Nationwide Teacher Shortage

Some districts in Texas are switching to four-day school weeks. College students, administrators and military personnel are being used to fill positions left by teachers around the country. There is no national database to confirm statistics, but many states are reporting staffing gaps that reach into the thousands per district.

No wonder! With the stress of transitioning back and forth to on-line teaching due to covid, the recent attacks on teachers who teach real history to their students, and the low respect, overwork and fatigue long present for teachers, many are saying NO.

In my twenty-seven years in high-school classrooms, I found that no one who had not had the experience could understand the level of constantly increasing pressure. Duties were added every year, without the old ones being taken away. Especially in the public school systems, we were expected to be social workers, psychiatrists, and policemen, in addition to teaching a rigorous curriculum in multiple subjects to groups of 35 plus students each hour. I usually taught over 300 different teenagers each of the last twenty years in the classroom.

I loved the students, loved the diversity of ethnicity and culture. The rewards came in bright eyes, understanding, open sharing of their lives, hugs, connections that last to this day in my life. All values that cannot be measured by standardized testing.

School boards need to listen to students’ needs and teachers’ needs if they expect to begin to solve the problems of losing these valuable, generous people who are shaping our next generation.

We Organize to Change Everything

FREE EBOOK!
We Organize to Change Everything
Co-publication with
Lux Magazine

An urgent collection on losing Roe v. Wade, struggling to provide abortion across the Americas, and how we can rebuild a fighting movement for reproductive justice.

Contributors also consider the intimate connection of abortion rights to forced sterilization and structural racism, incarceration and criminalization, Indigenous people’s sovereignty, transgender rights, and the growing threat of a white supremacist far right.

I finished this book yesterday just before our Takoma Park Mobilization book group discussion. We Organize to Change Everything is a collection of twenty articles on reproductive justice that appeared on Verso Books on line in June 2022.

I plan to send a link of the book to my granddaughter, to make sure that she and her friends know about how to do an at-home abortion in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy with misoprostol, a pill that causes uterine contractions. The book includes many stories of how women have been using herbal methods to end unwanted pregnancies for millennia, and how our racist, patriarchal system is making new laws to stop all abortion access. They call for a powerful grassroots movement for reproductive justice to ensure rights for every member of our society.

Statistics are cited about the efforts of eugenicists in 1937 to “wipe out” the Puerto Rican population with forced sterilization. Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer tells the story of being sterilized during another operation without her knowledge. Forced sterilizations continued for women of color in California prisons as recently at 2011. As with most social issues, people of color and the poor are most oppressed by the efforts of the right to deny women’s rights.

The authors call for a “Women’s liberation movement” that gives the choice back to women about when, where and how often they wish to become parents. Planned Parenthood and NARAL receive criticism for focusing too narrowly on white women and not enough on the larger social issues of justice for all. Native American, African American and Latina activists tell about forced sterilizations of people of color, eugenics, the history of forced childbirth for slaves, conditions for women in prison, trans and non-binary people, and the necessity to fight for fair wages, housing, and health care in addition to abortion. It is truly a call to “change everything” from the grassroots up.

Some of the most hopeful and uplifting stories come from women who devote their time to “accompanying” women who are feeling frightened and hopeless in their dilemma. Anna, dedicated to accompanying other women continued to do so during her pregnancy until contractions began.