Whether the President listens or not, we won’t stop telling him to pay attention to the people who work in the nation’s classrooms and schools every day. His Race to the Top is NCLB 2.0. The original failed because its sponsors tried to impose their theories on practitioners without listening. When we get the President’s attention, he will learn from letters like this one.
October 17, 2012
Dear President Obama,
I believe you are passionate about the potential for education to change the future for children and thus our nation. But the innovations your administration is seeking are taking us down the wrong path. Some of us have been working to improve education for many years. We have studied learning, curriculum, the change process, and supporting children in poverty. We are the professional educators that have had no voice in this administration. We have been able to make important changes in various schools throughout the nation, but have never had the commitment of time and money necessary to make the level of change we seek. I believe you would be inspired by what we do and have done.
For me and my colleagues, the teacher’s unions have been irrelevant throughout my more than 40 years of living my passion for children and teaching. I am dismayed that the union is shown to be the face of education everywhere I look. I think the unions have a role but it is so minor compared to the myriad of professionals who have dedicated their lives to accomplishing what I believe are your goals. Please listen to those who are, not tied to ideology, but to a search for understanding. Listen to professional educators.
Sincerely, Kathy Richardson Math Perspectives Teacher Development Center Bellingham, WA
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane here is my letter:
Dear President Obama:
I will make this brief. I am a college student in my junior year as an elementary education major. I plan on being a classroom teacher when I graduate. I have loved education since I started volunteering at my old elementary school. I saw a lot of new things about education I had never saw before. I saw a lot of teachers “teaching the test” and I had to help them with such tasks. It was hard, and I knew the students I was helping were not getting it either. When did education become about numbers and quotas? What happened to creativity, imagination, the spark of learning? It is gone Mr. President. But we can bring it back, we need for you to stop Race To The Top and pass legislation to end NCLB. We need to close charter schools, and get rid of privatization. We need for more money in the classrooms, and for teachers to get paid more. We need to stop advocating merit pay (we had tested that idea and it has failed multiple times. We need you Mr. President to stand up for true education!
Sincerely,
Jeremiah Henderson
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I have never been in a position to do much more than pay my union dues. I was forced to seek the help of a union rep on one occasion knowing that because of it I would be let go. I told my team as much and they even went to speak on my behalf, but I knew that as an nontenured teacher I was toast. I was, but I also know that without the union salaries and benefits would have been affected as well as working conditions and expectations. Even nonunion workers benefit from unions indirectly. I am sorry that unions are portrayed so negatively. Although the nationals have dropped the ball on the current “reform” movement, there has been quite a bit of local action orchestrated by local chapters. Fantastic, dedicated individual teachers are nothing new, but we need to be recognized as a profession rather than as someone’s favorite teacher if we want to be heard. I cherish the thank yous from my students, but I am still told that I had a cushy job. How many of us had heard the suggestion that we should get a real job?
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“For me and my colleagues, the teacher’s unions have been irrelevant throughout my more than 40 years of living my passion for children and teaching. I am dismayed that the union is shown to be the face of education everywhere I look.”
I’m not dismayed at all. Union contracts protect a teacher’s academic freedom. As well they provide support for due process. Without these, a public school would not have dedicated staff members who make an investment in the community.
If you really want to be dismayed, imagine a world where teachers are fearful of taking risks that may invite critical thinking in their classrooms for fear they will be fired. Imagine a world of cut-throat hiring practices where it’s every teacher for himself, and teachers are not recognized for their hard work and expertise–they are recognized for who they know on the school board or how cheaply they’ll work. Imagine a world where district administrations touting innovative approaches leave out the very teachers expected to take them.
I’m dismayed that the public perception has been allowed to be skewed by political untruths that bad-mouth teachers unions and devalue the role they play in supporting a professional staff of educators who are advocates for those districts in which they invest their careers and lives.
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I am not against unions. I know how critical they are. But in my personal journey in education, the union was not central to what I was learning and figuring out about teaching and learning. The fact we had a union might have been WHY I could keep improving as a teacher, but the work of the teacher is not really about the union itself. My problem is that I don’t see any of the “pundits” who discuss education acknowledging teaching as a profession. They focus only on union contracts. If they were to look beyond the unions, they would see in place what many are advocating for. That is, great teachers doing amazing things. Reformers think they have to invent new methods, but their idea of reform is often years/decades behind what the profession has learned and put in place in schools throughout the nation. Sometimes I think the focus on the union has clouded the bigger picture. By attacking the unions, they can avoid dealing with what is really happening in classrooms every day.
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