By Clayton Trosclair/WEST OAKLAND
The students in Ms. Scott’s fourth grade class at Prescott Elementary have yet to see her this year.
Every morning for two months now, they’ve shown up to their West Oakland campus and wondered which substitute teacher will take her place that day. A rotating cast of temporary teachers has been standing in for Ms. Scott while she’s away on extended medical leave, and since school began on Aug. 25, at least four substitutes have been assigned to her class.
Last year, the Oakland Unified School district rotated a roster of teachers through two classes at Prescott Elementary – a third-grade class and a fifth-grade class – for the entire year.
“They had subs all year long,” said Enomwoyi Booker, the school’s principal, while pointing out that some of those third-grade students are without a permanent teacher again this year in fourth grade. “So we’re talking about going on two years now, which is not good.”
The problem starts when teachers take extended leave from the classroom, but it is exacerbated by the state’s credentialing process, which allows substitutes to spend no more than thirty days in the same class unless they hold full teaching credentials. The vast majority do not. While this ensures that substitutes don’t become permanent stand-ins for fully qualified teachers, it also creates what Booker called a “revolving door” of substitutes on her campus.
Enomwoyi Booker, principal of Prescott Elementary School
She would like to keep the current substitute in place until Ms. Scott can return to work, but bound by California rules, she has to keep eye an on the calendar and hope the next substitute – the fifth one – works out as well.
It’s unclear how many Oakland children are being taught by substitutes on a regular basis. The district currently has about 2,700 teachers, and 26 of them have taken leave so far this year. Officials say up to 16 of these classes have been filled by substitutes.
State and federal laws permit teachers to take leave for several reasons, including sickness, the birth or adoption of a child, the illness of an immediate family member or when a family member is deployed with the military. These teachers are still under contract and cannot be replaced by new hires.
Louvenia Funes is the mother of twelve children, all of whom have attended class at Prescott Elementary. She wrote a letter in September to the principal and the board of education asking that her daughter be transferred out of Ms. Scott’s class.
“I want my child out of that classroom,” she said outside the school gate one afternoon, pulling the hand-written letter from an envelope in her purse. “Can you imagine having four parents in a month? Imagine. Kids get confused with just having one parent or two parents. Can you imagine having four, telling them four different things? It’s crazy.”
In Ms. Scott’s class and others throughout the district, students are left without the steady guidance of a permanent teacher. Parents and principals said this gives students the impression they can run amok.
“A lot of it starts out with behavior,” Booker said. “Without having a consistent person in there, it’s really hard to pull them in.”
Kate Perry, a school psychologist and an instructor at UC Berkeley’s School of Education, said it is integral for elementary students to have a reliable teacher in the room.
“I think one of the things that child development research has told us is that children thrive on consistency, especially in a field like teaching. The consistency of a teacher and the supportive presence of a teacher provides the foundation of all learning,” she said.
Anecdotal evidence from teachers and principals confirms that finding. Funes said her daughter has shown less interest in school this year because of all the chaos in her class.
“The classroom is out of control,” she said. “How’s a child going to learn when you have all these other kids not behaving? They should take the kids who don’t want to learn anything, call their parents and have them pick up these kids. It’s not fair to my child who wants to learn,” she said.
Prescott Elementary School
Booker said the two classes taught by substitutes last year did have more behavior problems, and their grades seemed to lag behind their peers. “We do know that there wasn’t a lot of consistent instruction happening,” she said.
Instructors usually have no background information on the students, leading to what psychologist Perry referred to as “a trial-by-fire situation.” As a result, substitutes have a hard time gauging how well students are performing and don’t know which materials need reinforcement. Parents said the problem is reflected in the homework assignments they see night after night.
“The (substitute) teachers give them assignments but don’t really explain how to do them,” Sandra Vezquez said in Spanish. A former teacher in Mexico, she now finds herself teaching science and math lessons to her fourth-grade son because he isn’t getting the information at school. She said he has been sad lately because he realizes he is not keeping pace with other kids his age.
Few studies have been conducted on students taught by substitutes, but one published last summer by researchers at Harvard University found a three-percent decline in student math scores for every ten days of teacher absences. That study focused only on fourth-grade teachers who were absent occasionally, not those who were out of the class for months on end.
Those who spend time with children said it doesn’t take much scientific research to see the differences between students who study with the same teacher every day and those who do not.
“Naturally these students are behind,” said Sarah Stewart, Prescott’s community liaison. “Even though they have their lesson plans, each sub is going to teach it differently. Sometimes they don’t even use it. So what do the students get? It’s play time,” she said.
Experts said children in these classes are at risk because every wasted day puts them farther behind in their academic career. When their class eventually gets a permanent teacher, they will have to catch up on months of missed skills.
Funes, the parent of a child in Ms. Scott’s class, called the ordeal a “damaging process” for her daughter.
“If a child can’t come home and tell you they learned one thing from class, there’s a problem,” she said. “That’s just a whole waste of the day.”