Andrew

Age: 54

Occupation: Education Consultant for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Never in my life have a met a man as passionate for his life and his work as Andrew Roberts. My first memories of him take place when I was eleven years old and my mother, sister, and I had just moved in next door. He had a basketball hoop and two kids that were willing to play with the new girls in town. Later memories consist of my unyielding respect and sometimes fear of him as my Algebra 2 instructor. Though math has always been a formidable subject in my brain that revolves around the English language and human connections rather than systems of equations, Andrew was the best math teacher I have ever had. Most recently, I think back to only a few weeks ago when I sat in front of one of the most intelligent people I have ever known and sat in silent shock when he said, “You inspire me.” It was his knowledge, humor, compassion, character, and faith in every one of his students that inspired every learner that stepped foot in his room.

I, along with many of my peers, were shocked to find that Andrew would be stepping down from his position at Niwot High School. Andrew was known to speak his mind and speak it loudly. We all had our suspicions as to the cause of his resignation. However, being the storyteller and inquiry-driven woman that I am, suspicions just weren’t good enough for me or my readers. I was lucky enough to sit down with Andrew and talk about his life as a teacher and where that path has taken him over the past several years: the good, bad, and the ugly.

“Do you want to tell me a little bit about your experience as a student and how you think it might have gotten you here?”

“I wasn’t enormously connected to the process of my education. When I have students who’ve graduated and I call friends, it always fascinates me because I can’t remember most of my teachers. There wasn’t a lot in my education pre-college that I think shaped me. I got into teaching completely by accident. My dad was a teacher and I think it’s natural to grow up forging your own path and saying, ‘I’m not going to do that because that’s what my dad did.’ But there was a time in my life where I wasn’t really doing anything post-college and after one career and I went and substitute taught. It was like getting hit in the head with a sack of rocks. I was like ‘oh god this is what I do!’”

“So somewhere along the line, you end up at Niwot High School teaching traditional and IB math classes. Would you like to paint that picture for me?”

“I always loved… teaching. I would still be doing it if it weren’t for… circumstances that lead me to make another choice. I love being around kids. I like being able to show people how to do things and see how they do things so that we can all contribute to the critical thinking and active inquiry. I think that IB had something to do with that. The philosophies support that kind of pedagogy. However, it was certainly not unique to IB. The families that it tended to attract were a little more open-minded in general, which I think is a good thing if you’re trying to be educated.”

“Springboarding off of that, elaborate for me on the demographics you saw between the two programs you worked with at the school, IB and traditional.”

“IB was way too wealthy and caucasian. There are way too many factors that play into that. We could be here all day. And you’ll see that everywhere in the American system. Our money tends to go to people who don’t need it and our resources tend to go the same way. The folks with their own resources can afford to be loud and they’re the ones that get served.”

“Are there and pros and cons of being a teacher that you could name right off the bat?”

“I mean for me, the pros were shutting my door and working through things with kids. I loved that. Still love that. The cons were the people who tried to... interrupt that in any way, shape or form.”

“So I guess that brings me to what everyone has been really wondering about. Could you explain to me the why and how you left Niwot?”

“Yeah! I asked for a transfer.”

“Would you mind telling me how that went down?”

“For sure. I totally will, but if you don’t mind my asking, why are you so curious?”

“Honestly? It’s not just me. I’m still close with a bunch of people who’ve had your classes and with teachers who knew you really well. Everyone has theories on what did and did not happen. I’ve heard so many different things and I know that none of them are your whole truth. And that’s what this project is about. I can’t construct this narrative without having your story. Even if it isn’t what some of us want to hear.”

“I mean, a select few know. I’ve really made an effort not to talk to former students about specifics. But the specifics are this: I was openly critical about things that were, in my opinion and the opinion of other people, not managed well in the administration, the district, and the state. You could do your own research and find multiple local newspaper editorials written by me that called people out by name. That’s not always appreciated by people who don’t like critical thinking as much as many of the rest of us do. Honestly, I just pissed some people off who didn’t like being told that they were wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I tried to be humane and talk to people. I would say, ‘Look this doesn’t work. You take these kids and try to force them to take a significant time out of their academic lives for testing, and you’re not communicating to parents about it hoping that they won’t notice. That’s wrong.’ I tried to be nice and it got me nowhere. So I stopped being nice and I started being honest.

“I think the key thing about Niwot is we had a new principal come in at the time and this all coincided with his first year. He was a little gun shy. I don’t blame him for that, but it made him refuse to publish testing schedules. I tried to communicate with him that I have AP and IB kids’ parents who are going to be wondering why their kids are missing two weeks of instruction for this bullshit that is part of a closed-loop system of profit for one company (Pearson).

“Let’s just step back for a second and think about this. Someone can’t tell you what the difference between a good and a bad score is, but they can tell you that you’ll be successful if you get 90% of your kids to take it. That’s what we were facing. That year, we had about 30% participation while the other high schools in the area had over 80%. And I was 100% correctly blamed for that. Because the principal wasn’t communicating this to parents… so I let them know.

“What was wrong in my opinion? It was that I should then become subject to a constant program of targeting, which is essentially what came out of that. It became an agenda. It went on for three years and I got worn down. I asked for a transfer in 2017. Then it just gets worse. You know how the seniors get to pick a teacher to speak at graduation? By the way they aren’t allowed to do that anymore, but I’ll get back to that. So they voted for me, for whatever reason. I guess they have no taste. The student body president was told that was not going to be allowed. Niwot administration took it all the way to the school board and that young woman amazed me. As a representative of her class, she fought. I heard that she came out of that office in tears more than once… It’s sad. Some people are just small, I guess.”

“So fast forward. The school year comes to an end. I heard you were going to teach middle school?”

“Well, what happened was I took a sort of unorthodox approach. I asked HR for an administrative transfer, which basically means the principle carries out the transfer and puts you directly at another school. It becomes the district’s job to transfer you. That was basically me saying, ‘I don’t care where you transfer me. Put me anywhere.’

“They placed me in a school whose principle in 2012 in a contract negotiation said in print, ‘any good teacher should be able to handle 35 students,’ because they wanted to up class sizes and it pissed a bunch of us off. I got informally elected as the guy to take it on. I could send you the URL for the editorial that I wrote that was calling him out by name. In short, I ripped him to shreds.

“That was the school where they placed me. I think there was a plan in place there. They made it pretty clear that it was just going to keep happening. So I stepped back and looked at my options and luckily, I had options. I worked 25 years in the system. And I’m going to be 55 in March, so I had the option to retire. And I also had the option to make a deal. I cannot disclose the terms of my deal, but I can tell you this much: if you’re enough of a pain in the ass and not everyone hates you, people will know that it’s going to be hard. So yeah we made a deal and things ended up being a lot brighter on the other side. I have to tell you though I really miss those kids. And my colleagues. I actually sent an email to a few of them today saying, ‘there’s a lot of things I don’t miss, but I miss you guys.’”

“Coming back to the administration’s role in this ordeal, how do you think our system is shaped to support those kinds of power structures?”

“When you have leadership at your highest level that designs the platforms to appeal to the uneducated, that promotes the idea of undereducation. When you denigrate educated people as ‘elite,’ that just blows my mind: the fact that that word has become negatively associated with ‘educated.’ Why are we doing that to people in this country? When you get someone running your educational structure who doesn’t know anything about it with any personal experience… The way money is funnelled into administration… It’s tragic at every level. Why we don’t give a handful of teachers a half schedule and let them use the other half to carry out administration is beyond me. It would be cheaper, more efficient, and fundamentally better. If you decide as an educator to actively get away from students and get away from the classroom, you’re a different person than the teacher. You at that point become an administrator. It’s at that point that you can start making money in education. So What kind of people is that going to attract? Poor administrators. In my 25 years of experience, I could count the effective administrators I’ve had on one hand.”

“That handful; could you tell me what made them good administrators?”

“They trusted their professionals to act as professionals. They didn’t openly work against them. When your work is aimed against the people you are supposed to support and help grow, you’re obviously a bad manager.”

“Last question, I promise. What is this new job that you have?”

“I work for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. People were surprised when I started working for a publisher because part of my initial fight against testing was focused against the Pearson organization. Now, I am still very anti-Pearson, but this company is very different. It keeps me on my toes in some ways that I like. I get to work with people and I get to teach. And at the end of each session, I get ot walk away. I do not miss grading tests for hours on end.

“The company produces curriculum across every content area. They have about 12 or 13 different active math titles, so they were looking for somebody to learn their curricula and teach it to the teachers. I teach and coach teachers. And it’s kind of amazing.”