American schools suck. Conservatives and democrats, adults and children, and, most strikingly, teachers and non-teachers overwhelmingly agree on this point. But why? Why after so many years of hand-wringing, so many reforms, so many presidents pounding podiums and decrying our schools as unacceptable, do they still… suck?

According to one camp, the main problem with our schools is that teachers’ unions protect incompetent teachers and give good ones no reason to do their jobs well. Unions make it very difficult for principals to fire teachers, and thus bad ones can skate along without actually imparting any knowledge to their students.

The other camp asserts almost the exact opposite. Schools suck, they say, not because of the teachers–the teachers are doing a great job–but because of more nebulous factors: lack of parental involvement, poverty, lack of funding. To get rid of unions is to get rid of the one perk of this underpaid, overworked, and under-respected profession.

Last year, in a large, miserable school in New York City, I found myself unwittingly thrust into the middle of this debate.
I was a 22- year-old first year Teach for America 7th and 8th grade English teacher. In New York City alone, there were 550 of us, most newly graduated and delighted that we had found a sort of “back door” to getting respectable employment. We had spent the summer in a sticky Bronx school while the directors of Teach for America gave lessons on subjects like “Classroom Management Tactics” and “Working with ESL Students.” We had taught summer school classes, most ranging in size from about 5 to 10 students. Armed with this training, we were ready to do what Teach for America told we must do: Raise our students’ two grade levels in reading, have them pass the state mandated test with flying colors, and, last but not least, EMPOWER THE STUDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES TO BREAK THE CYCLE OF POVERTY.

All this was fine except for one notable problem: I sucked. Did I suck worse than other Teach for America first year teachers? I don’t believe so, but I also don’t know. What I do know is that, despite trying to do what I’d been taught in the “Classroom Management Tactics” seminar, my classroom was distinctly UN-managed. No one ever had a pencil. At any given time, at least 5 students were not in their seats. Independent reading, which TFA had stressed was crucial beyond measure for my students’ success, dissolved into paper ball fights. Each day brought 20 separate arguments about the bathroom pass (No miss, swear to God, I will go right here if you don’t let me). Texting was rampant. And the gum. Over a year later, when I think back on that room, I can still smell the sugar and hear the relentless cracking of Dentyne Ice and Watermelon Bubblicious. I was not fast enough to catch them pop it in, often too overwhelmed to remember to tell them to take it out.

These were not the sort of classroom management problems that make a good movie. There were no knives, no gang fights. No one ever directly challenged my authority. In fact, individually, these kids were charming, polite, intelligent, and fun. They were far from the worst kids in the world–they were even far from the worst kids in the borough. But through a combination of my inexperience, their attitude about education, and the general school climate, my class wasn’t a place where very much learning was happening.
So what should be done with me? The anti-union camp says (and rightly, I think) that bad teachers should be fired. I was, without a doubt, a bad teacher–but it was also my first year. I was trying extremely hard, sleeping 3 hours a night, virtually living at the Teach for America office. Must I be fired so swiftly? The union camp would say instead that I was one of THEIRS, that NO ONE, not any principal or administrator would EVER, EVER take this job from me, unless I had publicly torn a student limb from limb with my own two hands. And possibly not even then.

The trouble with this debate is that there is no room in it for programs like Teach for America or Teaching Fellows. If schools get rid of unions and staunchly adopt a “be a great teacher or you’re out” policy, members of these programs will be shown the door. Some exceptional people are very good teachers by their second year in such a program. No one is good in his or her first year. How could they be? The program is described as the ultimate “sink or swim” test–and no one starts swimming the second he’s hit the water. Huddled around the copy machines at the Teach for America office, we would trade stories and commiserate about how many students had gotten into a fight that day (“13!” one teacher proudly announced) and how independent reading apparently meant “all band together to make your teacher’s life a living hell.” We smiled. We had hope. Next year, we would be better.

On the other hand, throwing the full force of the union behind people who don’t intend to stay in the profession doesn’t make much sense either. Teach for America has not been around for 25 years yet, but I will eat my shoes if anyone who comes into teaching via Teach for America leaves with a pension plan after 25 years. The program does not intend to make career teachers, and those entering the program do not intend to be teachers for their entire professional life. Why pretend like they do?

At my particular school, the sides of this debate became extremely heated over my particular “case” while I was oddly trapped in the middle. In October, my principal sat me down and explained that it would be best for the kids if I resigned, since I didn’t have good control of the class. When I told my fellow teachers this, they sat me right back down and explained that the principal was a horrible man who had no right to intimidate me and make me feel badly for having very normal first year teaching struggles. The teachers, on the whole, were on my side and demanded a union meeting in which I, to my surprise, was held up as a prime example of why unions were so necessary.

“Here’s this wonderful girl with all kinds of potential, he’s given her one of the most difficult special ed classes in the school, and he has the nerve to try to take her job from her!” Ms. S, the school’s union leader, shouted at the assembled bunch. “We will NOT let him do that without just cause.” I stood up next to her on the lunchroom stage and wondered what exactly had happened. I wanted to keep my job, very much. I loved many things about it, I loved the kids, and I had wanted to be a teacher for a very long time. On the other hand, though, it was his school. Did he really not have the right to fire me? It would be nice, of course, if he offered more support–but people are fired every day by their bosses, often unfairly. Why exactly was I different?

As I perhaps could have predicted, it was the worst of both worlds. The principal, angry at the union leader for making this into a fight, passive aggressively agreed to follow every single union regulation…but still get me out. The union demands an extensive paper trail to remove a teacher, and, in order to assemble that, he began to do what is best described as stalking me. He showed up daily at the door, walking around with a checklist and looking for what he could write me up for today. Had the lunch milk been ordered? Was the aim of today’s lesson written on the board? Was my lesson plan printed out? Was there evidence of differentiated instruction going on? Had I posted the weekly bulletin? Were all students quietly engaged in a productive educational task? As the year went on, I got much meaner and much better, and gradually the answer to the last question became a “sort of” rather than a resounding “no.” I felt like I was swimming upstream, though, in a losing battle with a massive binder cataloging all my faults as an educator. Sometimes when he slithered in the door, I would want to turn around and scream, “Yup, that’s right, there is definitely a kid with gum in this room. That’s your write up for today, you evil checklist wielder.” It’s a deep regret that I never did.

Teach for America, for its part, was wonderful, as much as they could be. What many people outside the program don’t realize, though, is that you aren’t actually employed by them. There is very little they can do. And in New York, as in many, many other places around the country, what Teach for America teaches you to do is not in line with what your particular school district, much less your particular administration, wants to see. TFA, for example, suggested that I make a competition between my 7th and my 8th graders to see who could do independent reading for the longest time without talking. I agreed with them that this was a good idea–it even seemed to be working for the first 2 days–before the principal saw the chart and wrote me up for “fostering a disrespectful attitude between students” or some other such nonsense. “Well, be flexible honey! Keep your chin up!” My TFA adviser said. I can’t blame her. What else was she supposed to say?

Though I am no longer in TFA (shocking, I know), no longer employed by the NYC DOE (also shocking) and no longer a member of the United Federation of Teachers (shocking, since I will never again belong to an organization that loves me quite like they did), the teacher union debate still appears everywhere for me, from bus conversations to the front cover of The New York Times Magazine 3 weeks ago. All parts of the debate are based on lies. Teach for America says “Our teachers will be so amazing right out of the gate that wanting to let them go will be out of the question!” The teacher’s union says, “There ARE no bad teachers. There are only bad principals who want to fire us unjustly!” The average person off the street says, “It’s the kids’ fault! They don’t want to learn!” Education specialists say something like “If only we had a more differentiated and integrated curriculum that educated students not merely as passive receptacles but as equal partners in their own development….” and other things that are too boring to write. The sides yell and yell and yell.

And meanwhile, despite 9 years in the public education system, some of my students still thought that “Bronx” was the name of their country.

Sarah McCarthy writes on distance learning for Guide to Online Schools.