Saturday, February 8, 2020

Teachers Fraud in Hiring Shortages

Musical chairs and draconian workplace

(Originally posted in February 2020) 

It's been a few years since I last posted and it seems I should have covered all the issues. However time moves on. 2020 is an election year and the teachers' unions and pensions have sapped the teaching system to the point that new hires commonly move from school to school for at least the first five years of their careers. Unlike in the 1970s, teachers no longer stay at one school for decades at a time.

My motivation today involves an increasing tendency for Fraud meaning the practice of falsehood or being a fake or faking it. Deception is used for personal gain or advancement. A related term is Corruption which I take to mean a sum of addends such as:

Mismanagement + Entitlement = Corruption

The factors in fakeness and corruption in my current locale coupled with the gig economy is hollowing the traditional public school systems and taking its toll on workers. Here's an example of an article by Madison.com published last fall, "Classroom 'exodus': Education schools grapple with finding the next generation of teachers as more leave the profession." 

The author points out a lot of situational irony embedded in the idea often promoted in the media that we have endemic shortages of white collar professions: teachers, nurses, engineers, and doctors. As an Asian-American female engineer, my experience is the opposite. The so-called shortages are based on employers need to select only one best qualified applicant among a huge pool of talent since the engineer's salary has climbed to $80K. As a teacher, my experience is a dissimilar but parallel story of underemployment. Certainly I am grateful to have grown all-around in human awareness and intellectual development; however, in education the competition is couched in subtle cues and complex psychobabble. In short, teaching shortages are due to high turnover in an industry that has become the manufacturing counterpart of musical chairs.

Teaching schools dangle the material incentives of becoming one of the increasingly select tenured employees. You will receive loan forgiveness if you work in a Title 1 school. You will receive full union pay and benefits. You will accrue societal merit and recognition in civic society, for growing the dreams of the younger generation. You still get your summers off, and can spend that time pursuing your dream hobbies, or travel around the country and showcase all-American glamor.

Today very likely up to 50% of teachers are no longer experiencing all those wonderful things. Imagine that applies to the ones who are staying in the field, not leaving for greener pastures or sneaking into desk jobs where the stress might be lower. All teachers must center their statements around their love for children, teaching, and the education community. (Gone are the days of the stern spinster or nuns whose love was based upon abstractions). Nor is it even like the 1970s when you had nice affable teachers who took time off in the middle of the day to play golf, take their children to the doctor, and felt compelled to share stories about their travel adventures and hobbies. Those teachers might really have cared about poor children enough to bring them bags of gently worn clothes. 

In contrast, today's beautiful teachers point the children toward social workers and are proud of their controlled moral dysfunction or existential support for anomie.

As I stated in "Substitute Limbo" you will be duly marginalized and live the shaky life of a permanent substitute teacher if you dare to share your love of art, theater, journalism, writing, politics, religion, or anything else under the sun in a way that threatens the ego of your supervisors. (And it turns out that many permanents have tender egos or fake appreciation). Their opinions don't just apply to rookies; pronouncements are used to thin-out and lay-off seasoned teachers as "ATR Purgatory" (Absent teacher reserve) is used to isolate and shame those teachers who dared to question or march or organize or wear a political button.

At one school district all the teachers were supposed to wear black tee-shirts on Fridays symbolizing their support for the War Troops. Good principals wore the U.S. flag button on their lapels (same as in government offices). The message was that if you didn't do or support those things, you were an unpatriotic and therefore bad person. You earned a black-mark that could jeopardize how you are rated by students and peers. However just like living under any regime, Arab-Americans were not spared if they did all the right things; they endured harassment and criticisms anyway. (Mostly, fake liberal-proclaiming, elite-worshipping teachers who are mostly white don't give a rat's arse about culture really; it is all so they offer one another positive handshakes on being politically correct.) 

Popularity is not supposed to matter at schools. If you are conscientious, care about the children, plan wonderful curricula, and produce improvements in class performance, why would anything else matter? Because since the 2010s everything has become data-driven. When you attend training, it is not to improve your area-expertise or your philosophy; instead, there is a relentless push to quantify everything. If you are a teacher-leader, you will be scientifically studying how to modulate student behaviors by conducting test-cases on types of strategies which work, and charting the results. If you are a professor at a university, you can no longer teach just using a textbook; you are pushed to excel at developing fully self-navigable courses online including holding virtual discussion groups. (The less actual classroom face-to-face you have, the better, so academia and IT can pocket the change). 

All the fields are being pushed toward their limits by Artificial Intelligence according to Socialist Worker's article, "Let them eat Data." Some children do well in self-mastery programs, while unfortunately many do not. After all, is not one of the purposes of education to include healthy socialization of the child? What is healthy about being tracked and managed whether as a family, indigent person, child, homeless child, displaced worker, or privileged model citizen?

Thanks to the Patriot Act and progressively authoritarian Presidents, huge data centers such as the National Security Agency in Utah, have been built to allow collection of unlimited amounts of data on people, their habits, movements, interests, associations, etc. What they do with this data is often unclassified (meaning they can do just about anything with it). My belief is that we are attempting to build The Tower of Babel using computers, automation, technology to create The Ultimate Robot.

If that sounds paranoid, let me share how my most recent job opportunity came and went. Teach for America (TFA), one of the largest alternative teaching certificate programs in the United States developed a subsidiary named Enriched Schools in 2012. When a mentor shared this idea with me, I thought it was the grand opportunity I had been waiting for. The motto: Reimagine Substitute Teaching sounded exactly like what I had been waiting for all these years.

"You can be a substitute teacher while leading a fulfilling life on the outside as an artist." 

"Share your love of news journalism while teaching part-time as an English teacher."

"Be the actor, care-giver, minister, or cook of your dreams while earning extra income as a substitute teacher."

No Kidding, What a Hook!

There were things in the application process which raised immediate alarm bells, but I eagerly swept them aside. First off, the lie that "the application takes only 5 minutes to complete." No, that really was not the case at all; maybe the first two questions. There are at least 20 questions though. Second, the fact that almost everything was done virtually. Application, interviews, mandatory reporting course, uploading all critical documents (drivers license, fingerprints, medical documents) was done mandatory. Only the final interview and training were conducted in person.

What does Enriched or TFA do with all that information? It's really scary because they are hiring like crazy. Enriched has expanded to cities across the country in just a few short years. They must collect reams of data, and TFA with its $350 million dollar plus budget does so as well. They keep everything whether or not you are hired, work a few months, or they deliberately place you on no-call.

It's not like when you applied at the local school district two decades ago where there was a packet of paper forms to fill out, and then background checks. Today there is a checklist that would fill up two sheets of 8-1/2x11. Of course I did what homework I could, and my application was well-received. But the website (5 months ago) had NO real "About Enriched Schools" section. Just this page with glamorously joyful Substitute Teacher testimonials, and when you pressed the Join button you were whisked to the offsite application page which again promised to be fast and easy---provided you didn't need any Save buttons. 

Obviously their IT is talented and busy. Just a few days ago, they grafted on brand new About page. Much too late, I realised the About is packed with professional careerists in the Beautiful People category. They are all mostly TFA graduates who have gave Teaching Their All. 

"Why would anyone believe that elite careerists have empathy for authentic grassroots artists?"

We had recognized the fake button too late: They don't! They practically hate them! 
 
Most of the programmers and staff at TFA/Enriched spend many hours ogling at their computers, drinking coffee, meeting at WeWork style drafting tables, discussing applied pedagogy, and looking down their noses at outsiders. In D.C., we only really have two separate classes of teachers: The Leaders (elite, privileged, white), and The Field Hands (inner city, underprivileged, black). If you understand anything about D.C. Washingtonian History, it's always been this way. If you are pre-identified as Field Hand, if you want to be hired and stay on the job, you had better know your place!

(Nowadays it is not uncommon for desperate wannabee permanent inclusion teachers to share the most painful sob-stories; I have heard at least two stories of being in chemotherapy and others looking very much like they live in their car.) 

For West Coast educators it takes awhile getting used to seeing Inclusion Teachers (fancy-title for Special Education Aides) wearing super-tight torn jeans, converse tennis shoes, purple dreadlocks, garish fingernails, multiple tattoos, and gothic lip-stick. If their attire does not convince you, you know that in class they will often be engaged with their iPhone listening to Beyonce and Jay Z, or messaging with a vast circle of Facebook friends. If they strike you as minimally engaged or even underachieving, it's okay because they are entitled to their positions as an underclass drawn from the local poor, raising children, and often having grown up with their own Special Needs. 

The Teachers (mostly white, or mixed-black graduates of Howard University) can often barely keep their classes in order, but because they are privileged, they are not chastised and not even necessarily held accountable. If their class underperforms (which can often be the case since the Teachers do not assign that much homework in public schools---an unconscious form of ingrained classism since they would expect much more from their own), the Teachers can easily transfer to another school.

But if you are a Substitute or Guest Educator (how Enriched calls them), BEWARE. Enriched specializes in hiring minorities. You MUST pre-identify as Lead or Support, which is code for Teacher or Inclusion. The HR gave a hint that most of us should be Support. Foolishly, I asked for Lead. I mean that I did call in as Support, and tried doing that, but due to the shock of the Field Hand culture, and seeing how young and inexperienced the Teachers were, I decided to try Teacher.

That was what abbetted my downfall. I was told by the new supervisor and the Enriched Scheduler: 

"We are trying to find a school and location that would be a good fit for you."

No matter how I tried to explain that I was not picky and would work anywhere, they saw it differently, being my "intermediaries." Turns out these intermediaries did not believe that I was suited to work anywhere. They decided to cut me out of the list, despite the fact that I was well-qualified, showed up on time, did more than was required, and got along with everyone. 

My pointing out that they overhired people did not help. The new supervisor sent a message out in January about "We are having a problem, we need to hire more people. If you provide a referral we will offer you a $100 bonus." Because I had the audacity to text her back pointing out that I was not being offered work even half the days that I signed up for, she made an issue out of that. 

Thanks to Android apps, I am backing up ALL OF MY MESSAGES FROM ENRICHEDSCHOOLS DC, BECAUSE IF YOU SCROLL THROUGH THOSE MESSAGES, THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT I VIOLATED ANY PART OF ANY AGREEMENTS, WAS RUDE, OFFENSIVE, ETC. ON THE CONTRARY, OFTEN THEY WOULD MESSAGE ME THROUGHOUT THE DAY. 

ONLY AFTER BEING OFFERED VERY FEW DAYS WAS I FORCED TO TEXT MESSAGE THEM MORE OFTEN, BUT NEVER IN A WAY THAT WAS OFFENSIVE. Thus, it is patently false for them to have used this as justification to put my phone number on lockdown. It was cruel and draconian of EnrichedSchools to enact such measures particularly in lieu of their inexplicable, arcane decision-making on assignments and on evaluations. The new supervisor had no evaluations on me to speak of, but based her shutdown on over-reaction to words such as "sure" "snap judgment" and "used to scheduling my own work dates." 

FAKE TEACHERS AS MEAN AS FROM THE OLD SOUTH

Again, most West Coast teachers would not understand that Back East, the so-called liberal Teachers are just as class-conscious and race-conscious as in the Old South. They just hide it much, much better. In fact, they often truly believe that they are wonderful, politically correct liberals to the point of seeming to be toadies. But no matter how unkempt, anemic-looking, nerdist, and detached from Nature they appear, they will always remember they are white from their behavior to associations

That qualifies as fake in my book. What remains unstated or left off the printing press is that today's teachers (thanks to almost two decades of wars in the Middle East labeled as good for democracy) are constantly encouraged to police themselves, operate pan-optic rumor mills, and tolerate what outsiders might view as micro-aggressive, control freak, mind-control administrative programming. 

Whenever you attend any district seminars, whether leaders or field hands, all employees drill one another over "where do you work" "what is your classification" which is code messaging for identifying job stability and income category. If you (like me) dare to mention Values, Homeless People Living Near NOMA Metro, or that you are Differently Abled, you will witness an incredible amount of hostility towards you even by "teachers who work at Schools Without Walls." Strangely enough, they will be leering and gossiping about your DARING TO DISPLAY DIFFERENCE!

(The double-standards in teaching has never been worse. As an engineer with teaching experience, they will not allow me to teach STEM; because more pay is involved those slots are rewarded to senior teachers---even if their primary qualification is teaching English! And the friendliness towards white male teachers has never been more favorable in Teacher Education; whereas in engineering the women are scorned and sidelined!) 

The current levels of fascistical expectations to conform and obey are enabling the acceptance of the dark government operatives. These operatives, disguised as anything from experts to nonprofits, are eager to infiltrate the system to support the profiling and setups needed for drug-peddling, child-sex-trafficking, establishing porno-rings, and promoting more satanic overtones in the school culture. 

At one West Coast school, this educator identified one white-male educator who most likely is a member of the Hell's Angels during his off-duty hours. One school principal glorified in his wartime exploits and often included sexual undertones in patronizing attitudes towards female employees. 

There have been lawsuits and investigations into the bizarre stories of child rape, and cultures of pedophilia in the LASD. But even at BSD we had teacher convocations that celebrated Michael Jackson look-alikes, making you wonder about the double entendre

What else can one make of the strangely unsettling push to expose toddlers to transgender sex clowns including taking riding-romps on top of the transexuals? MassResistance.org and HumansAreFree.com have reported and depicted these drag-queen presentations--- not geared to enlighten our community spiritually but instead to support all manners of bestiality. Instead the NWO Pawns in the Game (William Guy Carr) agenda supports labeling MassResistance.org as "right-wing" and even as "anti-LGBT hate-group"! 

CRAZY MESSAGING SERVICE

The ostensible reason EnrichedSchools DC gave me that they had an issue was that I was not accepting enough of their message system. As a past Substitute Teacher in a School District, I had the privilege in the past of scheduling my days and roles in the school district computer system by myself. EnrichedSchools.com serves as an intermediary, meaning they decide for you what school you will work at, in what capacity, on what dates. And they tell you they know what's best for you!

"They aspire to become the bonafide TFA subsidiary intermediary employers operating in urban cities around the country, thereby becoming in effect dangerous draconian gatekeepers of teachers aspiring to the middle-class, while retaining a non-unionized amoral underclass of field hands." 

Workers have to call in almost every single day, at multiple times, checking their messages almost every other hour as they transmit "inspirational" messages, ask you to clock-in, clock-out, provide feedback, and check on feedback. They will message you from 4pm to 10pm, from 5am to 4pm. And you are not allowed to say ANYTHING that is questioning, and WOE IS TO YOU IF YOU ACTUALLY DECIDE TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON A JOBSITE. 

Because remember they mostly sit on their butts all day long, so they LOVE TO DISCUSS which is the code for gossip, innuendo, faulty conclusion----ALL WITHOUT YOU BEING THERE TO DISCUSS IN PERSON. And if you dare to visit them in person (like I did) it became the means by which my new scam-artist supervisor decided to cook up a negative counseling memo. Even if I had tape-recorded our conversation and there was nothing there for incrimination, my being present gave her the excuse she was looking for. Incidentally, the day I stopped by there were no less than six more interviewees being processed through the system. When they are invited to headquarters, chances are they will be hired. So no wonder she is looking for an excuse to set my number aside! 

With regard to how friendly and understanding these staff are. One staffperson frequently addressed me "Hey, what about working tommorrow at...." peppering with messages afternoon and evening. I would accept and then she would message back saying, "Oh no, already taken."

I complained about the lack of courtesy and the unpredictability. They complained back that I should not message them at all except to say "Role Ready" once per morning. I would wait by the phone for several hours, starting at 5:30am, and then half the time, nothing.

Then in December (my second month), my old supervisor, Nhandi J., accepted a better position at DCPS. The new supervisor has all the characteristics of a classic ADHD. She began to direct her attention to me in ways that were deliberately targeting. Anything I stated would be twisted around.

"So I sense you are angry and have a negative attitude about our message system?"

I tried to pacify her and explain, no, really, I just wanted to there to be more consistency and perhaps they could explain to us exactly when, how, and at what times they will message. Saying "Sure!" to the scheduler should not be confuted as some kind of rude response. The new supervisor would interject herself right into the scheduling process and ask me if I could "call her back to chat." She knew that she is being very intimidating because we temporaries are already beside ourselves waiting patiently for message-placements, but then on top of this, this dame demands to chat (more like brow-beat) with you on "you-say, we-say, what-did-you-mean, you-must-have-a-problem" etc. 

Because she is my new supervisor, I tried to market myself as experienced in education, eager to work, filled with ideas to implement my Teacher-Toolkit of plans if ever needed, etc. I followed up with a thankyou note with my titles, A.Sc., B.Sc., P.E., M.A. She promised to get back to me, though I detected deliberate snarky meanness that from my decades of work can only mean one thing.

When I asked her if she wanted to get rid of me, she replied, "You are very well qualified, but you are free to look for other work if you want to."

THE VERY NEXT DAY, THEY PUSHED ME OUT OF THE MESSAGE SYSTEM.

ENRICHED HOOKS YOU INTO THEIR MESSAGING CYCLE, THEN CUTS YOU OFF COLD. NO WARNINGS, NO MEANINGFUL FEEDBACK, NO SECOND CHANCES. THEY PUT YOU BASICALLY ON A VIRTUAL LOCKDOWN AND WILL NOT EVEN ANSWER YOUR CALLS.

Meanwhile the fancy careerists at TFA and EnrichedSchools keep all this DATA about me that they will be able to keep and use for nefarious purposes. (We have many teachers here from Africa and other parts of the world). They will continue to brag about their successes in their fake magazines.

They are aiming for rising up the ranks of the capitalist pyramid foundation game, and they do this by using their many IT professionals to inflate or fake the ratings and reviews at places like Indeed.com and all the other suspect places where they can plant fake positive reviews or shill how THEY DESPERATELY NEED MORE AND MORE EMPLOYEES, WITHOUT EVER MENTIONING THE HUGE BACKLOG OF HIRED EMPLOYEES THEY HAVE LAID WASTE TO.

Believe me, most of these careerists at EnrichedSchools.com don't have the qualifications or life experience that I do, but being mean girls and toxic careerists, they really don't care that they are playing with the hopes and dreams of we independent contractors, perpetuating musical chairs and revolving doors, while pretending to the world that they earned their keep and are entitled to more respectability than the PhD driving a taxi or cleaning upholstery. These Teach for America, and EnrichedSchools organizations are so fake they develop teachers who willingly plagiarize unit plans, adapt material for their publications, fake connections with Native Americans, pretend to care deeply about your community, all while being narcissistically obsessed with growing their Beautiful Life portfolios.

This is why reviewers at Indeed.com recommend that you RUN THE OTHER DIRECTION, and do not take them at face-value. Other reviewers describe TFA as being only concerned about building relationships in the community (neoliberal code for establishment networking excludes the lower 50% disenfranchised underemployed grassroots communities) meaning they care more about advancing their brand than addressing your concerns with being placed in an over-sized classroom filled with at-risk students many of whom live in unstable neighborhoods with unemployed parents.

Is it any wonder that the new supervisor, a mean-girl-operative, understands her orders about what constitutes an unfit person? "Someone who is Gen X, experienced, well-travelled, well-qualified, connects with grassroots communities and people of color, is well-rounded, and delivers neat lesson plans because she is NOT committed enough to giving 120% of herself 120% of the time for a real TFA type!" (That, and maybe the fact that "She writes, blogs, opines about the state of the world and climate change"?)

My new supervisor addressed my concerns with utter mockery in her voice, showing nothing of the empathy, understanding, support, encouragement, that a new employee deserved. Her pretext for a dismissal said it all, that this is something they are doing ALOT NOT JUST TO ME. And just to knock the worker down some more, in response to my volunteer work at another educational nonprofit she said, "Oh, I know about them. We've worked with them before." Her remark meant that while she did not acknowledge my value, she is proud that she networks with them (which reminded me of some mean creepy engineering consultants I used to work with back in the 1990s).

SO AT THE END THE DAY, WE SAY: LET THEM EAT DATA!