Imagine Teachers were Reporters

I think the Times Union gives the school district a pass and does so to the detriment or our children and city. Maybe they wouldn't if they were in the same boat.

Imagine this. You are the managing editor at a newspaper. Your publisher tells you, sports are now the most important news to be covered. Now you may not be convinced you need more sports or forcing sports on your audience is wise but since you stopped thinking about them and what they need long ago you go along anyways.

You look at your staff and realize that you don’t have enough reporters to cover all the news that the publisher wants covered. You decide you must hire several news sports reporters. Unfortunately you are not given an increase to your budget. You are just told to make it happen.

How do you do it? Well you have to cut some people and some programs. You decide to cut the feature reporters to make room for the extra sports reporters. Sure features are popular but they aren’t as popular as hard news or what the publish wants covered. So then you start your search and as you do so bring in some temps to fill the positions until you can find permanent sports reporters. The temps are nice an all but they are a bit overwhelmed and don’t really contribute that much but you have to have bodies in the slots.

Your search goes slow. All the other papers in the area have been told by their publishers to hire sports writers as well. As all this is happening other reports start to quit. The deadlines have become very intense. The news business has evolved to the point where reporters are given the responsibility to cover the news, but at the same time they have to follow very rigorous procedures and guidelines that have stripped away much creativity, flexibility and even joy from teaching. Furthermore most of the reporters have to work ten hours a day and on their time off to just keep up with the amount of work given them, much of it just reports that have very little to do with actual reporting. Actual reporting is literally just about half their job. They also do so on salaries that practically assures they are little more than pay check to paycheck they live in fear of mundane occurrences’ like new tires or a child’s illness.

Oh did I mention as all this was happening at a time when reporters have started being blamed for the news, whatever goes wrong becomes their fault. Oh in case you missed it, reporters are actually teachers in this story.

At my school we cut three electives and a vacancy to hire more reading teachers, just like a bunch of schools did. After weeks we found two though neither lasted a week, we have hundreds of kids being taught by subs. At the same time three veteran teachers have decided they have had enough with the Duval County school system and have put in their notice. Finally nobody walks around happy any more. I would say my school is pretty typical by the way.