The Loss of Teachers' Voices

When was the last time you heard an interview with a teacher about education on a major radio or television station -- I mean an active teacher, not someone who used to be one.

Whenever discussions of education are held, it's the voice of politicians or businessmen. You rarely hear any statement with that heartening introduction, "I've been teaching on the same street to the children of ... for 36 years."

Those people do exist and I work with some one them. And they are fantastic teachers. But, these days they spend their days leaning against windows in quiet moments, afraid of what is going to happen next. Administrators come and go, and with them changes in policy, but in the process they wear on the nervous systems of dedicated professionals who really care about your kids. I say, your kids, because I don't have any children in the school system, but some of you reading this, do.

There is nothing fair about seeing people who have worked arduously with kids for almost as long as I've been alive finding themselves in fear of what they KNOW will be disaster.

A new program gets introduced to the school -- well -- new to this administrations. The faculty has tried it before and it didn't work. And they're demanding that teachers do it again. The kind of insanity -- of doing what fails over and over, is not unique to schools. But teachers find themselves alone when they are forced to do it. When a company does this and fails, they are publicly scorned. When a teacher does this, no one takes the time to ask how the failure happened. They just blame the teacher, who knew it wouldn't work all along.

Why didn't the teacher protest? There is no forum for protest in the Dept. of Education. None. You don't like it -- you're insubordinate.

And you can be fired for being insubordinate.

So, colleagues I deeply respect, bite their nails after over 20 or 30 years of knowing how to teach, facing the reality that they will not be able to do what they most want to and are best at doing. They will work within an insanity for which only they will be blamed.