[Note to readers: I abridged this article to comply with copyright limits. Please open the link and read the article in full at the Hartford Courant, which had the good sense to publish it.]
Thanks to the punitive actions and policies of the U.S. Department of Education and the states, there is a new genre of writing by teachers, explaining why they are quitting. The most famous was written by Kris Neilsen of North Carolina, whose letter of resignation went viral, was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, and went around the world.
This column was written by Elizabeth Natale, a middle-school teacher in Connecticut. This state has one of the best public school systems in the United States, yet its governor and state commissioner continually bash teachers and public schools, while lauding charters and showering them with extra money. The leaders are certain that public schools and teachers are failing and need tough measures to shake them up. In time, what the leaders are doing will be revealed as a mighty hoax whose goal is to increase market share for charters.
Natale writes:
“Surrounded by piles of student work to grade, lessons to plan and laundry to do, I have but one hope for the new year: that the Common Core State Standards, their related Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium testing and the new teacher evaluation program will become extinct.
I have been a middle school English teacher for 15 years. I entered teaching after 19 years as a newspaper reporter and college public relations professional….
Although the tasks ahead of me are no different from those of the last 14 years, today is different. Today, I am considering ending my teaching career.
When I started teaching, I learned that dealing with demanding college presidents and cantankerous newspaper editors was nothing. While those jobs allowed me time to drink tea and read the newspaper, teaching deprived me of an opportunity to use the restroom. And when I did, I was often the Pied Piper, followed by children intent on speaking with me through the bathroom door.
I loved it!
Unfortunately, government attempts to improve education are stripping the joy out of teaching and doing nothing to help children….
The Smarter Balance program assumes my students are comfortable taking tests on a computer, even if they do not own one…
I am a professional. My mission is to help students progress academically, but there is much more to my job than ensuring students can answer multiple-choice questions on a computer. Unlike my engineer husband who runs tests to rate the functionality of instruments, I cannot assess students by plugging them into a computer….
My most important contributions to students are not addressed by the Common Core, Smarter Balance and teacher evaluations. I come in early, work through lunch and stay late to help children who ask for assistance but clearly crave the attention of a caring adult…
Teaching is the most difficult — but most rewarding — work I have ever done. It is, however, art, not science. A student’s learning will never be measured by any test, and I do not believe the current trend in education will lead to adults better prepared for the workforce, or to better citizens. For the sake of students, our legislators must reach this same conclusion before good teachers give up the profession — and the children — they love.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What’s interesting is how the Hartford Courant is acting as if this one letter swayed Governor Malloy, who this week said that teacher evaluations should not necessarily be linked to standardized test scores (until after the November election). This is a great letter, but the Courant has offered no explanation for why Malloy ignored many similar letters over his tenure, especially those that were testimony before the governor’s “education reforms” were passed through in 2012.
More details:
http://www.realhartford.org/2014/01/30/policy-delay-a-sign-of-responsiveness/
Yes, the Hartford Courant is acting as though one voice has moved the needle:
http://articles.courant.com/2014-01-30/news/hc-ed-one-voice-counts-20140130_1_teacher-evaluation-the-courant-uconn-president-susan-herbst
And in fact, it has. It was mine, and each of yours, and Elizabeth Natale’s.
Look! The needle is moving again. Somebody must have spoken up.
Sad, but true, there are thousands of us that feel the exact same way.
Every teacher I talk to feels the same way. Well, I can think of ONE exception.
Teaching is an art form, not a science…so true. It is organic, innate, passionate,spontaneous, random, creative, ever-changing, dynamic…The “teachable moment” is never scripted or expected. All the above make teaching the beautiful art it is (or should be)!
This is a great blog and someone should send it to: barack obama, arnie duncan, mikey bloomberg, bill gates, michelle rhee and that dizzy mayor in chicago.
Obama got a stack of letters – many similar to this one – handed to him in October of 2012. Crickets (except for the very insulting form letter that some were “lucky” enough to get). Please don’t waste your time on those people – all of them are fully aware of what’s going on.
Barry O doesn’t give a $@&$@&**!!! what you think. These decisions have been made for the rest of us by our betters. That’s to be the rule going forward. The oligarchs decide. We obey.
I know this letter from a Connecticut teacher may sound depressing and negative, but I found it one of the most wonderful descriptions of what it’s like to teach reading and writing to kids beyond the primary years. So, hang in there, it celebrates what you all do with passion.
Love and hope, Pat
Sent from my iPad
bravo…everyone should watch the dvd, a touch of greatness, to see a brilliant teacher at work and what he accomplished. my son found it at the public library.
Amen.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
This sounds so familiar. In the not too distant future there may not be any teachers. They will all be fed up and quit or just retire.
Beautiful letter.
every parent of every state should be made to read this and every governor of every state and every legislature of every state. We are murdering the passion and joy of learning one common core component at a time. Really how to make a paper airplane over The Trumpet of the Swan or Charlottes Web. I weep at this.
This is part of why I tended to stick with severe-profound students. Nobody thought they could learn so I was usually left alone to teach and could pretty much teach what I damn well pleased. Ironic isn’t it. Kept me out of the politics.
Don’t give up. Start a nationwide revolt. Be the change http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-call-to-action.html
It should be a worldwide revolt. The situation is exactly the same here in Italy!!
Sorry to hear that the same crap is occurring in other countries. I would have hoped they would have looked what we’re doing here and just started to laugh “those stupid Americans, what do they know.”
The people making these decisions have obviously never felt the thrill of teaching, when one’s students reach a milestone, whether it be academic, behavioral or both. There is an aesthetic plane that is reached that cannot be replicated by any other endeavor. Those who have experienced that emotion need the tools to continue to replicate that aesthetic because they know that doing so means that the vital connections between the teacher, the student and the knowledge have been made.
The proponents of the new Alphabet Soup of Education refuse to understand that teaching cannot be reduced to simple numbers or data. They see education as a soulless enterprise, with the end product being half- humans absent of all creativity and only able to offer robotic responses to questions whose responses require no emotional depth or sensitivity.
The ultimate insult is how few of these policy makers send their own children to the very schools they claim to be fixing. We are perpetuating the socio-economic stratification that is the anthesis of our identity as the United States of America. When the truth is revealed, we will have lost an entire generation’s worth of students to these pseudo-intellectuals, with no way to undo the damage.
Is there a word akin to genocide, that means the systematic and deliberate annihilation of an entire profession?
educide
You haven’t gotten the memo. Teachers are no longer needed. There’s an app for that. Bill G. has made this decision for the rest of us.
By implementing the Common Core we are committing menticide.
Definition of menticide:
The undermining or destruction of a person’s mind or will.
Are we going to allow our rich traditional classical literature, with its high-level vocabulary and complex plots and characters to be replaced by reports from the Federal Reserve?
Cerebrucide???
Exactly. I am leaving the profession after 23 years. I’m done. I’m talented, and I care about my students. However, I’m exhausted and tired of feeling like a failure. Tired of the—provide evidence you are teaching nonsense.
I wish teachers would not quit. We need teachers who understand these issues to stay and fight, and ultimately to win. The darkest hour is right before dawn.
And into this genre, I, too, shall wade. After over 30 years as a math teacher in CA, I decided to retire last year. My colleagues confessed to me, that the only reasons they could not retire with me was due to either their economic situation or not quite enough years in. Their only solace was in the thought that NCLB was going away and taking all those tests with it. I did not have the heart to tell them, that the assessment regime would not only continue but, IMO, intensify.
The previous year I had attended a Common Core math lesson workshop. To my surprise, three of the four lessons presented I had given 20 years before! Just not with the use of current technology. Having gone through NCLB, I was not looking forward to another multi-year round of being pulled out of classes to attend countless workshops, with the constant parade afterward of workshop presenters and administrators arriving at the classroom with clipboard in hand.
Twenty years ago, when I had less students, it was easy to arrange desks into groups. Last year I had to abandon my beloved seating arrangement, because I ended up with 50 desks in my classroom. The only way I could make them all fit was to arrange them into long rows from left to right. I worked with 240 students a day; because students would enter and leave, I really was responsible for over 300 students over the course of last year. I was not the only teacher with class loads like this. And from what I hear this year, nothing has changed.
What finally was the last straw was when test scores from all the county high schools were released. The scores from the charter STEM magnet school were included for the first time, and right out the gate that school was scoring over 100 points higher than my school. New buildings, small class sizes, selected students, and this school was already way above the score my school had been “chasing” all the years of NCLB! And, mind you, my colleagues included Stanford and top private college math grads!
As one of my brilliant math colleagues lamented at the lunch table a few years ago, “NCLB got rid of the story of Algebra, the beauty of Geometry.” And this is what I am afraid is going to happen with “critical thinking” under Common Core. Thinking itself will become standardized, tested, demonstrated to be lacking, and the students at my former school, who deal with poverty everyday and neither possess the desire or aptitude to attend the STEM charter, will continue to be over 100 points behind and be deemed “failures”.
Oh, lest I give the impression only older teachers left, three wonderful young teachers left also, two leaving the profession entirely and one to work at a private school her children attend.
Ah yes, Woody Guthrie wouldn’t mind at all if we sang these school are our schools.. In fact you can here a recording of that song on this CD http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/dhbdrake4 Written by Pikku My and performed by John Hammick. And I produced the CD so enjoy and buy it
The key is “selected students” and all that implies.
I think the point is that educrats WANT us to quit! So stay and fight !
I agree with everything you said here. That is why I retired.
I spent years giving most of my waking hours to a job that I view as an art, also. I cared for my students, helping muddle school kids who came back to my 4th grade class if they struggled with algebra or reading. I love those kids.
I got a hand-delivered thank you from a middle school kid who came over asking for help from time to time. He thanked me for helping him believe in himself. He thanked me for helping him know how to make friends and to show that he was capable.
That was why I wanted to teach…to reach lives. To love someone who might not feel that any place else.
But “the system” doesn’t really care. They push you to spend hours absorbing ideas for which you know in your heart are simply “change”. They wrecked my health and almost my mind. I had to escape before health prevented me from teaching what I knew needed taught. I was tired of playing their games while trying to do what I felt was right in addition.
I still care so much for all those children who I will never know. I am trying to retain a voice. But it is often drowned out by those more shrill and more concerned with money.
I am glad Diane has taken this noble task on. We are being manipulated daily. The Orwellian overtones are stupefying.
We are kindred spirits.
“I still care so much for all those children who I will never know.”
Oh, yes!
Something else. For a couple years before I left, our principal kept dropping the term “seasoned teachers” into staff conversations, but not in a good, honorable way.
No, what the implication was was that “seasoned teachers” did not possess the necessary set of skills and would refuse to change, and so could not offer anything to help the school/district implement CC.
Besides finding, that the same words and phrases that once described NCLB and told us why it should be accepted were now being used to promote CC, I found it also Orwellian that I, we, were being made into unpersons.
My former principal would say to me: “A teacher of your experience (read “age”) should (know…, be able to,,,[fill in the blank}) in order to try to shame me when something went wrong in my class. But, of course, she had no problem with my age, right?
Classic ageism.
“But “the system” doesn’t really care.”
No doubt about that. I was just sitting here thinking that I am quite fortunate in teaching a subject, Spanish, that is not tested and most administrators have no clue about, in a medium size rural school where I and only I get to decide what texts, materials, curriculum, etc. . . I am going to utilize and when I want to. So I can pretty much shut myself off from this crap. But it, the crap, still digs its claws into all teachers in one way or another, it’s almost impossible to get away from it.
My principal came in (toting the ubiquitous computer) for my yearly summative evaluation for all of first hour on Weds. After he left one of my students asked if it made me nervous (yes the students are fully aware of what it means when an administrator sets foot in the door) and my response was: “No, they can come in anytime, I don’t care because I’m going to do what I think needs to be done so that the students may learn what they need to learn. Most administrators have never learned a second language and don’t have any clue as to what it takes to teach one. Do you think I worry about what they have to say about what’s happening? No, I don’t”
She and the others just laughed!!
Here is my principal’s and my “converstion” afterwards-via email. And I’m sure that all the “veteran” teachers here have had very similar “conversations”. Realize that my principal likes the “sandwich” method-good, bad, good-in communicating with parents and staff:
“First off, I love the fact that students are coming to the board and seem comfortable doing so. I think some transitions could be better with not all students going up together, and the first/last five minutes of class are not spent wisely. Students are off task and you noticed it at the end of the hour and tried to re-direct them. Finally, spending the entire hour on one activity makes the lesson drag. If you could introduce more learning activities, that would improve the motivation.
Lastly, the questioning you did in class was great. One of my favorite parts of the observation is how you had students make mistakes or find out others made mistakes and it changed how you taught. In some instances you went back over previous examples and other times it just took you or the kids to smile/laugh and the idea was understood.”
XXX
XXX,
One thing about that particular period and in working with the subjunctive is that it is a quite difficult concept to grasp. I wanted every student to have the opportunity to not only write it but also speak it in attempting to comprehend it. Normally I do have 2-3 varied activities per period* but the learning the usage (and that yesterday was only one of a half dozen or so “triggers” in the usage of it) of the subjunctive needed a more intense/longer than usual focus. Today for instance we will quickly go over the last activity of that work, then play vocab bingo and then have the students complete the lesson’s vocab quiz. Also the first/last five minutes (roughly) is the time for the students to work the vocabulary. Some do and some don’t. A part of schooling is to learn to use their time wisely and to do so we must give them the opportunity to do such, otherwise they won’t learn that aspect of life and living. I’m sure you noticed that when I need to have their attention, they give it and part of that is due to allowing them to make their own decisions with the time I give them to either do the work in class or choose to do it outside of class.
Please feel free to come and watch (and even participate) any class any time.
Duane
*I am more than happy to sit down with you and explain just how we handle a chapter-the activities done, when we do them, the pedagogical reasons for doing so and what the general flow in the learning of Spanish in my classes is. I think you would find that there is a variety of activities that serve to keep the students interested.
Administrators are all receiving the same professional training on evaluating teachers. You could take that observation and paste it into almost any classroom with minor changes. I have always wondered how most administrators can feel competent to walk into a classroom and write a critique based on limited data. It would make more sense to me if the teacher and the evaluator sat down together and analyzed the observation before anything is put on paper. I remember one administrator being surprised and irritated that I had explanations for my actions. He seemed to feel that his judgement was what counted not what I understood about what I was doing. His reaction caught me by surprise. My previous obvservations/evals in a different district had been a collaborative, not a gotcha, process.
I can relate. Our principal makes so many assumptions. It is interesting how she cuts and pastes recommendations from one eval to another. She has been known to tell a 4th grade teacher to do the same things as a 2nd grade teacher … when the program changes drastically for 4th grade implementation. She has even said complimentary things that were based on assumptions that are totally untrue. She bases some “observations” on comments from her “golden boy” rather than knowing what she is talking about.
We have a Praxis based rubric that looks at the domains being evaluated on a particular day. Now they are vamping it up to do 5 evals per year per teacher randomly showing up to evaluate random domains without advance knowledge. This makes it possible to choose a time in a teacher’s schedule that might not be optimal for highlighting a particular domain since not all lessons lend themselves to perfect alignment with all domains.
I know people in other professions who try to compare their evaluation process to that used in education. Bottom line … Children aren’t widgets.
What can I add to this except maybe this. I retired in 1991, could not wait to get out. I LOVED teaching, still miss it for all the reasons given heretofore. In our school system as far as I know I am the only teacher to, in a North Central evaluation have stated that my students showed skills and proficiencies never observed to that time in our state. Yet when I dared to confront a principal who had been fired from another school system adjacent to our system about something which every department head had voted against but which he had pushed I was sent packing to the elementary school and our school board evidently approved. Where we had had 5 or 6 sections of choir, the very next year there were 2.
As an administrator my teachers were visited by other teachers from all over Northern Illinois and Indiana to watch them teach. An adjacent school system had every teacher in their system: elementary, jr. high, and high school; general music, choir, band and orchestra come to watch one of my teachers teach and they left with mouths wide open at what they had observed. YET, the school board relieved me of my job as Music Coordinator. The band, which everyone focused attention on, had had about 120 students enrolled in the band program for year after year and consistently won accolades at contests but is now after several years at 29 students and was down to 20 for awhile.
How could anyone who teaches music, especially choral music be intellectually astute? Be valuable to a school system. BUT I once had a former student tell me that he did better in every subject because of me. THAT no one can take from me.
I see this as a microcosm of what we can expect when political considerations supersede professional judgements
Judgment is generally spelled without the other e in the word.
Elizabeth Natale’s letter expresses the sentiment of thousands of teachers who see their craft as an art form and their classroom as an expression of that art. What has set America apart from her counterparts has always been the human factor. The productivity of Individuals equipped with the skills to be life long learners and steeped in a tradition of individual exceptionalism cannot be measured with a “global measuring stick”. Success is defined by intangibles of satisfaction and contentment that come from a feeling of autonomy. Certainly we in America have struggled with some children being “left behind”. Common Core does nothing to ensure that those children will have the circumstances that drive their achievement gap addressed. On the contrary, this achievement gap is the crisis that big government has used to cast a net wide enough to snare all the rest of us in mundane educational experience that feigns a benevolent purpose, but effectively remands us and our posterity to a lifetime limited by a glass ceiling that creates two classes–the educationally and the politically elite and the rest of us muggles. Common Core is unabashedly unamerican and yet except for a few of us with our impotent whimpering it moves forward with seemingly little observation by the majority of the nation.
teachers must stop taking orders, and start taking over!!
It is far past time for teachers to retake their profession from the usurpers.
No hay duda.
¡Viva la revolución! ¡Huelga, huelga, huelga!
(Unfortunately most Gringo teachers would respond to toga, toga, toga before huelga huelga, huelga.)
That’s not fair. Most of them are too tired to party.
Don’t quit now, become the change you want. Start by developing a viable alternative to the testing fiasco http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html Use those ideas as a jumping off spot and then take action http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-call-to-action.html
“While those jobs allowed me time to drink tea and read the newspaper, teaching deprived me of an opportunity to use the restroom”
So true!
I understand everything you said.
And, like you, Elizabeth, I love it anyway.
Hang in there, my friend. Your students clearly need you.
I posted this on my Facebook page and immediately had public “likes” and private messages telling me how true this was. As retired teachers we need to stand up and make sure our voices are heard. Current teachers want to speak up but worry about the consequences of their honesty. Many of them are single parents who have children to feed. How frustrating for them – wanting to speak up in defense of their students but worried about keeping their jobs to support their families. Yes, teaching is an art that takes practice and guidance. There is no quick fix or recipe for being an outstanding teacher. It takes, knowledge, instinct, experience, energy, passion and a desire to continually improve and refine your skills. We need to all work together to help restore respect for the profession of teaching and help America see that students are unique individuals, not numbers or pieces of data. Public education is truly at a crossroads and we owe it to future generations to make sure schools offer the best we have rather than reducing their education to numbers.
I don’t know why experience is seen as the enemy of expertise. I can’t think of a profession where the newly minted professional is let loose on the world with the expectation of immediate competency. A well prepared new teacher has a learning curve just like a new lawyer. Doctors are not let loose without extensive clinical training under skilled mentorship. There is a reason you do not want to be your surgeon’s first gall bladder. He may end up doing part of it under the lead of a senior attending but not without close supervision. It would be nice to have training wheels on first entering the classroom. Depending on the school leadership, the support may be superior to non-existent.
“There is no quick fix or recipe for being an outstanding teacher. It takes, knowledge, instinct, experience, energy, passion and a desire to continually improve and refine your skills. “
I can definitely relate to the frustration. I felt like a criminal today because I rewarded one of my classes with Chinese food. I planned 30 minutes of instruction and left the remaining time for them to enjoy their reward, and may I also add that learning to get along socially is part of educating the whole child. The administration was immediately at my door, wanting to know if my students were eating during instruction time. I had to explain and justify my professional decision to reward my students with food for 15 minutes of class time. This is only one example of the petty knit-picking, micro-managing shenanigans that occur every day at the school I teach in, and I am so fed up, after 16 years of teaching, with the negativity and bashing, that I have my letter of resignation already written. I love teaching, I love my students and I will defend them with my life if it came down to it, but over the last decade I have witnessed and have experienced the destructive agenda of this beast called educational reform and it is sucking the joy of learning from our students and forcing seasoned, experienced teachers to leave the classrooms. I certainly am not looking for sympathy here, but before anyone judges another, make sure to first listen and understand what is really being stated: we who have chosen to teach truly do want our students to do their best. I want to stay and fight, but every year I stay, it seems to only worsen, and the paperwork is beyond overwhelming. I do not have an answer for what it is going to take for our students to love school again but I do know that taking endless tests will stop any brain from functioning normally because too much stress shuts the switch of learning off. Maybe I’m wrong, but the brain actually retains more information when given short, frequent breaks. But I am only a teacher, and now that education is a business, there’s no time to stop and celebrate progress with my students with some food. Arrest me because I am guilty of spending some quality time with my students. Forgive me for robbing them of fifteen minutes of academic instruction time. Better yet, just fire me. That way, I can collect unemployment until I can figure out another career. Pass me another teriyaki chicken, please!
“Maybe I’m wrong, but the brain actually retains more information when given short, frequent breaks. But I am only a teacher, and now that education is a business, there’s no time to stop and celebrate progress with my students with some food.”
You can turn out more widgets if you closely monitor your “time on task.” I was not good at their definition of productivity. In my world, you are not wrong.
Last year my class and I read a story by a famous children’s author (Cynthia Rylant) about an old man who adopted a cat. Part of the story was about how the man and the cat ate English muffins with cream cheese and jam. Many of my Latino students (20 out of 23) were not familiar with either cream cheese or English muffins. I brought cream cheese, English muffins, and jam in so they could experience what the characters in the story had eaten. We did this just before recess. I was asked by a teacher sent to help me “improve” my teaching what ELA standard I was teaching! I thought people learned by experience as well as by reading. Silly me.
What passes for “experience” nowadays is a picture from the interactive board gallery or found on the internet and projected onto the interactive board or a picture from a publisher’s resource material shown on the interactive board.
Yes, isn’t it sad?
Glitz instead of substance. When did people get such a shallow view of learning and what we want for students?
Begtodiffer,
Please look into another district. I’m sure you can find somewhere that is more compatible with your “philosophy” (oh know another one of those dirty “f” words “philosophy”).
My principal asks me why I don’t teach at a university level (he sees that as a place that “anything goes” when it comes to the teachers speaking their mind) or why I don’t move on because these “changes” are here to stay. I tell him I was here before these “changes” were and that out of respect for experience it’s the “changes” that should change and not me.
I ran across this today and wanted to share here, because the teacher is retiring.
http://momastery.com/blog/2014/01/30/share-schools/
Enjoy the read.
ALL of this is explained by four letters–ALEC. It’s all about money (Pear$on, charter schools {although, Joe N., not every single one–interestingly enough, the Chicago PS Board denied the application for a charter school run by–gasp!–former public school teachers who had developed a plan for the kind of school we are clamoring for}) & all about turning our children into obedient widgets who do not question authority, who will work for minimum wage at WalMart, & who will have been cheated out of an education due to excessive test prep & testing. If you don’t know about ALEC (just celebrated its 40th birthday in Chicago this past summer–big protest downtown–but, of course, the media didn’t report it), you’d better find out because, pretty soon, this country’s going to be renamed the United States of ALEC.
Stay where you are, keep teaching, and work within your communities to push back.
Parents, retired teachers & administrators & community members–help them. Opt out of testing, run for school boards and legislative offices. DO NOT give up.
New York Senator John Flanagan, head of the Education Committee, is a member of ALEC.
NCLB started out benign compared to where it ended up. CC is starting out where NCLB left off:
Big Testing
Big Data
Big Money for Private Hands
Big Authoritarianism
This makes the fight more difficult but not impossible. Active teachers need to speak out through their associations.The rest of us as you stated need to support them.
I will be writing one of these at the end of the 2014-2015 school year. I understand her frustration.
What donasnora said! Just look at what they did in New Jersey–bill passed through committee to stop forced public school closings!
Yes, WE can & we WILL! Everyone, keep fighting–act locally, & it will spread.
Exactly!
I don’t think Woody would mind if we sing, “This school is your school, this school is my school”.
The Three R’s must fight against the Four B’s above. The educational carpetbaggers must be laughed at, shamed, and driven from the system.
Ah yes, Woody wouldn’t mind at all. In fact you can here a recording of that song on this CD http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/dhbdrake4 Written by Pikku My and performed by John Hammick. And I produced the CD so enjoy and buy it
LOVED YOUR article…so inspired! I am a teacher 22 years in.We have created a line of anti stress mists made BY a teacher FOR teachers, please like us on fb THE BLISSFUL TEACHER…check out our teacher related back labels on etsy.com/shop/theblissfulteacher. We are trying to get our word out like you did, and please help. The teachers in these times need these therapeutic grade essential oil healing mists, like SUNDAY NIGHT SOOTHER, and DATA DRIVEN DELIGHT.
Please like us and share. Great job, I am in East Hartford CT.
As a former NYC public school teacher I feel the pain that other teachers are going through. Though I am not the type to get joy out of other’s misery, it does make me happy to know that the LIBERALS who caused the changes in the school system as far as children’s rights (but to the extreme), children’s feelings, and all of the other cradling nonsense, are now getting bitten by the MONSTER they have created. Political correctness and all of the other LIBERAL creations are seriously affecting LIBERAL teachers with THEM being accused of being racist, etc. I only feel bad for the non-liberal teachers. They’ve been pulled into your mess!
Wake up, people. What’s going on in our nation’s schools isn’t the result of naive policymakers not understanding the nuances of education. It is a well-planned, concerted campaign to destroy the one institution that provides children from ordinary families the chance to achieve their dreams of becoming doctors, teachers, engineers, etc. That institution is, of course, public schools.
The goal is to transform the publics into training schools to supply Bill Gates and other billionaire industrialists with an entire generation of worker drones for the factories they intend to bring back to the U.S. Politicians from both parties–beneficiaries of superpac funding–have promised to “bring manufacturing back to our shores to create new jobs for millions of Americans.”
Sounds lofty, but what they don’t tell us is that in order to do this, they will have to compete with sweatshop countries such China, India, Pakistan, and others. Places where workers live in crowded dormitories and are treated as slaves.
Dont think that could happen here? Check out the concept of “light rail communities,” which are touted as 21st Century answers to urban congestion, wherein workers will not have luxury of private cars nor be able to own their homes. Where they will shop for all of their necessities in stores within the community. Where they will be shuttled by light rail from their apartments to nearby factories and back again.
Sound like the world you’d want your kids to inherit? That’s what will happen if we allow the corporate-political machine to co-opt our public education system. It is time for revolution. All you teachers who want to quit, why not stand together and fight the machine. Fifty years ago, people hit the streets in protest and helped achieve civil rights and brought about the end of the Vietnam War. We did it before, we can do it again.
The time to act is NOW