President’s Column:
Reflections on more than a decade with MDCSPA
by Gary Clites
Originally published in the Maryland-DC Scholastic Press Association's newsletter, The Adviser
I was elected president of the Maryland Scholastic Press Association (we didn’t incorporate D.C. untill later) in the Spring of 1996. As I complete 11 years in the role, I felt it appropriate to pause and look at the things I’ve learned as president and from over 20 years teaching scholastic journalism.
1. Journalism teachers are the luckiest people in the world. Sure, we’re overworked, underpaid and definitely underappreciated, but we get to work with the sharpest, brightest and most engaged students in our schools. Communications classes attract the highest achieving students available. Students who want to write, photograph, edit, and communicate are thin on the ground in most high schools, and we get to spend our days helping them do the things they love.
Beyond that, our courses allow students to create a real product. The outcomes of our process are newspapers, yearbooks, magazines and TV and radio broadcasts. While most teachers struggle to teach students for future achievements, we get to actually see the results of our pupils’ work and to display it to the school and community. Sure, we hear more criticisms than compliments, but we get to see the real sense of achievement in our students’ eyes when their product hits the school. That’s a satisfaction few teachers get to experience.
2. Scholastic journalism can be a lonely business. Your high school may have a dozen English teachers, a dozen math teacher, etc. But many have only one journalism teacher. It’s a challenging job with demands no other teacher ever has to face. We deal with budgets, printing contracts, advertisers, fundraisers, deadlines, and often prior review and censorship, all things that add stress, and no doubt contribute to the high teacher turnover in our profession. All teaching is stressful, but working in this kind of isolation compounds that stress and can make the journalism teacher’s life harder than it needs to be.
3. You’re not paranoid if they’re actually out to get you. I’ve told this story before, but in the first few years of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Maryland’s Bridge to Excellence, I was at an event with an employee of the State Department of Education. He asked me what I taught, and when I told him journalism, newspaper and broadcasting, he grinned and said, “Oh, you teach the classes we’re trying to kill.”
The national NCLB law, married to Bridge, have put heavy pressure on school systems to concentrate on a back-to-basics approach to education wherein a handful of tested courses receive all the resources to the detriment of all other courses. Journalism is a high-level course that tends to attract high-achieving students. Unfortunately, the requirements of NCLB and Bridge provide no incentive for schools to focus on those kids. In my own county, this has expressed itself in policies that encourage high school students to take the absolute bare minimum of classes, and to graduate early or attend school only a period or two their senior year. Consequently, fewer and fewer students are taking anything beyond the state and county mandated minimums, starving programs like journalism, theatre and art, and denying students the enrichment and growth they would achieve in these courses.
Beyond this, about eight years ago, MDCSPA led the effort to accredit journalism production classes as Technology Education graduation credits in Maryland. We won, and for awhile, that credit has rewarded students who use our highly technological classes to learn about real world tech applications. Of late, the state has been working to exclude journalism classes as tech. ed. credits, further draining us of resources and student.
4. Censorship hurts kids. It was my misfortune to begin teaching and advising in 1988, the year the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. It is clear that the Court intended to create an exception to the First Amendment only for the most extreme cases. In practice, the ruling created a loophole principals have been able to drive school buses through. The effect has been to teach students that rights are flexible at best. That may explain why 35% of students agreed that the First Amendment “goes too far” in the Knight Center’s “Future of the First Amendment” study. The acceptability of censorship is a poor lesson to teach the future citizens of our republic.
5. Joining with others can make all the difference. Getting involved in organizations like MDCSPA on the state level, as well as with national scholastic journalism entities like CSPA and JEA, allows teachers to fight the isolation inherent in the job and to deal with the issues we face together as a group. One teacher in one classroom can feel powerless. Getting involved can make you a more powerful educator in support of your students.
How can you step up your level of involvement? Attend state and national conventions. Sign your students up for Summer Workshops. Volunteer to get involved with MDCSPA’s Board of Directors either as a member or helping with projects (updating our critiques is a major priority with which we need help). Together, we can make our profession stronger and our students’ lives better.
© Gary Clites, 2008
