An Austrian Physics Teacher in New York City

Hannes Richter spoke with Thomas Strasser about his 20-year teaching career in the Big Apple

Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School is considered among the most prestigious in the country, seen here from southern Battery Park City.
© JIM HENDERSON (CC0)

Mr. Strasser, let’s start with how you came to New York City and what brought you here.

It took two things combined to get me here: the first was a teaching program recruiting teachers for New York City schools. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were too many teachers in Austria, particularly in some subject areas, while there was always a lack of teachers in New York City. So the idea was to send Austrian teachers to work in New York and have that experience, while taking them out of the Austrian job market for a bit. After their return, those teachers had also earned the right to teach English as a foreign language in Austrian schools, so this was mutually beneficial. A friend of mine had already participated in this program, that’s how I knew about it. At that time, the recruiting for all of Central Europe was done in Vienna. The reason for that was a personal interest from an official at City College of New York, who had a personal connection to Vienna, loved Austria, and started the program. So bureaucrats from New York City would come to Vienna, where they selected the program participants. The second, corresponding reason was that I met an American around that time, who had moved to Vienna for a year. She was then accepted into a Ph.D. program at Princeton University and therefore had to move back stateside, so we had to decide about the best way for me to move with her. Since New York City is close enough to Princeton it seemed like a good choice to apply for the teachers’ program. I had my interview in Vienna and you were told on the spot if you were selected; I could sign the paperwork right there. My flight and accommodation for the first week were provided by the organization, as were several workshops, like on how to get a social security number and the like. So that’s how I ended up in New York as a teacher in 2003. New York City at that time literally recruited thousands of teachers internationally; we had a welcome ceremony in Madison Square Garden, there were thousands of teachers, many Jamaicans and Filipinos, for example, because the English language was easier for them, and only a handful of Austrians – we were a minority.

Did New York really have such a massive teacher shortage?

Oh yes, because the turnover here is crazy. The situation is unlike in Austria, where you make a whole career out of it. In New York, maybe teachers stay only for a couple of years. This is why it made sense for them to recruit teachers from all over the world, even if they stayed only for a few years, because that is the norm here anyway. Most teachers never make it past the fifth year. So they really had to replace thousands of teachers every year.

So is that program still active today?

No, I don’t think so. I believe it stopped around 2008, when teachers here stayed on longer because of the financial crisis. The Austrian part of the program then switched to Philadelphia for one or two years. But the organization in Austria still exists, and today they work on the opposite direction – they bring American teachers to Austria now.

Where in New York did you first teach and how was that experience for you?

First of all, it was a complete culture shock. It was such a different world. Of course, you have to get used to a new country, the big city, and so on. But besides that, the school system and the bureaucracy are completely different. It was such a shock for us that some colleagues had already left again before the school year even started. I specifically remember one teacher, who was in my group: we had to attend workshops by the Department of Education to show us how the system works; she was so dissatisfied that she called her principal back home and asked if her position had been filled already. Since it was still open, she said she would be back and left New York before the first day of school. She just could not handle the way things were run. The vastly different way of doing things compared to Austria was a big shock for us – particularly the hierarchy in the schools. It was very authoritarian, very top-down, contrary to what we were used to from Austrian schools. We were used to just ask people on a one to one basis, and in New York they were not used to that at all. It was more than my colleague was prepared to handle, but I continued in my school.

I was hired as a physics teacher, and during the first days of school, before the students arrived, I received my teaching schedule, and it was just showing all “earth science” classes. So I went to my assistant principal and asked what exactly earth science was, I had never heard of that subject before. And she explained to me that it includes a mix of meteorology, geology, astronomy and other, related subjects. I also heard from my colleagues that it is the easiest science class. So, in terms of hierarchy of science classes, you have physics on top, which is considered to be the hardest class, followed by chemistry, biology, and earth science is considered to be the easiest. Every student has to take earth science to fulfill their science requirement, and only the better students take chemistry and physics. I insisted that regardless of what label the class has, I will teach physics, because I was hired as a physics teacher. My good fortune was that I had the paperwork to back it up, signed by the district superintendent, that listed my teaching license specifically as “physics,” not just as “science,” as was the case with a lot of my colleagues. At the same time, a colleague of mine had all physics classes and he was looking to change his schedule, so the assistant principle switched our classes and I ended up teaching physics only. That was important. In retrospect, I would not be here anymore if that switch had not happened. Because teaching physics means you get the best students. This was a big school, so out of the 5,000 students there, no more than maybe 300 took physics, so you get the top percentage of students in your class. That made a big difference, that’s why I liked it there so much, and this is why I stayed on.

With all the obstacles you face in the beginning, the new system, the language, etc., at least I knew my subject. Many of my colleagues struggled because they assigned chemistry classes to biologists, and so on. As a result, a lot of people left; by Christmas a handful was already gone. And I can’t blame them, but this is how the system works here - the youngest, most inexperienced teachers get the hardest to teach classes. Another colleague of mine, also from Austria, taught sports and Spanish. The school was in the Bronx, which is predominantly Spanish-speaking. So this Austrian guy, who spoke Spanish as a second language, ended up teaching a class of native speakers in the Bronx. He was just laughing about it, he said that his Spanish was way worse than his students’.

You ended up staying a fair number of years at that school.

Yes, I stayed there for eight years. It was such a big school back then and they had an honors program for more motivated kids, who were academically better. It was a strong program and physics was almost exclusively for students of that honors program, so that meant that I could work with the academically best prepared students, and that was really fulfilling. Those were very smart kids, who saw education as a way out of their current circumstances. And once they realized that they can actually learn something, they soaked it up like a sponge. After my first year of teaching, the students asked for an advanced placement physics class. In the end we were the only public school in the Bronx that offered not one, but two advanced placement physics classes (with the exception of the specialized Bronx High School for Science).

It was fantastic to work there, because you were able to start and create something, and the kids were really working hard. This was new for me; if you were a very demanding teacher in Austria you had a reputation as the bad guy among students, but here it really was the opposite. The kids respected high demand, it was fantastic.

But today you no longer teach there – what made you leave this school?

In two words: school reform. The mayor then ran on an education platform with the promise of improving it, and his big thing was that small schools are better. So what they did was breaking up big schools into smaller ones. To this day there exist big school buildings in New York City that used to be one school, and now there are four small schools within that building. So instead of one principal there are four principals, the bureaucracy has gotten much worse compared to before. The mayor wanted to prove that small schools are indeed better, and one way to do that is sending the better students to the smaller schools, and leaving academically weaker students at the larger schools. And the largest school in the Bronx was my school.

And you could witness the deterioration over the years; we were increasingly flooded with so-called over the counter – students, those are the students completely new to the system. So if an immigrant arrived yesterday, they go to the neighborhood school and ask where to sign up. Many of these kids did not speak the language or were not educated in their home countries, and a big number of them came from war-torn countries. All of those students were collected in the big schools, and then the data could show that the big schools really are doing worse and that small schools are better. This started around 2007-2008 and it got worse from year to year. And all the problems that came with it made regular school increasingly impossible. There has always been a certain amount of violence, but it started to spill into the school building - there were more fights, with knives or glass bottles, and also arson. I once lost a classroom because the students burned it down. On another occasion, I stopped a fire in the trash bin in my classroom. On top of that there were robberies, assaults and drug problems, and it just was clear that the school was going downhill, and I was nearing the point where I had to leave. During my last year there, we had an incident where the school was pretty much taken over by students, that was the last drop in the bucket for me - I knew that I had to leave. During my last year, in 2010/11, my school had become by far the most violent school in the city; we had more violent incidents that year than in schools number two and three on that list combined.

Exterior view of the Bronx Charter School of the Arts.
© BEN KILGUST, CC BY-NC_ND 2.0

Once you made the decision to leave, where did you go?

I started applying at many schools in the city. By then I knew the system better, and I also knew that most schools have these problems – there were only a limited number of schools where you could fully focus on academics instead of watching kids and preventing them from killing each other. And switching schools was particularly difficult as a physics teacher, because many schools do not offer enough physics classes to have a designated physics teacher. If they offer only one class, it would be taught by a biologist, for example. This is true for a majority of New York City schools. In order to maintain a physics teacher, a school has to offer at least five classes, and very few schools in the city do that, maybe a dozen or so. One of those schools had offered me a position before in 2006, which I declined at the time. A friend of mine was teaching there, so I registered my interest should a new opening become available – and it did, so I could switch. This is how I ended up at my current school, which is considered the most prestigious public high school in New York City and one of the best in the country – Stuyvesant High School. It is quite the opposite to where I was coming from.

So life is good there?

Yes, that was my second culture shock, but a good one. There is absolutely no violence, and no disciplinary problems whatsoever, they really don’t exist here. This makes your work as a teacher lot easier, that’s for sure. It is part of a set of nine selective public city schools called specialized high schools, where you have to take a test to get in, the Specialized High School Admissions Test. The first and most traditional of those are Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. There is a specialized test that students can take in middle school, and they have to hit a certain number. Depending on how many points they get, they can choose, and traditionally Stuyvesant is the school requiring the highest cut-off score, it is the hardest to get into. Due to this test-based admission system, it is harder to get into Stuyvesant High School than it is to get into Harvard University; our acceptance rate is lower. It is very, very competitive.

An Ivy League feeder school?

Exactly. At the same time, it is of course easy to be a good school if you can select your students. The kids we get would end up in the Ivy League regardless, our school benefits from the fact that we can select the very best. It’s the same with colleges, a selection-based system. This is something that I personally was not used to at all coming from Austria – the fact that there exist such big differences between schools. I taught in Vienna before coming to the United States, and yes, there are a few preparatory high schools (Gymnasien) that are considered better than others, but such huge discrepancies like we can observe in New York do not exist in Vienna.

Stuyvesant High School is still a public school, so there is not fee to attend?

Correct, it is a public school, there is no tuition. The only difference is that you have to score high enough on that test to be able to enroll.

If tuition money is out of the equation, do you still see a socio-economic impact in terms of attendance? Is it mostly kids from wealthy backgrounds because they have a support system at home that allows them to excel in testing?

No, there are some, but not many. We do have many poor kids, similar to other public high schools in the city. I see more of a cultural and racial divide; about 70% of our students are Asian. Testing for admission is something that is more common in many Asian societies, so they are familiar with this. They prepare and study hard for that test, they go to prep school and to after school programs in order to get ready. It is just a different mentality. For example, I frequently get students in my physics class, who have taken a summer course in physics before ever setting foot in my classroom, just to be ready for that class. This sometimes seems insane to me; why would you go to summer school before class has even started? To me, summer school is something you do afterwards if you did not do well in that class.

And this has been a big discussion in New York City that has become more and more urgent, because of the racial differences. Out of our freshman class of some 800- 900 students, there are only a handful of black kids. I believe last year it was a total of seven. And in a city that is certainly not 70% Asian and less than one percent black, this is problematic for many. This issue has been in the news a lot over the past couple of years; every time the admission statistics come out it is a big deal. And it has gotten worse over time: in the 1970s we had more black students than we have today. We, as a school, have no influence over who gets in because that is determined exclusively by that test. Some politicians say that is it, while others have suggested changes; for example, admitting the best student from each school, regardless of their test score. It remains an ongoing debate.

Let’s shift the topic a little bit to something that COVID-19 certainly has accelerated: the digitalization of teaching. What are your thoughts on the changes in teaching methodology, regardless of the current situation?

You’re right, this has started a long time before Corona, and I have made changes already ten years ago. I have been teaching for 20 years now and it has been changing dramatically. I started with an overhead projector being the most modern tool, and I still used that a little bit when I started in the Bronx. And then of course computers became more and more important. My big switch happened in 2009. I was still teaching in the Bronx and the situation there had already deteriorated, leading to an increasing number of absences. So I started a web page that year and posted a lot of materials on it. So kids could at least get to the homework assignments without being in school. Needless to say, many of those not coming to school did not bother anyway. But at least they had the option. At that time, social media was gaining popularity and MySpace was the big thing. On my web page, I also included a discussion forum, and students could message each other – and they did that to a certain extent. I realized this is a valuable tool, but in no way a replacement of being in the classroom. But it turned out to be better than nothing if you are absent. After that I switched homework completely, so since 2010 all my homework assignments have always been on my web page. It is also interactive, I can post videos, simulations, animations, I can incorporate a lot of things. I can also add and track questions and see if students answered them. It makes homework assignments easier for everyone.

Is this demanded by the school today?

No, not at all. But a vast majority of my colleagues do something like this, particularly in the sciences. There is of course a generational divide, teachers my age and younger all incorporate an online component into their teaching, while many of the older teachers don’t use it as much.

So do you still use a website that you host and maintain privately, or do you use an online learning platform provided by the school?

Our school does provide a solution, but I don’t use it, I use my own, Moodle to be specific, it is an open source learning solution that I have been using for ten years now and host myself. And I personally want to be independent from what the school offers, simply because the school switches systems every other year or so. I have somewhere close to 200 homework assignments online, it has been a huge amount of work putting them together, and I don’t want to have to recreate them on a different online learning platform – it has been years of work to accumulate all of that. Also, knowing the nature of the New York City Department of Education my fear is that whatever I put into their system might be deleted the next day – so I do not touch it.

Do you have any basis for comparison on how this is handled in Austrian schools?

I do follow a few teaching blogs, some of them German. It depends on the school district and the federal state. I believe that Bavaria has a pretty unified, Moodle-based system. In Europe in general, there has been a greater sense of urgency in that area because of the European General Data Protection Regulation, which is a lot stricter than what is mandated here. In other words, what I do online here in New York I could not do in Austria because of that.

Did you ever run into issues where students lack the digital infrastructure to take full advantage of your online offering? Has not having a laptop, etc., been an issue in some households?

That’s a good question. It was a concern for me in the beginning in the Bronx. This is why I still accepted other forms of homework there. But it turns out I have never been asked to provide paper-based homework. Students either had access at home, or at the school library. They used computers and the Internet for other things, if they needed access they found it and used it for school as well. In the Bronx I had students that were homeless, students that were in shelters, yet they never took me up on the offer to provide the homework via different means. They always found a way. And with the recent switch to online learning this March I really have to give the city credit, they have managed that very well. Within a remarkably short amount of time, every student who did not have a device was provided a laptop or a tablet, and even remote Internet hubs from the Department of Education. They just called everyone to see what they needed and delivered it. The teachers got a list that showed who had received a device. It was not that many, but in New York City, every student who did not have their one device or Internet access got it within a remarkably short period of time.

In terms of comparisons, do you have any final thoughts regarding the educational systems in New York and Austria – who could learn from whom in certain areas?

There are opportunities to learn in both directions. You have to be aware of the main difference: schools in New York City and in the United States are more than just schools. It might seem unfair to compare a Gymnasium in Vienna with a public high school in New York. But a Gymnasium in Vienna is also already a pre-selected pool of kids. Not everybody goes to a Gymnasium in Austria, children are pre-selected at a relatively early age and put either on the college track or the vocational track. By the time some kids reach senior high school (Oberstufe), a lot of others have never gotten the opportunity to be there. Here in a U.S. high school, everybody is still there. Nobody here ended school at 14 to learn a trade, everybody is in high school. So it’s a much wider pool of kids here when compared to the Austrian Berufsschule, Hauptschule, Gymnasium – the separation in Austria happens a lot earlier. So it’s not really fair to compare a Gymnasium with high school here. The other important point is that a high school here is much more than just a school. It is a school, and academic institution of learning, but at the same time it is also a medical institution, where kids receive treatment if they are sick, where they get contraception, condoms, they can test their eyesight, get prescription glasses, they get send to specialists, etc. All of that happens inside the school building. High schools are also social institutions, there are social workers employed here that deal with students’ psychological problems. And we have quite a lot of that here compared to my previous school – the high pressure and so on; we have kids with depression and also see hospitalizations because of that. In my old school, we had a day care for the babies of students. Sixteen, seventeen year olds with babies could drop them off at daycare and the kindergarten so they could still go to school. The high school is also a restaurant: every single student in New York City gets breakfast and lunch in school – even if there is no school. During summer, students can still go to any school to get food; even during vacation, two meals per day are provided, the school still feeds the kids. Some schools offer laundry, because there are a lot of homeless kids in New York City schools, they can put their dirty clothes in a bag and at the end of the day they get it back washed. To my knowledge none of that exists in an Austrian school to this extent.

Given the fractured nature of American society along socio-economic lines, a lot of stuff happens in school, because there you can at least get the kids. Schools here have to make up for a lot of shortcomings in other places. Many people lack health insurance, but you want kids to be healthy, so we make up for that in schools. Many people cannot afford food, so we make up for that in schools. All of that happens inside a New York City public school. In Europe, a lot of these services are provided elsewhere, there exist other institutions that take care of that. Income disparity is less pronounced in Austria compared to here and fewer people are homeless, and other organizations exist to take care of that, there are other ways to access health care in Austria. There is no need to have a medical facility inside a school. School here in the United States encompasses a wider meaning compared to what school is in Austria. And this is what Europe can learn from the United States – do not go down that path, because of course academics will suffer when all these other things are more important and have to be dealt with at school. If you know that a student is fed, healthy, and has a roof over their head, then you are at a different starting point.

You have been teaching in New York City for many years. Any plans for returning to Austria or Europe?

Not really. It would of course be interesting to see what it would be like to teach in Austria after all this, but there are no immediate plans. I am also in the pension system here; once I am able to retire I might think about it again. I am a happy New Yorker and I am happy at my school. If you end up in a school like this as a teacher in New York City, you really don’t leave unless you have a really good reason – it is sort of a jackpot.

Mr. Strasser, thank you very much for your time.