This diary is a view of the interaction of politics and teaching in a large urban school district in Southern California, from the point of view of a teacher of Spanish to native, or heritage, speakers of Spanish, and how the hopes of teachers for positive change can only come if teachers are protected by tenure and by a teacher's union.
Teachers are always on the front line of politics, in part because teaching is governed by a myriad of federal, state, and county educational laws. Local Boards of Education also determine what is allowable and what is not. The interaction between teachers and students of all walks of life, all races, religions, etc. can also become political, as can the sometimes difficult interactions between teachers and parents regarding what is being taught, how it is being taught and how student discipline is handled.
Politics is also part of teachers' activities within our schools, our unions and in the larger realm of the media where teachers are continually wrongly represented as a group of employees who are overly favored in their jobs, their vacations and in the expectations of them by their administrators. We are constantly harangued about all the bad teachers and about how it is impossible to fire them because of our unions' protection.
And then there are the teachers, like myself, who are charged with improving the Spanish skills of kids who already know some Spanish because they were either born in a Spanish-speaking country or were raised in the US by Spanish-speaking parents who did not teach their children how to read or write Spanish because of lack of interest or because their parents did not know how to read and write Spanish. Politics 100% when the real reason we do this, based on sound research, is to improve kids' chances of learning English because we know that kids who do not know their own language very well will learn a second language, such as English, only as well as their first language.
This diary is meant to help anyone who wishes to read it, to find out about the problems teachers encounter and how the politics involved in education ends up killing hope and thus makes changing and improving schools much more difficult.