teachers earned more than $276 million from hosting on Airbnb<\/a> in 2021, the company announced in August.<\/p>\n\u201cIt’s ridiculous. It’s shameful,\u201d Myart-Cruz said of teachers having to take on additional work to raise their wages. \u201cAnd not only that \u2014 folks have to grade papers. When do folks have that opportunity?\u201d<\/p>\n
Another source of stress for teachers is the series of standardized tests they\u2019re required to give each year. These tests limit the autonomy of teachers and overwhelm students, who take at least 100 standardized assessments by the time they reach sixth grade, the UTLA report states. UTLA wants the district to eliminate all standardized assessments that have not been government-mandated. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou need to assess kids to see how well they’re doing,\u201d Noguera said. \u201cBut\u2026I think what’s happened in many districts is they put too much emphasis on assessment and not enough emphasis on instruction. How do you make sure that kids are getting high quality instruction and the supports they need? So the teachers are probably right to push back on the amount of assessment that the district requires \u2014 not the state.\u201d <\/p>\n
Colla estimates that he loses two weeks of instructional time to testing each school year. He said the process has become normalized for his students. As an experienced educator, however, he takes issue with the amount of standardized tests he has to administer. <\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially when you look at what it is precisely that the [test] is measuring, all these standardized tests \u2026 are measuring things which may or may not have any real bearing on how well the students are doing,\u201d Colla said. <\/p>\n
During a year when teachers in urban and suburban districts alike have engaged in walkouts, Myart-Cruz isn\u2019t ruling out a labor action but called talk of a strike \u201cpremature.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut let’s be clear that we stand ready to have the conversations with our members about respect,\u201d she said. \u201cOur educators did a yeoman’s job in this pandemic, flipping their entire lives, their entire curriculum to a platform they didn’t even know themselves. First they got applauded for doing a yeoman\u2019s job and then they got lambasted for not coming back sooner. Our educators did that, held it together, and they should be paid what they’re worth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Colla said that teaching online during the pandemic was his most difficult period as an educator. His struggles haven\u2019t ended now that school is back in person for the second consecutive school year. Students still have learning deficits, and he can\u2019t access all of the digital learning tools he needs due to a recent ransomware attack on the district. The recent political attacks on teachers nationwide haven\u2019t helped his mental health either, particularly because he identifies as queer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn’t affect me directly,\u201d he said of laws such as Florida\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Say Gay.\u201d \u201cBut it affects me indirectly because it’s a continuing move in this country to denigrate educators, to make teachers the bad guy, the fall guy, the straw man. It’s a pseudo-intellectual movement where one person’s completely uneducated opinion is considered just as valid as another highly educated individual’s position, and that’s simply not true. The whole move towards \u2018Don’t Say Gay\u2019 and banning books \u2014 we know what kind of governments ban books. The governments that ban books are fascist.\u201d<\/p>\n
In some parts of the country, restrictions on what educators can say in class or teach have prompted them to leave the education profession entirely.<\/p>\n
\u201cAcross the country, teachers are feeling stressed out from the lingering effects of the pandemic just like a lot of kids<\/a>, so we have seen mental health challenges amongst teachers, rising depression, anxiety, and the school shootings<\/a> have made it worse,\u201d Noguera said. \u201cThen you have the politics of the moment \u2026 All of that is adding to the pressures on teachers and making many question whether or not they want to continue teaching.\u201d<\/p>\nAs conservative lawmakers limit what students can read and educators can teach, UTLA is pushing for its progressive policies to become realities in LAUSD. Educators should be able to afford housing where they teach, Myart-Cruz said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have 86 pages worth of proposals, and all of them are righteous,\u201d she said. \u201cBut we also need people to have some gumption to do the necessary things to make sure that our kids have holistic learning environments.\u201d<\/p>\n
*Nadra Nittle is married to an LAUSD teacher and UTLA member.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Latest - Truthout<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The local teachers union lists unaffordable housing, large class sizes and over-testing as contributing stressors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[428,247,4711,4851,9332],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817564"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":817565,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817564\/revisions\/817565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}