Saturday, November 04, 2006
Job #13: Charter School Teacher
I spent a year teaching creative writing and improv at a Charter High School in Arizona. The couple who ran the school had no education experience, but they'd started five other business ventures that went under, so I guess they decided to try to make some money off of the growing privatization of public education.
The school itself was in a rundown strip-mall, credit card stickers still up on the windows from when the school had previously been a series of restaurants and boutique stores. Some of the teachers suspected that the owners of the school were misusing the government money charter schools receive. I don't know if that was true or not, but they did drive around very nice "school vehicles" and they did buy a "school boat."
Coming in, I was warned that most of the students at the school had flunked out or been kicked out of nearly every other school in town. I also learned that there were only three teachers returning from the year before. The majority of the old teaching staff had either quit or been fired. One of the returning teachers said, "It's not because of the students. A teacher has never left here because of the students. It's because of the administration."
