being a substitute for the rest of your career in teaching has never been higher, according to several sources. New York City is running a vast Absent Teacher Reserve. In the pool are teachers who got downsized due to school closures; teachers who failed to improve their students test scores adequately; and teachers who never are offered a permanent job.
Of course in NYC the salary for a permanent teacher is so high, that even half that income would seem to be quite respectable for substitute teachers willing to commute or share housing.
But can the bottom line, as Larry Littlefield points, be that ATR or Substitute pools will become the new trend because Teachers Unions and School Districts and States recognize they can't afford all those retired pensioned teachers? Littlefield, an accountant by trade, seems to have put his finger on the fact that the NYPSD allocates far more money per pupil than may be spent. If you can believe the figures, nearly four times more is allocated per special education student. Is it possible that the retiree pensions are so high that extra money must be stowed away from somewhere in today's budgets?
The Littlefield thoughtfully imagines a new cottage industry system where all teachers would operate as substitutes, and specialize in teaching online, earning about $20-22 per hour:
"For the more severely disabled, if a home setting were possible, the same pay could be had with a class size of just three or four. A friend whose child has autism fought with the state of New Jersey for years to get the state to pay for education in just such a setting, rather than in a factory school setting.
"And what would a teacher’s career be like in this sort of cottage industry network? Their first five years might be spent teaching, and being trained, in a “mothership” regular school that acted as a central node for the network. That school would make a school building experience available to those that wanted it.
"Then the teacher would start working from home, perhaps conveniently when they had become a parent themselves. Rather than teaching the same grade every year, with the children passed on to other area teachers, he or she could have the option to keep the same children for a decade, right from pre-K to grade 8. Learning a new grade, or math vs. English, wouldn’t be as hard if most of the instructing was done by other teachers, via programs and videos on the laptop."
Naturally this would have every public school district in the nation up in arms. After all, it is not as if charter schools have done that great a job. The Washington Post ran a series of articles regarding the cornering of the public education market by charter schools. The perception of Walmartization; schools run like businesses; embezzlement of allocated funds; failure to adequately provide needed academic services; autocratic school philosophy; mistreatment of students and teachers; all of these are potential issues when schools become privatized. Working at charter schools, you may have anything from an overfilled school classroom, to inadequate down time for teachers, to absconding by the school administration, to a lack of balance in the curricula.
Hung in Limbo forever
Nothing so symbolizes the current crossroads in teaching as the story of the substitute teacher suspended for showing the students a film about Frida Kahlo.
Firstly, such a teacher ought to garner special recognition for offering her class a lesson intersecting history, art, culture, gender identity, yet instead she is punished for engaging her classroom. BAD!
Second, Frida Kahlo herself is a Latina heroine worth emulating to some degree because she possessed the courage, tenacity, and resilience to overcome different types of personal trauma in the form of disease, accident, marital infidelities, prejudice, and living in her husband's shadow.
She was literally the type of heroine who lifted herself up by her own bootstraps, her complicated sexual identity notwithstanding.
Today, increasingly, we live in a society of instant labeling, judgments, and scorn where one would have thought the Information Age would have advanced human understanding and tolerance.
Trumpsters might only see the surface, a gal with facial hair or hirsutism. A misfit consumed with her art in place of shopping mall narcissism. A woman with revolutionary ideas on political activism.
How would a real-life Frida Kahlo fare today in the classroom we wonder? Would she be able to work as a teacher and still be an artist? Would not BSD punish her for her outspoken revolutionary tendencies? Would not the school administration and tenured professors try to squelch her sense of humor and fierce independence? How willing would they be to provide her accommodations?
Sadly, one can hardly imagine today's Frida Kahlo being accepted or being able to serve in Teach for America hardly. Why do I think this? Because teaching has become precisely what it should really not be, which is the Master's Degree in Pedagogy. A pedagogic person tends to be narrow-minded, overweening, and even materialistic or pecuniary (since why go to all that trouble if you are not in it for the money). They believe that if you want to advance in education, you must teach 24/7.
Though the teaching programs will never say it to your face, you are unlikely to be welcome to teach if you love writing or art or making music first. Those things must become a distant second and mostly third, meaning you must settle for being a dilettante rather than a real artist. More important of course would be the extra countless hours of volunteering needed to establish more references!
Of course, there are always exceptions. Maybe there are a few Frida Kahlos working in Limbo. We just don't know about them because their lives are troubled and fractured because they are floating from one temporary teaching job to another, their belongings in a mini-storage, and their art literally hanging by threads. In fact that would have to be the case if she ends up in a jobless limbo, as a part-time instructional assistant.
Today's poor Frida Kahlos would be shorn of any benefits at all unless she set aside time for fighting for a higher minimum wage, for national low-cost health care, and for a guaranteed basic income. All of those things that only paupers need to be concerned about...
Thus, we don't need the Trumpeters to tell us how society is becoming undone. It is obvious that there are fewer and fewer Frida Kahlos being promoted in the media who have the time to juggle art, teaching, homelessness, and fighting for civil rights. Growing a mustache might just signify the audacity to endure in the boundless hate faced for bringing pointless matters up to social attention.