1st Latina NEA President’s Concern: Testing, Teacher Pay and Undocumented Students
By Manuel De La Rosa, NewsTaco
The president of the nation’s largest teachers group visited the Rio Grande Valley in Texas as part of a two-day tour to discuss standardized testing, low teacher’s pay and undocumented children in the classroom.
National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia used her “Back to School Tour” to speak to Rio Grande Valley superintendents, administrators, teachers and students. As part of the tour, Garcia has visited several areas, including New York, Florida, Alaska and Texas.
Garcia is the first-ever Latina elected to hold office for the largest teacher’s organization in the United States and represents about three million teachers throughout the nation. She was elected President last July and began her term on September 1st.
“This is like a dream come true for me,” said Garcia who spoke to Newstaco at the Texas State Teacher’s Association office in Brownsville. “I wanted to get more involved with my association because schools needed so much and I wanted to reach for something because our kids needed something special.”
Garcia, whose mother is from Panama, came to the educational front line to see how teachers are dealing with the influx of immigrant children, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials estimated 66,000 undocumented children have crossed the border without the parents since last October.
“I want to ask the teachers, ‘how do you do it (and) what kind of advice can you give your colleagues that might be looking at this for the first time?,” said Garcia. “’What are you dealing with in that school building to have families and children feel they are loved in school. What are you doing to have that school community accept these transient populations that go in and out so often?’”
She also went into attack mode, criticizing the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS test.
“The high stakes standardized testing has come to corrupt in what it means to teach and what it means to learn,” Garcia told us. “What is job one for NEA is to unite educators and families against the toxic testing. Enough is enough.”
Garcia went on to explain how teachers are getting bad labels due to this standardized testing when students don’t do well on the test. “It’s poisoning the learning atmosphere in schools,” she said.
She is pushing for a better way to assess students in the classroom.
“We want the arts, foreign language, the debate team, science and technology,” Garcia said. “We want all those things that were never going to fit on the multiple choice test. We have to look at the needs of the whole child.”
Garcia, who started as a teacher’s aide and worked her way up to a teacher, explained the importance of having Latinos in the classroom teaching classes. In Texas, state statistics show 25 percent of the teachers are Latino, while student population is double that.
“You have to see somebody who looks like you and acts like you,” said Garcia. “We believe it makes a huge difference to have the faculty on the campus to reflect the communities where those children live, especially in those Latino communities, because there is often a language issue.”
The other issue is teacher’s pay in Texas that is forcing many to leave the industry.
“If you become a teacher, I will be making about $30 or $35,000 my first year, ouch,” Garcia said. “One of the things we would like to approach state legislatures and the Department of Education who do have funding for scholarships and (ask) why not a scholarship for that hometown community for the best and brightest high school students, who could be science teachers and English language teachers and special ed teachers.”
Garcia knows it’s a tall order to get Texas leaders to change on these educational issues, but she plans to fight to the end, trying to do all she can to improve the learning environment for teachers and students in the classroom.
[Photo by NEA Public Relations/Flickr]
