Teacher: Why I won’t quit despite ‘inane’ reform
A recent post of a teacher’s resignation letter struck a chord with many readers, who wrote more than 1,300 comments, tweeted it some 2,000 times, and “liked” it more than 91,000 times. That teacher, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y., wrote that he felt that school reformers have decimated the teaching profession.Here is a different letter, one from a teacher who refuses to quit despite what she calls “inane” school reform. She is Christine McCartney, an English Language Arts high school teacher in Newburgh Free Academy in Newburgh , NY. She is currently in Finland through a Distinguished Fulbright Award in Teaching, doing a comparative study of our education systems. Finland, of course, has one of the world’s highest achieving school systems, at least according to international test scores. (You can read about Finnish schools here and hereand here.) This appeared on her blog, “an educator’s re-reducation.”
By Christine McCartney
I applaud the resolution of educators such as Gerald J. Conti and Kris L. Nielsen, for
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