Dear
Teachers,
We, the school reformers of America,
have a little job for you. We realize you feel you are busy trying to teach reading,
science and math.
Yes, many of you already come to
work early, stay late, and spend countless hours at home grading papers and
creating lesson plans, too.
We don’t care about any of that that.
We’re school reformers and we love to talk about what you should do.
We expect you to fix the world. We expect you to show us
data, too, to prove when you do. We love data so much we want you to carve out time
from helping children to chart everything you do. Band teachers, count all
musical notes played. Gym teachers, we must know how many jumping jacks your
students performed. Art teachers, how many colors did each pupil use? Don’t
have time to save real children and chart data, too? Maybe you should work a
little harder, you know, tabulate data in your room when you’re normally eating
lunch.
In what ways do we expect you to fix
the world? For starters, you should plug the “school-to-prison” pipeline. You
might doubt this “pipeline” actually exists. You might argue that problems of
society spill into your classrooms,
and not out onto the streets. You might claim the best way to plug the pipeline
would be provide competent legal assistance to all defendants, no matter how
poor, or make sure all American adults have good-paying jobs. You might think a
way to empty the pipeline would be to stop jailing people for non-violent drug
offenses.
We’re
reformers. We don’t care what you think. No. We put this problem all on you.
Oh,
and while you’re at it, could you make sure to keep teaching social studies,
science and health.
You need to get busy—you have lots of
work to do. We expect you to prepare every child
to “compete in a global economy.”
We
love that phrase!
Google “preparing students to compete in a global economy” and see how many hits
you receive!
You
might say, “Wait! How do we prepare students to compete in a global economy if corporations
ship millions of jobs to China and Bangladesh? How do we prepare the kid from Michigan
or Montana to work in an automobile plant if production has been shifted to
Mexico, where workers come cheap?”
Quit
whining, teachers. We reformers don’t want to hear it again.
We
know you can do more! We might be policy wonks, tucked safely away in comfy offices,
with nothing more than cogitating to do. But we have all kinds of suggestions
for what you
should do. We want you to focus on character education: teach the young to
be honest, empathetic, hard-working, and show up for work on time and every
day. We expect you to teach children how to handle money, how to do home repairs
and get the family car running again whenever
it breaks down.
We
want you to address teen dating violence,
too.
To
be frank, there is no end to what we expect of you. You should teach students how
to succeed in marriage.
You might get all sarcastic and say, “Maybe this is the job of ministers and rabbis
and not for us.”
Quit
grumbling. You’ve got more work to do.
We
expect you to teach sex education (even though most Americans can’t decide what
topics schools should include). For example, we want you to teach children to
be accepting
of gay, lesbian and transgender peers. Then we want you to deal with parents
who are furious because you dared.
By the way: Would you mind terribly giving up your union protection while
you’re at it? Because, really, when do parents ever go nuts and what
administrator or school board member ever bent like a willow tree in the face
of parental or public ire???
In
fact, we are going to blame you for the failure
of sex education, too.
Also,
schools should teach self-defense.
It’s a scary world outside the classroom and you can fix it for sure.
That
reminds us: you need to focus on drug prevention education, for sure.
We
want you to teach understanding of different cultures and religions; but if you
bring up Islam, well, parents might blow.
And have we mentioned this lately? We want you to put prayer back
in school!
Being a school reformer is hard.
It’s tough giving so much advice. But we expect you to be rigorous.
You must demand more from your students. We know, as reformers, even though none
of us has ever taught, that the parents we’ve never had to deal with will love
you if you set a high bar. We can say this, with perfect confidence: The more
rigorous you are the more you will reduce the number of dropouts in your schools.
Did we mention: all dropouts are on you?
Of course, we expect the schools to
provide free lunch, and now free
breakfast, as well. We think you should allow kids to eat scrambled eggs with
toast in your classrooms. Then it will be part of your daily grind to help clean
up the mess when everyone is finished and insure class still gets started on
time. (And remember, you have data to chart, so you might not want to waste all
that time you spend going to the bathroom every day.)
By
the way, we expect you to turn the tide on childhood obesity,
even if schools, struggling to raise test scores, have been forced to cut back
time devoted to gym.
What else do we think you should do?
Why, we’re just warming up! We think you should add an hour to your workday and
not complain to your unions, because this is the only way to raise standardized
scores. We don’t want you to balk. We don’t want you to demand extra pay. We
think you should carry around phones so parents can call you, night or day, and
ask any question they like, and all of this for free—you know, like lawyers and
doctors and other professionals do.
It might appear to you that we are
asking for too much. This makes us think you
are the problem in the schools.
We want you to teach students to
write computer code
and expect you to save children who are homeless and have no computers at home—or,
for that matter, homes. You must teach children how to cook,
to file
taxes, to prepare resumes, and to jump in when medical emergencies occur. You
need to show them how to live sustainably, too. You should also teach yoga,
because children today are stressed out. And don’t be babies and run to the union
when parents
freak out.
Well, as famous reformers, giving
all this advice is tuckering us out. We’re going to take a break now. We have
to get ready to attend a gala for reformers, testing company executives,
corporate lobbyists, billionaire philanthropists who dabble at fixing schools
and politicians of varying stripes.
(There won’t be a single real
teacher in the room. We don’t believe teachers know anything about helping
kids.)
At any rate, don’t forget to prepare
every student to pass all the newest standardized tests. Be sure to devote plenty
of time to test prep. Get busy, quick, and create and score a few pre-tests, create
and score a few practice tests, chart every fragment of data, and then spend a
week or two administering all the standardized tests, even if those tests seem
to change every year!
Remember: We expect you to fix the
world and we know you can do it if you follow all our advice.
If you can’t—if you’re not all excellent
at what you do—and no: “good,” or “very good,” don’t cut it in our eyes—well,
we promise, we will find someone who actually cares about kids and pitch you all
out on your ears.
Your friends,
The School Reformers
Your friends,
The School Reformers
PEACE OUT!
 |
| Better get busy! You have some fixing to do! |
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