What I Learned by Writing a Book about Teaching

Six years ago, I sat down to write a book about teaching. I already knew a great deal about teaching.

I spent most of my adult life in a classroom.

I admit here, as well as in my book, that I knew nothing about heart surgery and almost nothing about plumbing. I served with the Marines during the Vietnam War. I’m no hero though. I was a clerk in a Camp Pendleton, California supply unit. I don’t know diddly about combat. So I don’t pretend I do.

I only know teaching.

Writing a book about the art of educating young people proved interesting and I learned a great deal in the process. For starters, I learned that people who know nothing about teaching seem compelled to write books about teaching.

Most of these books add nothing to a reader’s understanding and the worst (and there are many) may do actual harm.

It would be no difficult task to provide a long list of examples, but let me limit myself to but one. If you’ve never heard of Wendy Kopp, she’s the young college graduate who founded Teach for America back in 1989. Kopp quickly became the darling of school reform circles, quoted widely in magazines and newspapers, showing up with alarming frequency on cable news TV. Kopp was always happy to offer insights about teaching. Most of those insights centered on the idea that we needed to get more smart people—people like Kopp, who attended an Ivy League institution—into teaching. To paraphrase her message, the teachers we had were just dumb.

Kopp has three books to her credit, including Teaching as Leadership, which I find amazing. Not the book. No. I mean the fact Kopp has written three books about teaching without teaching.

(Call me Dr. Viall! I hereby claim to be a renowned heart surgeon!)

I don’t know if my particular book will sell. I do know I know more about teaching than Ms. Kopp and probably the top fifty “school reformers” combined. (Millions of frontline educators could say the same.) And I’m proud of the message I’m trying to relay. Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching is intended as a defense of all good teachers, one classroom combat veteran’s attempt to explain what good teachers can do—which is much—and what they cannot do without help.

I already knew, the day I began writing, that there was potential in every child. I already knew that my job as an educator had been to tap that potential in every way possible. What I learned while writing was that reformers like Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee held frontline educators to an impossible standard. “Good” was not good enough. Even “very good” was akin to failure.

Oh no. They were prone to making bold statements like: “Every child deserves an excellent teacher.”

(More on that in a moment.)

Even a gifted writer like Amanda Ripley could offer up simplistic lines like the following, in a Time magazine article about education in 2010: “We now know that it is possible to teach every kid, even poor kids with wretched lives, to read, write and do math and science at respectable levels.”

I knew, of course—because I actually taught—that it was possible to teach every child. I had always felt that in my bones. I had lived by that philosophy in my own classroom for thirty-three years. But I knew what millions of dedicated teachers know, what Ripley did not, because Ripley never taught. “Yes, you are right,” we might have told Ms. Ripley, “but we have been in combat, so to speak, and you have not. It is possible to teach every child. It certainly isn’t easy and trying with all your heart and soul can wear you out.”

I remember a young man in my class back in 1981. He was absent 140 days in seventh grade alone. In the end, we had little choice but to fail him, because citing parents to court on four separate occasions didn’t help.

The next year he missed another 108 days.

Was it possible to teach him? In theory, it was. In reality, however, it was a daunting, depressing challenge. It’s easy to say, as a magazine writer, that it is possible to teach every child. It can be hard if you’re a teacher in this situation—unless, maybe, you possess some telepathic power.

What did I learn while writing to add to what I already knew from experience? I learned that these kinds of attendance problems were a national problem. I learned that researchers at Johns Hopkins University were reporting 10-15% of all U. S. students piled up a month or more of unexcused absences annually.

I kept hearing school reformers insist that every child deserved an excellent child. I kept wondering. Why isn’t anyone saying, “Every child deserve an excellent pediatrician?” Or: “Every child deserves excellent parents.”

At the same time, I learned our representatives in Congress had no idea what they were doing when it came to writing education policy.  These were the boneheads who gave us No Child Left Behind in 2002, who promised every child would be proficient in reading and math by 2014, who could not fix that flawed law even after it had clearly and catastrophically failed. And I learned that our lawmakers have spent eight years trying to recraft NCLB and still can’t agree on details.

What else did I learn?

I learned that pundits agree. Teachers are the problem in U. S. education. Kopp and many others think we’re stupid. Some say we’re too protected by unions. Some enjoy insulting teachers for the fun of it. Brent Staples, for example, put a finger on the “problem” in our schools when he claimed in a 2010 editorial that, “Public schools generally do a horrendous job of screening and evaluating teachers, which means that they typically end up hiring and granting tenure to any warm body that comes along.”

(I had to put down the paper for a moment and check my temperature to see if I could still be a teacher. Okay: 98.6°. I still could.)

I knew the day I retired in 2008, that I had always loved teaching. I knew, because students told me, that I was good in the classroom. I knew, by observing peers, and talking to students and parents, that most of them were good too. Excellent? Yes, some were excellent too.

Generally, I think excellence is rare in any field.

I do know I never once looked down a hallway at school and thought to myself, “Teachers. Yeah. We’re the problem.”

Here’s what I knew before I wrote single word for my book. I knew the boy who spent months living in a rusted out station wagon was going to struggle in school no matter what members of the staff at my wife’s school might do.

I learned by writing that 2.5 million American children were homeless for at least part of every year.

I learned that reformers insist “poverty” is an excuse teachers trot out so they can evade responsibility for failing to educate every child. That’s what Joel I. Klein, chancellor of New York City Schools, said in 2009. And, again, it almost goes without saying Klein never taught at all.

Klein’s big idea was to grade schools. I thought we might need to talk about “grading parents” or “grading society,” too.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a former Marine. I believe in the power of motivation. I knew that my motivation as a teacher meant much. I also knew I did not teach in a vacuum. I knew education was a stool with three legs. I knew educators were one. Students were a second. Parents were a third.

Unlike all the arrogant school reformers, who offer up bold plans, but never bother or even dare to lend a hand, I knew we couldn’t improve education if all we planned to do was “hold teachers accountable.”

I knew that could never work.

I knew, because I met thousands of parents in the Ohio community where I worked, that most moms and dads were good, just as most educators were good. I knew some parents were excellent, too. I also knew parents were like a shadow, their influence and the values they inculcated in their offspring following them to school.

I knew, because I had tried teaching, that the boy whose schizophrenic mother came to my wife’s school and tried to kill the principal with a large butcher knife must face terrible problems in the home.

I knew the girl in my class who had been sexually abused by her father and older brother had problems that I might not be able to solve.

I would often wonder what we were going to do—as a society—to help children who suffered terribly, not in school, but at home. What were we going to do for the infant whose father beat her and stuck her in a freezer to stop her from crying? For the toddler whose mother filmed her smoking marijuana?

(Go to YouTube and search: “Pot Smoking Toddler” if you want to watch. I find it too depressing to even provide a link.)

You couple multiply these cases out into the millions. Why, then, weren’t all the bold school reformers focusing on parents responsible for three million cases of child abuse and neglect every year?

Yes, every child did deserve excellent teachers. But excellent parents would trump that every time. What about that third leg of the stool?

I already knew (because I had studied my colleagues for years), that principals and school counselors and psychologists were often overwhelmed by complex competing demands. I knew the situation had worsened as the focus on standardized testing grew.

I knew lawmakers at the state and national levels had failed to provide adequate funds, at least for the poorest schools.

I didn’t know—but learned while writing—that the United States had one of the highest poverty rates for children of all the advanced countries on the face of this green and blue earth.

I knew that as a society we did not do enough to help children growing up under trying conditions. I learned while writing that life was hard for all kinds of kids—that 2.7 million children had at least one parent behind bars.

I learned that 23 million Americans over the age of 12, nearly one in ten, were addicted to alcohol or drugs. (This included 1 in every 15 high school seniors who admitted smoking marijuana daily.)

I learned that a plague of prescription drug misuse was sweeping the nation, that in Scioto County, Ohio, 10% of babies were born addicted to drugs. I knew teachers weren’t the only leg to the stool.

I listened to the school reformers talk and talk and talk about how we needed more and more standardized tests. We had to “hold teachers accountable.” I tried to understand how standardized testing was going to fix all this societal mess.

I did learn we spent at least $1.7 billion on standardized testing every year. I wished we could have taken that money and used it to beef up children’s protective services in every city and state in the land.

I knew from seeing the damage in my classroom, and the damage done to my two oldest kids, that even good parents were having increasing trouble—with the American family (including my own) battered by divorce and other negative forces. In 1950, for example, 6% of children in this country grew up in single-parent homes. By 2012 that figure had soared to 35%.

I learned that poverty does matter, not just in schools, but in hospitals, too. When it comes to life expectancy, the richest 10% of American men could expect to live eleven years longer than the poorest 10%.

I learned that in Chicago, Arne Duncan, who went on to be U. S. Secretary of Education, had been credited with “fixing the schools.” Sadly, after he left for Washington those schools didn’t stay fixed at all. Hundreds of school-age kids were shot and wounded every year in the Windy City. Gangs were the main cause.

In 2013, according to NBC News, Chicago had 100,000 gang members. Most were between the ages of 16 and 19.

I thought that seemed like a problem educators alone might not be able to solve, certainly not by “grading schools.”

I learned that critics seemed to have sweet kindergartners in mind when they talked about “saving every child.” I knew none of them had ever had to face down an agitated teen with a gun in a hallway at school. I knew they were not considering children with severe emotional problems. I knew, because I taught, what that could be like. In 1984 I had a young man bring a gun to school to shoot me.

I was lucky in that case; but I suppose we all learned—by watching the bloody news—that violence in America’s schools was rising steadily. I learned that since January 1, 2010, there have been more than a hundred shootings in and around our nation’s schools, with more than 250 teachers, students and bystanders killed or wounded.

I could never figure out how creating more charter schools was a priority, when the halls of the schools we already had were running crimson with blood.

I did learn while writing that school reformers, including the corporate types out to make a few million quick bucks, knew nothing about the problems frontline educators faced. And frankly, I learned that they didn’t really care. (Well, about anything besides money, I mean.) I learned that they blamed tens of thousands of real educators for creating “dropout factories.” These were schools, reformers howled, where teachers were rap-tap-tapping along some diabolical assembly line. We were purposely creating dropouts. The corporate types would stop us. They would create a business model for education that truly worked! (Translation: worked for them.) Secretary Duncan, perhaps the most clueless individual ever to hold his cabinet position, warned that there were 5,000 “dropout factories” spread across the United States.

I kept writing. I kept learning. I learned that pregnant teens were far more likely to drop out of school.

I learned in Ohio, that the law made it illegal for kids to drop out before age 18, without parental permission. Yet, 23,000 Ohio teens walked away from schools every year and never returned.

I learned a great deal more while writing about teaching. But I already knew a lot. I knew that the growing fetish for standardized tests had been crippling education and stifling learning in multiple ways.

I learned by writing, and by talking with hundreds of educators in the seven years since I retired, that the negative effects related to testing were growing worse with every passing season, like a metastasizing brain tumor.

I already knew, because I served with the United States Marines, because I pedaled a bicycle across the United States twice (with my role model Bruce Jennings, a young man who did it in 1976 with only one leg), because I worked with 5,000 teens, that there was one clear path if we wanted to improve what happened in schools.

I already knew everyone involved in education or interested in helping would have to be willing to pedal to reach their goals. I knew that two legs (and sometimes one, and even none) would always suffice.

So I wrote my book.

Now available Amazon.com.

2014: The Year Teachers became Public Enemy #1

MOST TEACHERS WERE probably too busy working with kids to notice. But in 2014 we were declared “Public Enemy #1.”

Who so declared? A group of arrogant fools with no idea what it is like to spend a life in the classroom.

Luckily, as the chart below indicates, the general public still has faith in teachers. When it comes to ethics and honesty, elementary teachers rated higher in a 2013 Gallup survey than almost any other profession. (We were not included in a more recent survey in December 2014.) True, we lost to nurses. But we nosed out doctors and military officers.

Members of Congress, state officeholders and lobbyists (who have a stranglehold on education policy) ranked at rock bottom.

The only profession they beat out was witches.

(In 2014 nurses finished first again at 80%. Members of Congress dropped a point and came in dead last.)

WELL, THEN, WHO DECIDED teachers were the Great Satan? Glenn Beck was one. Campbell Brown was another. Frank Bruni, education writer for the New York Times, was a third.

There were plenty of others.

Beck weighed in with his book: Conform: Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education. It wasn’t just Common Core that left Beck fuming. He also railed against extending the school day in hopes of raising test scores. What really made teachers wince, however, was his reasoning:

There’s also the issue of what our kids would learn with even more hours at school. Many of these educators would relish the opportunity to spend more time feeding students a steady stream of radical, anti-American political ideas, encouraging teen sexual activity, and deemphasizing the importance of traditional values and religion.

Former CNN anchor Brown also had a bee-filled bonnet. Leading the charge against teacher tenure, she left listeners with the impression that this was the gravest problem our nation faced, with the possible exception of Ebola.

Again, her “reasoning” was what shocked: 

In New York City, home to the largest public school system in America, the four-year graduation rate hovers at a dismal 60.4 percent. More distressing: Less than 22 percent of the city’s students graduate college and emerge career ready, and the number drops to 12.2 percent for Hispanics and 11.1 percent for African-Americans.

Despite those statistics, a new teachers’ contract celebrated by political and union leaders offers more frustration. The deal will weaken evaluations of teachers, reduce instructional time, send teachers with disciplinary records back to the classroom, and make it harder to fire a teacher who engages in sexual misconduct with kids.

In August the California Supreme Court rendered a decision which may end tenure in the state. First, the judge in Vergara vs. California ruled that students from low income families often had less-qualified teachers and attended schools which were less safe than schools attended by students from high income families. Therefore, the judge added, a more equitable method of assigning good teachers and a quicker way to fire bad ones was essential.

SECRETARY OF EDUCATION Arne Duncan was thrilled. After all, Duncan likes to tell anyone who will listen: “equal opportunities for education must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher.”

Real teachers, struggling to help real kids attending low income schools, might have pointed out that children from low income families also deserved great neighborhoods to live in....

Great pediatricians to keep them healthy....

That the parents deserved great job opportunities....

And that teachers deserved a great Secretary of Education, one not so utterly and consistently clueless....

Who else decided in the last twelve months that teachers were the root of all evil? Thomas J. Kane, a Harvard economist whose research helped decide the Vergara case, “proved” it with numbers. According to Kane, a poor teacher cost the average child something like sixteen bazillion dollars in lifetime earnings.

So, for god sakes, we had to have excellent teachers in every classroom.

Time piled on, too, with an egregious cover story about bad teachers (“Rotten Apples”). If a reader followed the logic of the article, they came away convinced that millions of feloniously-inclined educators were hiding behind tenure protection. Naturally, Time decided to ask former Washington, D. C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee to comment. Just as naturally, Rhee agreed the Vergara decision would fix a “broken status quo.”

Rhee, for those who don’t recognize her by name, appeared on the cover of Time in 2009. There she stood—looking menacing, broom in hand—indicating she had her own plan to fix a broken status quo. She was going to use that broom to clean up the mess in the schools by sweeping out...of course...all the bad teachers!

During her three years as chancellor, Rhee did indeed fire hundreds of educators when they “failed” to raise test scores. Rhee did reward hundreds who raised scores. She then grabbed her broom and skipped town before news of a huge cheating scandal involving “raised” test scores hit the educational fan.

WHO ELSE WAS LEADING the fight to fix education?

Bill Gates, for one, was hard at work behind the scenes. Unlike Beck, Gates was all for Common Core, even though politicians seemed unable to decide if they were for it—or against it—or for it and then against.

Common Core, as you may recall, was adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia four years ago. But in 2014 lawmakers in Alabama and Ohio were hard at work trying to withdraw from the program. In Mississippi the issue turned out to be “politically radioactive” and the governor called it a “failed program,” even though he once touted it. Georgia dropped out, citing the high costs of all the standardized testing. In Louisiana the governor wanted to rescind approval. The legislature wouldn’t let him. Indiana and Oklahoma pulled out entirely, with lawmakers who voted for it four years before leading the repeal effort.

(Teachers could only shake their heads and wonder if these people had any idea what they were doing.)

The New York Times also kicked teachers in the shins on several occasions. Frank Bruni delivered some of the best blows, agreeing that problems in U. S. education pretty much began and ended with poor teachers. After talking with Mike Johnston, former Teach for America star/turned Colorado lawmaker, Bruni had no doubt the Centennial State had acted wisely in eliminating tenure. Because, with tenure, Johnston told Bruni, there was “no incentive for someone to improve their practice.”

Who else agreed that teachers were the problem? Naturally, Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America (who never taught for America or for the Fiji Islands, either), joined in the kicking with gusto. We needed smart people in every classroom, Kopp clamored. We needed people like Rhee and Johnston and everyone else who signed up with Teach for America!

Of course, one problem with this model boiled down to math. Those who signed on agreed to try to save children for two years. (After that: not so much.) Kopp had to admit that of 47,000 men and women enrolled in the last twenty-five years in the program only 11,000 remained in the classroom last September.

AMANDA RIPLEY also weighed in on the subject, delivering a number of speeches in 2014 to august bodies of non-teachers. Ripley specializes in reporting on education, although she has no personal experience in the classroom, except as an avid student. In The Smartest Kids in the World, And How They Got that Way, she first pinpointed the problem in U.S. education in 2013. Finland, she wrote, had smarter teachers. For that reason, Finnish students scored near the very top in international testing assessments.

(See: PISA scores.)

What could we learn by studying the Finnish model? We could learn that American teachers were numbskulls. That’s why American students scored somewhere in the middle on PISA assessments.

Bruni was at it again in the fall, penning a review of another new book on education, this one by Joel I. Klein, former New York City school chancellor. What factor mattered most in “the education equation?” Surprise, surprise: “Teacher quality.” Insisted Klein: “a great teacher can rescue a child from a life of struggle.” 

This is true, of course. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy—and Klein might find that out if he tried teaching.

(Needless to say, he never will.)

Bruni reminded readers that Klein “oversaw the largest public school system in the country and did so for longer than any other New York schools chief in half a century.” “That gives him a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore,” Bruni insisted. Or to put it plainly, anyone interested in education should jump in a car and drive at breakneck speed to the book store and pick up a copy of Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools.

THEN AGAIN: maybe the potential reader should tap the brakes once or twice. Klein devoted eight years to fixing the New York schools and then he decided he’d was finished. (Most of his life he has been a corporate lawyer.) Plus, Campbell Brown said the New York City Schools still sucked, despite all his efforts! So, if you’ve taught nine years, or fifteen, or thirty-one, you can offer valuable insights because you have “a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore.”

Of course, Bruni never bothered to ask veteran teachers what they thought about pretty much anything.

In 2014, that was all too typical.

With the year drawing to a close, Campbell Brown journeyed to Washington to speak at the convention for the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Without noticing the irony, the Foundation later reported: “At the nation’s premier annual education forum, lawmakers and policymakers were immersed in two days of in-depth discussions on proven policies and innovative strategies to improve student achievement.”

Two measly days. Two measly days—and they knew everything.

So it was, last year, that teachers were labeled “Public Enemy #1” by those who knew nothing about what it meant to work in a classroom.

THESE FOOLS TALKED and talked and talked about what had to be done to save every child. Meanwhile, they left all the saving to real teachers.

***

If you liked this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon.

Experts for America: Like Teach for America, only Better!

Project 98.6°.

(Dateline: Washington, D.C.) Today, for the second time in less than a month, the U.S. education establishment was rocked by stunning news (See: NFL Adopts Common Core Playbook.) A secret committee of twenty-five veteran teachers, known as Project 98.6°, and working at the behest of President Barack Obama, today announced results of their deliberations.

Nancy Potts, spokesperson for the group, and a classroom veteran of nineteen years, announced a new federal initiative called “Experts for America.”

The program is meant to mirror “Teach for America.” 

Speaking to a gathering of school reform experts, executives of companies hoping to increase their role in public school education and concerned politicians hoping to extend their tenure in office, Potts noted that the time to solve the nation’s school crisis was now.

“All the big names in school reform will be involved,” she noted. “Bill Gates. Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for America. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.”

These remarks were met with thunderous applause. America’s children would finally be saved! 

All of them!

“Every expert in this auditorium will play a role,” Potts continued, with just a hint of disdain. “Joel I. Klein, former chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, you will have a chance to teach. Brent Staples, editorial writer for the New York Times, Richard Whitmire, acclaimed education author, Davis Guggenheim, producer of Waiting for Superman, yes, all of you will have a real chance to teach. Michelle Rhee – the most experienced expert among you, will be your mentor and colleague.”

Potts had trouble stifling a laugh.  

Quickly, she turned the microphone over to another member of the secret group, Mr. Horace Mann, an Ohio middle school history teacher for the last twenty-four years.

“First, let me tell you what an honor it is to address you all,” Mann began. “Normally, I spend my time in a 25-by-25-foot room, surrounded by hormone-addled teens. Now, here I am, talking to the men and women who do all the talking about fixing America’s schools.

“When our group first met,” he added, “we began by asking, ‘What would be the best way to improve America’s schools?’

“We heard what all of you were saying. What we really needed, you said, was better teachers. Mr. Staples, you have no idea how much you helped. When you reviewed Mr. Guggenheim’s movie, you wrote: ‘Public schools generally do a horrendous job of screening and evaluating teachers, which means that they typically end up hiring and granting tenure to any warm body that comes along.’”

“That was when we decided to call ourselves Project 98.6°,” Ms. Potts interjected helpfully, again trying her hardest not to laugh.

Mann continued. “Oh, yes. Mr. Bloomberg, we heard you too. When you said the biggest problem in education was teachers hired “from the bottom 20% of their [college] classes, and not of the best schools” we stood in awe of your epic brilliance. We listened to all of you and suddenly it was perfectly clear. Who better to save the children than you here in this audience today?”

“So we came up with a plan: ‘Experts for America,’” Potts noted happily.

“With the aid of the Selective Service and approval from President Obama,” Mann explained, “a new draft will be instituted. All education experts between the ages of 23-75, all writers of books about education, all executives of companies profiting from ties to public schools, will be subject to call to active duty.”

“We know this may come as a shock for most of you. But you will be committing to work for ten years – minimum – in the toughest public schools. None of that sissy two-year stuff like ‘Teach for America.’” Mrs. Potts smiled.

“Ten years… I mean…you are committed to saving kids? Right?”

“Here are a few assignments we already know,” Mann continued. “Mr. Bill Gates, you will teach students with severe behavior disorders at Marvin Gardens High School in Seattle. You will be replacing a teacher who was assaulted last May and has not recovered from a broken nose and jaw.”

“No, no,” Gates was heard to shout from a front row seat. “You don't understand. My education foundation only dispenses advice...”

Mann’s face hardened. “You will do just fine. As for you, Mr. Klein and Mr. Bloomberg, you favored grading schools in New York City. It seems perfectly fitting, then, that you work with some of the 200,000 homeless children in your city. You’ll be evaluated on how they perform on standardized tests. Should they fail to make adequate yearly progress, you will be required to devote another year to ‘Experts for America,’ until you finally get it right.

“We need you, too, Mr. Guggenheim. You made a movie about five wonderful families, all of whom wanted the best education for their kids. You made fixing schools seem simple.

“Now you and Mr. Staples will have the chance. You will work at a special charter school, with children of parents who didn’t sign up for any lottery, who did not care about what school their kids attended. We just picked random kids for you to teach. And trust me when I say, parent conferences are going to be great! You will work with the dad who threatened his daughter with an AK-47 when her grades were low. You will be charged with educating the older son of the man who stuck his six-month-old daughter in the freezer to stop her crying. You will teach a disabled boy, born ten years ago addicted to heroin because his single mother was (and still is) a drug abuser.

“You will have the chance to fix it all. And as a bonus, you will work with the son of the mother who chased the principal out of his school last spring. She was wielding a large butcher knife. That happened at my wife’s school,” Mr. Mann noted.

Guggenheim and Staples both looked stunned.

“Ms. Rhee, you are going back to D.C. to straighten out the mess in one of the schools where you handed out big cash rewards when standardized test scores dramatically improved –where cheating was soon shown to be rampant and wrong answers on test after test after test were erased. And you will be issued special pencils.”

“Yep, no erasers,” Potts interjected.

When Mann added that Whitmire would be drafted to work alongside Rhee – that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would be assigned to a Chicago charter school, working only with teen gang members – that Kopp would be joining him – that executives from Pearson, the money-making, standardized testing-company, would be sent to Florida to teach in a high poverty school – howls for mercy filled the room.

“The time to turn hot air into action…IS NOW!” Ms. Potts shouted into the microphone. “And don’t worry. You’re all so smart!!! Besides, for the rest of us, watching you fix the schools will mean ten years of fabulous fun!”

Mrs. Potts curtsied.

Mr. Mann bowed.

Both smiled broadly and exited the stage. They had other work to do. They had to get back to their home schools and keep helping kids.

Ergo or Lego? I Hate Teach for America

“…ther is many a man that crieth ‘Werre! werre!

That woot ful litel what werre amounteth.”

Geoffrey Chaucer

LET ME BE THE FIRST TO SAY, at least in this public fashion: I hate Teach for America. And because we all know, if we follow current educational debate, that Teach for America candidates are way smarter—and so are going to save us all—let me try to say what I mean in the most erudite fashion. I don’t hate people in Teach for America.

I hate arrogance.

I don’t hate the concept either. I think we can applaud the idea behind TforA: That is, sign up top graduates from top schools like Harvard, Stanford and Yale and clear a path for them to follow to the front of the American classroom.

I taught for 33 years. So, I know that, all else being equal, smart teachers are better than dumb teachers any school day of the week.

Why, then, do I hate Teach for America?

Personally, I loved teaching and in all my years in a classroom would never have allowed myself to hate any child. I don’t use the word “hate” loosely. The young people I know who are in or have tried to get into the TforA program are wonderful young men and women.

What, then, is wrong? To begin with, we have a serious problem in this country when we start from the premise (now accepted by some of the most obnoxious education reformers in America today) that the big problem in schools is idiot teachers.

I see stories about the shooting at Chardon High, here in Ohio, for instance and wonder, “Does anyone believe that all that blood was spilled because some teacher was stupid? You don’t have to be all that gifted intellectually to notice that most problems in education have nothing to do with the mental capacities of the men and women at the fronts of our nation’s classrooms.

Certainly, it’s a gross oversimplification to argue that smarter people can fix all of society’s ills. One might even point out that sometimes the smartest people, i.e. Wall Street leaders, cause our most serious problems. It’s a gross insult, too, to dedicated “regular” teachers, to hint that we could save every child if these garden-variety educators weren’t so infernally ignorant.

If I were to meet a Teach for America candidate on the street today I would wish him or her happiness and success from the moment they first enter the classroom unto the last, thirty years down the road (if they stick it out that long) and they walk out going the opposite way. I would say, “You enter a noble profession and if you give it all you can, if you strain every nerve and sinew, you can shape lives.”

But I would also caution them to remember that just because their SAT scores were higher than average that they should not assume they’re going to be the best teachers. In fact, if your IQ is 130, and the regular teacher’s IQ is a mere 113, but they’ve been fighting the battle to save children for seven years, or fifteen, or thirty-seven, and you only signed up for two, which is all TforA asks, then, I would say, be humble, be humble.

Don’t talk about what a hero you’re going to be until you prove you’re a hero.

It’s a long war we fight to educate the young and bravery is not the exclusive preserve of the most intelligent.

Perhaps you believe I’m over-reacting—nothing more than a crotchety old fart venting.

I'm not anti-intellectual.
I have a daughter at Yale. (Note the hat).
I know what Chaucer meant, however.
So:  I'm anti-arrogance.

On the contrary, I’ve been thinking about this ever since I saw a comment in a column by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. In an article about the declining economic fortunes of America, which he pinned in part on America’s failing schools (and I say, “ergo,” to highlight my own academic credentials, or maybe “presto” or “pesto,” or would it be “Lego”), he turned to Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, for guidance. Kopp told him applications to the program were up in 2009, in part because brilliant young people want to save the day, because “students [are] responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve.”

I’m an old history teacher; and that last word, “solve,” reminds me of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, probably the smartest man ever to hold that cabinet position, a man who thought he knew best how to win the Vietnam War, because, though he never spent a minute in combat—well—he went to Harvard.

Today, Teach for America candidates make up roughly .2 percent of all U. S. teachers. And now somehow those two out of 1,000 are the key to salvation?

It reminds me of old Westerns I watched as a kid. In the climactic scene, we find the wagon train surrounded by redskins. (In today’s more enlightened world: Native-Americans). Arrows fly in all directions. There must be a million Native-Americans circling the pinned down travelers. Suddenly, the sound of a bugle is heard. Thank god, the cavalry is riding hard to the rescue! Look, up over that rise they come, the boys in blue.

Wait a minute. What movie is this? There are only two soldiers. One is the bugler.

Still, they break through the swarming Native-Americans. The pioneers are incredulous. Their leader fumes, “God a mercy, we need more than two crappy soldiers to save us.” To put a point to his sentiment an arrow strikes him in the chest and he dies a gruesome celluloid death.

The bugler reassures the settlers, “Don’t worry, we’ll save you. I’m a graduate of Cornell and my comrade here attended Princeton.”

In the final scene the camera pulls back to reveal all the concerned white faces. This is Hollywood, 1960. So, black and Hispanic pioneers are totally absent. You can see though: with all those arrows flying, that the travelers are dubious.

THE END