Students first; teachers, hmm, never mind!

It was such a delight to open the Wednesday edition of the paper and discover the insert that Saipan Tribune prepared for the CNMI PSS’ Education Day celebration. Body aches kept me home Wednesday while my colleagues celebrated our PSS corporate life at Hopwood.

Saipan Tribune’s insert heading of “Students First” was right on target. The stately photo of Andrew Golden shaking hands with George W. Bush at the White House, and his narrative of the highlights of his year, must have run tremors of anticipation in the heart of this year’s TOY awardee.

Still, though physically fatigued from the previous day’s half-day in the sun during SVES’ field day, it felt good reading through the well-designed PR piece. As I am prone to do when perusing a paper or a book, after getting past the cover and the foreword, I flip to the back, usually the last chapter, or, the epilogue. There came the reminder to all through the late William Sablan Reyes’s life mission for education: PPS’ mandate—nothing but the BEST for CNMI students!

Leafing backwards through the narratives about the various schools’ awardees of teachers, teacher aides, and support staff, I got the sense that there is in place a network of dedicated workers capable and willing to pursue WSR’s vision and mission. Someone had gotten the story right. Ashley and Donna Mae at Southern High wrote so. With the student-crafted slogan ringing in my ear, “Join the Band of Education and March to Success,” a bit corny but pointedly true, I was ready to pass the day without wrestling down to the ground my curmudgeon’s skeptical propensity.

Then I finally got to the inside the front cover pages. Page 3 had the Commissioner’s message and pictures of the Leadership Team. Heartening image of synergy amongst diverse individuals in the team. The fact that three out of the eight are in “acting” capacities (a category of some of the administrators at the local school level as well) led to the comic query: if they are only acting, does that mean they are not for real?

After the chuckle, the BoE page came to view, echoing words of gratitude for the culture of excellence in the education field. I ignored the appearance of pecking order with Lucia’s photo slightly larger than the rest, dismissing it as an editorial slip, or a misguided assumption that members of the Board wanted it that way. What did stand out was what was glaringly absent.

In a day that extolled the virtues of teachers, teachers aides and support staff in providing their BEST for the students, there was no mention of a PSS teacher’s presence in the Board at all. I would have settled for a blank space with the (dis)claimer that the Governor has yet to appoint a teachers’ rep, never mind that ACT has been through many hoops just to find out what the Governor required to appoint a Teachers’ Representative to the BoE! Even a one-liner that acknowledged the need for a TR would have sufficed!

Confined to quarters, one gets to catch up with e-mail and reading. Some colleagues have been studying the insights of Andrew Bacevich’s book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, which proved to be prescient and remarkably relevant to the recent Obama ascendancy and Wall Street gyrations. On the implications of change to the workplace and understanding the motivation of employees, one of my colleagues called attention to the findings of a 2002 book titled, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices. The work identifies four universal drives: to acquire (obtain scarce goods, including intangibles such as social status); to bond (form connections with individuals and groups); to comprehend (satisfy our curiosity and master the world around us); and to defend (protect against external threats and promote justice).

History’s influential thinkers about human behavior, e.g., Abraham Maslow who is known for his hierarchy of human needs, struggled to understand why people do the things they do. But the 2002 study has the advantage of knowledge gleaned from neuroscience, biology and evolutionary psychology. The four identified basic emotional needs, or drives, are considered humankind’s evolutionary heritage.

In the July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review, the identified drives are used to pinpoint current organizational levers in 300 Fortune 500 companies that meet workers’ deep needs. Let us see how their findings compare with PSS’ treatment of teachers. The italicized sentences are my comments re PSS.

Reward systems that truly value good performance fulfill the drive to acquire. PSS rewarded Praxis qualifiers save those who have already arrived at the salary cap, and severely penalized non-qualifiers even if their effectivity had already been proven. The drive to bond is best met by a culture that promotes collaboration and openness. PSS promotes even among its students a culture of elevated status and bragging rights in spite of its rhetoric on cooperative learning communities. Jobs that are designed to be meaningful and challenging meet the need to comprehend. No rationale is proffered to why policy decisions are made, nor why curriculum operational guidelines are followed. In fact, the hierarchical policy of need-to-know basis is the operating mode. PSS’ instincts are honed to habits of compliance. Not a word of dialogue transpires between central office mandates and teachers’ compliance. Processes for performance management and resource allocation that are fair, trustworthy, and transparent address the drive to defend. To measure PSS’ actuations, e.g., the imposition of Praxis, with standards such as fairness, trustworthiness, and transparency, is to invite Marianas Trench-deep despair.

No mention of a TR on the BoE page really perked me out of bed. This week, a new colleague declared objectively and matter-of-factly that s/he felt used and treated like an economic peon, burdened with the requirements and responsibilities of full-time teaching, but remunerated as a substitute teacher. I sniggered since I just discovered a thrown used condom at the back of my pickup when I cleaned it out an hour before. I did not dare, however, to make the analogy.

I asked one of BoE’s luminaries earlier why we have this practice of treating non-Praxis-compliant teachers as substitute teachers, and his candor was admirable. It is due solely to labor cost consideration. Borne out of research, ACT recently recommended to BoE a revisit of its previous Praxis decision. I mused: What would it take ACT to occasion a paradigm shift that would awaken its own members to demand their rights to be treated as the great purveyors of the culture of excellence, as the insert claims, rather than as dispensable and disposable labor cost items in the budgetary ledger?

It was then that one of those rare moments of lucidity occasioned the longed sought EUREKA. We’ve long known that we, the teachers, have met the enemy, and it is us. With the Obama ascendancy, we have also been shown that we have within our power to meet our own requirements. We have met our savior. It is no one but us! Do teachers have enough honor and integrity to claim their rightful role within the system?

It is Monday morning. My 6th grade class begins with the antiphon: This is the day we have. We can live this day, or throw it away. This is the day we have. Might the PSS teachers care that they were not even represented in the BoE page on Education Day? And, will teachers buzz this up a bit, and talk among themselves what they can do about it? Hmmmm, well, my body aches are gone; I am no longer feverish, and I am well and sane again. So? So, never mind!