Photo/courtesy of The Monterey County Herald (12/15/02)

Fighting the System:
An Interview with David Muñoz

by

Yvonne Ballesteros

"We made flyers and got 300 kids to miss school that day and protest at the school all day long. The students that decided not to ditch school were advised to answer incorrectly and mark B-A-D all the way down the answer sheet. The school was not happy about that at all."

Up until last November, David Muñoz taught English and ESL (English as a Second Language) at Alisal High School in Salinas, California, a school populated largely by Latino and migrant students. Last November Mr. Muñoz resigned from his position after clashing with the administration on issues related to standardized testing. When he told his students, they assisted him in distributing a farewell letter and called the media. Soon thereafter Muñoz organized a student walk out on a testing day that involved 300 students. In December the Salinas Union High School District Board of Education sent a letter to Muñoz threatening legal action if he should continue to “incite students to commit truancy and encourage them to purposely fail academic tests.”

David Muñoz was born and raised in Salinas, California and graduated from Alisal High School in East Salinas in 1997. He attended Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and graduated with a double major in Government and English. In his resignation letter to Alisal High School, Muñoz states, “This is a prison more than a school, with dogs, with police entering classrooms, searching lockers, with administrators walking into classes treating the students like animals in a zoo. The administration feeds the students nothing but junk food all day long . . . My classroom is dirty, the bell doesn’t ring on time for days at a time . . . This is not education.”

TCLA: Why did you begin to think about resigning after being back at Alisal High School?

DM: When I first started teaching, I loved it. I was teaching summer school, which was five hours everyday for five weeks. It seemed like it would be pretty intensive and hard. However, it was actually a lot of fun because I got to work closely with the students.

By the beginning of my second year teaching, there were a lot of changes that started happening. Most of them revolved around the emphasis on standardized testing. The administration began pushing everybody to become aligned and teach the test. They use that all of the time—“teach to the test,” which is a very complicated thing. They had all of the standards and wanted all of the teachers to teach the same ones. At the start of the school year, they got a huge grant—10 million dollars.

Photo/courtesy of The Californian (11/9/02)

What they decided to do with most of the money was to spend it on teacher collaboration periods. We had to meet everyday for an hour and a half. They threw us in this room without any specific guidelines about what we were supposed to work towards. What ended up happening was that we spent a lot of time complaining and talking about all of the problems. Nothing got done and instead it escalated into an intense situation. That one major problem led to my resignation. Our collaborations were thrown together without any direction. Half of us did not agree with the new policies and there was the other half that did what the administration told them. That led to an internal struggle. Then the principal stepped in and it was just a huge mess, as well as a huge waste of money and time.

Another concern that arose was that they increased the amount of walk-throughs. The year before, I remember getting a walk-through once in a great while. This year, there was one day that I had three different administrators walk into my classroom within a five-minute period. We were trying to read—I teach English so we’re trying to read a book. I had a hard enough time getting my kids to concentrate on what we were reading, and having all of these administrators constantly walking through my classroom made it difficult. I kept seeing stuff like that going on and I tried to speak up about it. However, I started to look like this rebel rouser, complainer, etc. They started looking down on me.

"A couple of days earlier, the principal had also suggested that we teach short stories instead of novels to make teaching the standards easier. It was getting to be too much."

TCLA: Can you talk more about testing at your school?

DM: Yes, the tests our district mandates, aside from the state tests, are the benchmark tests and, one of the biggest issues that I ran into. This is something that the school district does not have to do. It is not coming from the state. The first year, I do not know who wrote the test, but I remember the test was filled with errors. The English teachers all got together and took the test. We would debate on what the right answers were for some of the questions. It was ridiculous. There were grammatical errors inside of the text and the questions were poorly written. There is no way that that can help a teacher. The tests were supposed to help us know where our students were in terms of their learning but made teaching more confusing instead. They started using the benchmark test scores as a way to judge our individual performance. We complained and nothing really happened. During the second year, they switched the people who wrote the test. They had some outside company do it. However, there were still grammatical errors. We then decided to meet with the head of the district in charge of testing and told him about all of the problems with the test. He sat there, put a little dot next to the ones we were talking about, and promised he would make changes. However, those tests were printed up and given to everybody in the school district without any corrections. 8,000 kids took the test. The test is given 8 times during year. It is a huge waste of money and takes up 50 minutes of class time.

TCLA: What led up to you turning in your resignation letter?

DM: I contemplated resigning for a long time. Everyone kept telling me that as long as I had those students for an hour and a half, they were my kids. That was supposed to be my time, but it really wasn’t. I had kids banging on the walls as they walked through the hallways and the bells did not ring on time. I could not teach.

What pushed me over the edge was one day we were talking about the benchmark tests when the principal walked in. She gave us the results of the tests and told us what particular standards we needed to work on for the next test. I tried to tell her that it was difficult to see what standards to work on because there were only three questions on the test that represented each standard. In addition, I also commented on the fact that one or two of the questions reflecting a standard may have had errors. She replied that it didn’t matter because the head of testing in the district had said that there was a correlation between those schools that did well on the benchmark tests and performed well on the SAT 9 tests, which then carried over to the API scores. She did not agree with my skepticism and made sure that I was aware of it. A couple of days earlier, the principal had also suggested that we teach short stories instead of novels to make teaching the standards easier. It was getting to be too much.

"Parents need to visit their schools more frequently and talk to their kids’ teachers. They should visit the school when their kids are actually having class and not when it is after-school. Parents need to become involved in what is happening with their kids. "

When I had decided to resign, I talked to the students in my first class and told them that it was the last day that I was going to be their teacher. They were really upset and some of them even cried. It was emotional. I sat down at my computer and wrote a letter addressed to Alisal High School. I highlighted the fact that their policies were not educating the students and that they treated the students like prisoners. I gave the letter to one of the students and asked him to make copies of it. 700 copies were distributed immediately. Within minutes, there were groups and groups of students coming into my classroom asking me what was going on. I explained my situation to all of them. More and more people kept coming and the hallway became crowded. All of the students wanted to do something about it, so they started calling the media—the newspapers and the news. Someone walked in and announced that they weren’t going to let the media into the school. When I heard that, I took matters into my own hands. I grabbed the American flag, which the students pledged their allegiance to everyday, and asked the students to follow me. We all walked out of our school. There were about 150 students. In front of our school there is a big chain link fence and we waited there for the news to come. It was raining, but we were eager to inform the public of what had happened.

At that moment, the school treated me like I was some kind of criminal. They changed the locks on my classroom door when I had all of my stuff in there. From that moment on, they did not want me on campus anymore. They have escorted me off campus every time that I have tried to go back. I had to arrange a special time to get all of my things, and there was no real effort to fix things or discuss the situation.

After that, I felt like I was the only person that was able to do something. Knowing that testing was a major issue, I decided to hold a protest against the benchmark test. Everybody except the school supported me. This happened a couple of weeks after I had resigned. All of these parents started coming out to support me. They wanted to see a positive change as well, so we organized the community. We made flyers and got 300 kids to miss school that day and protest at the school all day long. The students that decided not to ditch school were advised to answer incorrectly and mark B-A-D all the way down the answer sheet. The school was not happy about that at all. Soon after that, I got a letter from the school district saying that they were going to seek criminal prosecution against me if I continued to do leafleting or encouraged students to commit truancy.

"The only way I got to go to college was because I did a lot of free reading on my own... You have to spend more time outside of school because the school is not really doing its job."

TCLA: Are you planning to go back into teaching?

DM: Well, I never got into teaching as a career. It was the beginning of a lot of different things. I never wanted to teach anywhere else. I wanted to teach the students in my community because if it were any different, I would feel like a traitor. The way that it stands right now, I can’t go back to teach at Alisal.

TCLA: What do you feel needs to be done?

DM: To be honest, I think that very little can be done immediately. The school district does not want to spend money to hire qualified teachers or reduce classroom sizes. Until we do that, we are always going to have all of these problems. A lot of students have asked me what they should do because they are not getting a good education. I tell them that they have to educate themselves because when I went to that school, I felt like I was not learning enough.

TCLA: What advice would you give students and/or parents that are in similar situations in other high schools?

DM: Parents need to visit their schools more frequently and talk to their kids’ teachers. They should visit the school when their kids are actually having class and not when it is after-school. Parents need to become involved in what is happening with their kids. With students, they have no choice but to educate themselves as well. The only way I got to go to college was because I did a lot of free reading on my own. If I had never done that, I don’t know what would have happened. Even with that, I didn’t feel prepared to go to college.

Yvonne Ballesteros leads TCLA's outreach efforts to high school students across Los Angeles.

^tcla

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