A veteran teacher in Pittsburgh explains what she does every day to serve and protect her students. She is a special education teacher.
Looking at the courage of the Newtown teachers, she sees in them the ethos that career educators share: we protect our students.
She writes: “Yet these same teachers are members of a profession that is increasingly being attacked for what we don’t do, for how much money we make, for how powerful some of our unions have come to be. After the dreadful tragedy in Newtown, it is time to reestablish our faith in our nation’s teachers.
“We need to remind ourselves why teachers do what they do, how they care for our children, how they are co-guarantors, along with parents, of our future. Far beyond instruction, fidelity to curriculum, Common Core State Standards and the like are the daily challenges of teaching children who come to school with a limitless supply of problems and struggles.”
The policymakers seem to have lost sight of the multiple roles that teachers assume in the lives of children and look only at test scores. “The press, public, legislators, government officials and those ever-important tests often seem to reduce teaching to standardized exams, using test data to drive instruction and then judging teachers based on how their students performed on one test on one day. It doesn’t matter if students have a bad morning, or were exhausted, or had a family crisis the night before or couldn’t read the test because of a learning disability.”
The teacher hopes that after Newtown, the public will have a deeper understanding of the challenges faced daily by teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane — So beautifully said!! We need to stand united and do what we do every day– care for the hearts and minds of the CHILDREN that parents lovingly put in our charge. We do no take this responsibility lightly.
Marge
Every teacher should write a letter to their local paper like the one posted here. Educators shouldn’t need a PR
campaign but I guess we do.
I think you are right. Teachers all over the country should take a day to write in and tell the country what is going on.
Those Sandy Hook teachers are heroes for what they did in the face of the most horrible situation imaginable.
Yet not a single teacher I know is even slightly surprised and how they responded. It is a given. I dare someon to try to calculate the “value added measurement” of that.
I’d like to add that college professors need to be included in this conversation. At Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York, we are getting a more low performing student every semester as well as the students who were in special educaction in high school. I have an autistic student whose situation matches Adam Lanza, yet the college administration does not give us a heads up to students with disabilities, I identified it myself as a veteran teacher.
The job requires a Master’s Degree, yet pays only $2,000 per course and does not allow a professor to teach more than 3 courses per semester. Let’s face it US Education is at an all time crisis! And it is not just k-12! If you pay your faculty well, then you will have quality educators.
This is the piece of teaching that needs to be brought to public attention. Somehow, the everyday work of keeping children safe, both emotionally and physically, is the teaching world’s best kept secret. Teachers do so much day in, day out, but even teachers do not recognize and share the importance of their worth. It is time to stop hiding a teacher’s dedication to children. We owe it to those who have given their lives in Sandy Hook.
I never understood how people don’t realize that part of a teacher’s job is keeping kids safe. That has been completely undervalued. The people who have been trashing teachers are just scum.