Teresa Thayer Snyder is a superintendent in upstate Néw York. She has more sense in her little finger and more understanding of children and education than the entire State Education Department. We have a surprise for her on Monday. And I have a promise for Dr. Snyder: the tide will turn. And she will be instrumental in turning it.
Here she is:
“Dear Dr. Ravitch: My granddaughter is about to turn six and is going into first grade. She is a remarkable child, the light of my life. Her father is an historian and a teacher-she has great background knowledge–it is fun to hear her extol on the swinging gate offence at the Battle of Gettysburg, even if her final commentary is that there were a lot of dead people. I pray she survives these next few years–before we see the tide turned. I have a recent picture of her in silhouette doing a handstand on an ocean beach which will be a part of my opening day talk with my teachers and staff. We need to re-claim childhood for our beloved children. We, as parents and grandparents, need to be a presence which insulates them from the utter obstruction of their education and of their innocent belief that school is supposed to be inviting and exciting for them.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautiful, just beautiful.
I wish there were more superintendents in New York like Dr. Thayer!
Sadly, some pay lip service to childhood but DATA rules the day.
Amen and amen.
Thank you! This made me cry.
Oh man, Dr. Ravitch. . .
I really hate surprises. Maybe you could just whisper it in our ears. I promise we won’t tell Dr. Thayer before Monday. . . .
Snyder represents passionate, compassionate leadership direly missing from too many school districts.
Dr. Thayer is right to be concerned that her precious Granddaughter could face a school experience not to her memory of old school expectations. School as a place to learn and grow on all levels of human yearning. The life, social, mental, and physical skills we were treated to as we grew and experienced our school years have been reshaped. I worry about my two very young Grandsons who go to school on each coast of our great nation. Children who have life expectancy well beyond anything we could have imagined. Yet, we have them racing towards years of tests and measuring for the purpose of a job force mainstreamed to the needs of others and a race against other nations. There is a coldness to this new approach towards learning that feels nothing like the old school values we held dear.
Over the last thirty plus years I have saved articles and research that spoke to the statistics from other countries where suicide, bullying, and abuse were part of the pressure cooker educational environments children were expected to learn in for the sake of their country. Where children were sorted out to be the winners and losers for the cause of the race to productivity and the world stage, the countries economy before the children. The children the instrument to insure that strength and purpose. For some and certainly not all. Not the way in which we approached learning, schooling or children. At least, not until now.
As a superintendent would she dare to instruct her teachers not to continue giving the
tests that do nothing but stress the children, most especially the challenged learners thrown into the pool of test takers unfairly and unreasonable, and do nothing to directly benefit the children and only the sorting process? Would all of the superintendents, administrators, school boards, teachers, and parents put down the tests, the pencils and the paper and say NO!??? Is that a choice to be made in protest of good practices and Do No Harm? Words fail to have meaning without action or resolve if only following orders. Continuing the wrong thing knowing that it is really not bringing the learning to the children except for the teaching to the test is disingenuous and denial of Truth.
I wish Dr. Thayer’s Granddaughter a wonderful education life and hope we see a turn around in the current trend in education for the sake of all children.
Thank you for your comments; I epecially liked the part where you said we need some spaces to express human yearning (as well as learning).
You are accurate when your portray this race/competition with other nations; it has become insane. It is fueled by the extra fear that came on after 911 but it was always there. I remember going up to a federal USDE person that I respected remendously when the Nation at Risk came out and asking him “I believe in improving schools but do we have to sell as beat the Japs?” So that theme has always been there. Insanity has stepped in and we have to bring things back to balance. The pendulum takes a while and I don’t want your grandchildren to suffer through the process.
You are also right about the coldness.
you express things very well; I admire you.
As I reflect upon the statement made, I continue to see different children receiving their civil rights being violated by the not so in tuned administrators of many school districts throughout the land. This kind of administrator only sees the federal dollars they receive and not on the special needs children where these federal dollars should be spent, to provide them with the individual needs of each child with disabilities.
There will be children which will receive all they can, as in times past, when the parents sucked up to this kind of administrator, and this administrator playing parent against parent, because he/she can.
Evilness in all forms will continue to occur, as the consciousness of many has been seared so long ago, by the crossing of the proverbial drawn line in the sand, by this kind of administrator.
With any luck, this insanity will be over by the time she is in third grade. Unfortunately, it will be too late for way to many children!
Check out Dr. Thayer’s statement to families in her school district regarding the ELA and Math scores. http://vcsd.neric.org/superintendent/superintendent.htm It is equally as profound as her letter to Diane Ravitch. It should be sent to every superintendent in NYS. Every superintendent should rally behind his/her students and teachers as she has done.
I’m watching “Our Nixon” on CNN and someone just made a statement referring to public outrage bringing down the presidency. WE NEED PUBLIC OUTRAGE!!
The public outrage is building. It is building in New York, in Florida, in North Carolina, in Michigan,in Louisiana, in Tennessee….it is happening.
I hope you are right!
……….and where is the outrage where all special needs children are not being provided a free appropriate public education. When children with disabilities do not receive a free appropriate public education because of top administrators, that child’s civil rights have been violated, by those calling the shots within such local education agencies. So, I again ask, where is the outrage by the public over this issue?
Every school district in the nation needs a superintendent like Dr. Thayer! As for the outrage across the nation…everyone of us needs to join in. Even if things aren’t so bad in your state or district right now, they could get bad really fast if we don’t STOP the insanity NOW! We must keep exposing the practices of the so called reformers and we must support people who are education friendly.
And thanks to you Dr. Ravich, we just might get there.
As a teacher and future grandparent (hopefully the far off future), I hope this too shall pass. But I don’t believe it will without a good fight, so I’m here to see this ‘thing’ through and if it doesn’t pass, I’m saving all my teaching books to home school my future grandkids!
I think this goes to the false promise of “choice.”
5% of chain charters are driving the agenda for the other 95% of public schools. What we’re seeing in my district looks more and more like the standardized-test based “no excuses” model that reformers are all in love with.
That is not actually a “choice”, because obviously I “chose” my traditional, local public school, not a “no excuses” national charter chain.
We need to ask our elected officials, state and federal, (not the local leaders, who are simply dealing with directives as best they can) how it is a “choice” if they are directing traditional public schools to follow a chain charter model.
Charter schools in Ohio don’t do any better than traditional public schools. They “excel” at one thing: paying staff and employees 20% less. I don’t want to adopt their model. I think it’s over-hyped and ideological; faith-based, in other words, and the last thing we need in my middle class community is another race-to-the-bottom employer.
My biggest fear with the imposition of the chain charter model on my public school is employee turnover. High turnover workplaces are not a model anyone should adopt, not in a business and certainly not in a school. The high turnover model in business is a dinosaur. Newer growing companies are going to back to retaining experienced employees even in retail. Trader Joes is the new model, not Wal Mart.
I don’t think constant churn and employees treated like easily-replaced units is good for anyone, let alone children. Manufacturers have even abandoned it, because quality suffered. Why would we adopt this for schools?
We can “re-claim childhood” for all the children we teach but it will be hand-to-hand combat for those who join the cause. Ours will not be a conversation about charters or test scores, instead we will focus on children. We will know the people we describe and attach significance to the handstands and the insights into Gettysburg. We will be talking about our students as if they are our own and that will be revolutionary…but revolting to the “corporates” as they will not be able to package it or profit from it.
Retired TN Supt
Kudos to you, Dr. Thayer. I retired as a Director of Schools in Tennessee last year and hope that I would have had the courage and caring to speak honestly to my community as you did on your website. Watching the evolution of the Huffman regime at the State Department of Education here has been frightening. Great, knowledgeable state department educators were replaced by “kiss ups”, TFA “experts”, and corporate forces who never even looked at current practices to determine how to properly move forward. What was more frightening was the lack of leadership among my colleagues in standing up for our children. Most sat silently as the steamroller moved across Tennessee education. I put myself in that category for not speaking out more when I could have done so. I am no better, fearing what might have been the backlash against my district.
I have a creative, wonderful granddaughter who will be entering school soon. I want her to be in a school where learning is not in the hands of frightened, stressed teachers and principals, but leaders and learning facilitators dedicated to the whole child. I pray that all Directors of Schools in Tennessee will become familiar with Dr. Thayer and search their hearts and professional beliefs about what schools ought to be, and rally the courage to turn this around before it is too late.
Diana
I have posted this to my community in Breezy Point that lost everything with Hurricane Sandy. Disney is about to build a playground when the kids in the schools need so much more.