Don't Worry. I didn't send it.

Dear President Obama,

Three years ago I trudged through cold spring rain with a toddler strapped to my back to canvass voters in Manchester, NH on your behalf. In the months that followed my husband and I wrote letters, made phone calls, knocked on doors, hosted parties, did anything we could to secure your seat in the executive office with the hope (Remember “hope”?) that you would defend the working class from the tyranny of corporate interests. We have continued to defend your decisions against world peace, the environment, and health care as necessary compromises in a complicated world. However, your recent stance on education is indefensible. It is clear to me that in this instance you and Secretary Duncan are leading our nation’s public school system down a dark hole, opened by the Bush administration, which is becoming deeper with no hope of hitting water and in which the light of day is quickly fading.

Research has shown conclusively that the American public education system is not meeting the needs of our ever changing population. The challenge of this generation is to identify the root causes of this apparent deterioration and then how to evolve our system accordingly.

I am most concerned with your administration’s support of the current rhetoric that true reform will only come when we hold teachers “accountable” and then get rid of the ineffective ones (“effectiveness” being defined exclusively by test scores). No one denies that accountability is an important component of equity. We need to know how our children are doing in every classroom across the country and ensure that they are all progressing, regardless of zip code, neighborhood or classroom. However, tying teacher performance to test scores will only succeed in deteriorating the validity of these tests as scores are manipulated and managed in order to secure funding and employment for the adults. I also question the ability of a standardized test, as an isolated measurement of progress, to tell a valuable story about the state of the whole child. We are quick to declare that teachers are successful when their students score well on tests, and turn a blind eye to the intricate, textured landscape of a teacher’s true work over the course of a day, or 180 days, or a career’s worth of interactions with children.

My heart broke last week when you endorsed the Central Falls school board’s decision to fire all 93 staff members at the high school. Certainly, the school is failing by current standards, and the union’s resistance to negotiations provoked strong action. Undoubtedly there are teachers in the school who abuse privileges and get away with substandard performance. But to condone the slaughter of an entire faculty in the interest of “change” is both short-sighted and cold-hearted. Teachers are human beings, not interchangeable, expendable parts on an assembly line. You might have at least offered your condolences to these individuals who have been working hard in the trenches of a failed education system for many years. Perhaps you agree with former assistant secretary of education Chester E. Finn Jr.’s council regarding the public school system that we “blow it up.” As with any bomb, there is sure to be civilian bloodshed. But how many intelligent, hard working, well-intentioned, capable teachers will be lost in the purge?

Teachers are the new scapegoats for the current crisis in education. A profession that has long been undervalued in American culture is now being demonized. There are effective or “good” teachers (or perhaps you know them as “high qualified” ones) and ineffective or “bad” teachers. If we just get rid of the bad ones, organizations like The New Teacher Project tell us, and replace them with good ones, children will achieve.

I am one of these “bad” teachers. I have a master’s degree in education from a reputable institution and have taught in a variety of rural and urban schools since 2002. I work on weekends and every evening and often before my two children wake up. I have volunteered on committees, run enrichment programs, attended PTO meetings and school board meetings. I tutor children after school and every day during my lunch break. I have spent nearly a thousand dollars of my own money each year on my classroom. I have a thick stack of parent letters and student cards that thank me for my time, my compassion, my effort, my impact on their lives. My students learn and progress at their own rates, as quickly as I can usher them along their individual paths, despite a notable lack of adequate counseling resources and support from administrators. Thank God, there are millions of men and women out there like me who are more than willing to have limited economic prospects in return for maximum societal impact. Last week I was fired, presumably for being “ineffective.”

Based on one set of test score data, and one principal’s limited concept of what “good teaching” looks like in the classroom (and with less than a blind eye to my income and benefits package) I have been exiled from the profession. I will be replaced with someone who is cheaper and perhaps more willing to teach test-taking skills for fifteen minutes every day of the school year.

I offer my personal anecdote as an illustration of what will occur in our public schools as we continue this witch hunt for ineffective teachers. Intelligent, hard working, well-intentioned educators, who lack the resources to do their jobs to the best of their ability and to the nation’s standards, will be sacrificed at a great cost to our country’s children and future. Our children and teachers need smaller class sizes, stronger counseling services, rigorous and reasonable curriculum standards, excellent teacher training and mentoring programs, as well as time and money for adequate, ongoing, career-long professional development programs for ALL schools, not just the “failing” ones. We need longer school days and more of them in order to meet expectations. There are many obstacles in the current system to the changes that we need, and we must change the system to eliminate these obstacles. But the teachers themselves are not the problem. We can be part of the solution

Currently hopeless,

A Teacher
Concord, NH