This week I completed my first year of teaching in an NYC public school that serves predominantly working class, immigrant students. My experience, and the experience of most other teachers, paints a stark picture: it is a bad time to be a teacher right now. 

My school, and many others, does not hire an adequate number of substitutes, so teachers receive multiple coverages a week, even if they did not volunteer for them. While teachers do get paid for these coverages, they take away necessary prep periods. Because of a lack of planning time during the school day, I had to spend long hours outside of contract time creating materials, grading, contacting parents, and doing the other endless administrative tasks we’re required to do. My special education co-teachers in my integrated co-teaching (ICT) classes were pulled frequently in order to cover another class or to proctor exams. This not only disrupts the curriculum, it also is a violation of the UFT contract and of student Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Throughout the year, I received many newcomers and refugee students in my class because, on paper only, the class received “English Language Learner (ELL) services” in the form of push-ins from a certified ELL teacher; in reality, this teacher was not in my classroom for the last two months of the school year because she was pulled for other duties (another violation of student educational rights). I was not given any additional support to teach these students on my own. Due to system-wide understaffing and budget issues, there is often a lack of support and resources for students with severe academic and behavioral issues. Educators have to deal with a slow-moving bureaucracy to get students the help they need, such as an IEP evaluation or a paraprofessional; these processes can often take months or even whole school years.

These working conditions and the lack of resources in schools throughout the city have a negative impact on students, particularly working class students. We see across the board that many kids are performing years below grade level. Reports show high rates of mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety disorders among children and teens; a shortage of school counselors and lack of mental health resources means that students are not getting the support they need at school. While public education as a whole is suffering, institutions that serve mostly working class and poor students bear the brunt. My experience as a student teacher in one of the city’s “top” high schools shows that not all schools are impacted equally. 

Such is the state of public schools all across the city and the nation. Not to mention states like Florida, where teachers are investigated by the BOE for showing movies with openly gay characters or prevented from talking too much about Emmett Till because of DeSantis’ “antiwoke” bill. It should then come as no surprise that there is a nationwide teaching shortage. 

Teacher training programs, such as the one I attended, do little to prepare you for the reality of the job, and really only serve as ideological training. At worst, these programs prepare you to be a dutiful servant of capital by gleefully sorting kids into “workers” and “bosses” or “wannabe bosses.” At “best,” they encourage utopian thinking that an individual teacher can, through the sheer force of will and good vibes, inspire all students into academic success despite everything else occurring in their lives. But in the classroom, we are faced with the naked truth: that academic achievement often has more to with a student’s economic status than with their inherent ability. The class divide between, for example, my honors students and my ICT/ELL students is stark.

Conservative pundits and politicians blame the “woke teachers unions” for the state of education today. But weak union leadership and reactionary anti-strike laws limit the power teachers can have in improving their working conditions and, in turn, student outcomes. The UFT executive board recently voted against a proposal to support getting rid of the Taylor Act provision that prevents public sector employees from striking (consider: the UFT has not gone on strike since 1975). Many educators in the UFT have expressed disappointment with union leadership for failing to adequately fight for our interests. On June 3rd, a tentative contract agreement between the union and NYC Mayor Eric Adams was announced. While the contract makes some attempts at improving the working conditions of teachers, such as offering more paid parental leave time, it does not do enough. Take, for example, the new provision that allows parent communication to be completed remotely. While this appears to be a win that allows teachers more flexibility in completing their work, it actually creates even more work as teachers would be required to keep extensive documentation of their outreach. Critically, the proposed yearly 3% raises in the agreement do not keep pace with inflation, meaning that educators would effectively be taking a pay cut if the contract was approved. The contract is also an insult to paraprofessionals, whose salaries would be capped (!) at $56k––meaning the majority of paras would not make enough to live in this city. The timing of the vote––the very end of the school year––seemed like a deliberate attempt of both union leadership and the city to pressure educators to vote for a subpar contract. For these and other reasons, I voted “no” on the tentative agreement. 

And then there’s the blatant disrespect the mayor has for teachers. The very same week he announced education budget cuts, which would involve reducing how much the city spends on benefits such as health insurance for teachers, Eric Adams tweeted that teachers “don’t do it for the money.” Compare this with his comment about raising police salaries in a recent contract agreement with the NYC PBA: “We need to find efficiencies. And part of finding efficiencies is to make sure we are paying our public servants a respectable salary.”

While this state of affairs may seem like just an immediate aftermath of a pandemic that saw widespread student learning loss and a great resignation of educators, the reality is that this is the culmination of a long trend, thanks to the systematic gutting of the public school system, the defanging of teachers unions, and poor educational policy. This is the school system under capitalism: overworked teachers, understaffing, unmanageable class sizes, crumbling infrastructure, ire from bourgeois politicians, untenable working conditions, and, ultimately, students who lag years behind. As the MDSO’s program states, public education has a dual role under capitalism: to educate the working class up to the minimum level required to hold jobs, while also restricting access to real knowledge. An individual teacher, no matter how well-meaning, often ends up reinforcing this very role because they can’t transcend the reality of teaching under capitalism. In other words, we are currently seeing a system working the way it was designed to work. 

While it is easy to become dispirited by our conditions of work, revolutionary teachers must continue fighting for an education system and for a social order that works better for us and for our students. One way we can do this is to radicalize other teachers. While we recognize that we cannot radically overhaul education so long as capitalism still exists, we can agitate around our working conditions and demand progressive changes to our schools. The first step is voting no on the contract and putting pressure on the city (and our own union) to meet our demands. We must also teach revolutionary content where we can (where we are not micromanaged by administration and DOE bureaucrats), to arm our students with a scientific understanding of society so they can take up the class struggle.