Open Letters To ‘B-List’ Reformers I Know. Part 1: Joel Rose
After two days of pursuit, I finally found him. I had never visited anyone in jail before – had never known anyone in jail before. Most of the people that waited on the visitor’s line with me appeared to be family. Many were children. The children didn’t seem to grasp where they were. Maybe they were just used to it. They played with each other so enthusiastically that their mothers demanded that they settle down. This was a happy place, this prison.On line with the families, I seemed out of place. As a young Jewish man in khakis and a button-down shirt, I looked like I must be a lawyer, which I was, though not the lawyer of the person I was visiting. An obvious rookie at this, I hadn’t even filled out the visit request slip properly. I then nearly found myself in the holding room when I set off the metal detector, accidentally attempting to smuggle in my cell phone.Finally permitted onto the elevator, I ascended to the fourth floor. The glass holding cage in the center of the visiting room was similar to ones I had seen in the movies except that instead of using telephones, prisoners and visitors communicated through a small tin grating that they both talked and listened through, making for awkward conversation as each person had to constantly alternate between having his ear or mouth pressed against the opening.An attractive woman in pink exchanged sweet nothings with her boyfriend. Another woman visited her man in the neighboring position. “Have you seen your other girlfriend?” she asked, as he clenched his lips and shook his head. Some visits were more fun than others.As I waited for him to enter the glass-enclosed room, I braced myself for the shock of seeing him, so different, after seven years. The last time I saw Victor Medez was at his fifth grade graduation. He was my student – one of seventy-five students I taught in my three years as a public school teacher in Houston. Part of the reason I was at the jail that day was to fulfill a promise.My first year as a teacher, I made a lot of promises to my fifth grade class. I promised to teach them fractions. I promised to take them on a field trip to the IMAX. I promised to keep the class under control. After hundreds of broken promises like these, I could understand why the kids would be skeptical when, at the end of the year, I promised to see each of them again in seven years at, I presumed, their high school graduation.During my tenure in Houston from 1992 to 1995, The Houston Chronicle continually reminded me that the students I taught, inner city students, were, statistically speaking, not expected to succeed. When I taught my class elementary statistics and probability, I included a lesson on how numbers can be manipulated to misrepresent data. The numbers that condemned my class, I assumed, was a stirring example of this distortion through a statistical, and political lens. The newspapers predicted that my kids would not graduate. I predicted that they would. By keeping the promise I had made seven years earlier, I would find out, first-hand, who was right.–Opening to “Going Back” (unpublished) by Gary Rubinstein and Joel Rose (2000)
A year ago I wrote a series of eight letters I called ‘Open Letters To Reformers I know’ which got a lot of attention, though just two responses. Nowadays I’m hearing a lot about how the disagreeing ‘sides’ in the ed reform debate need to be communicate more. Maybe I will get more responses from some of those big names in education reform who I’ve known, some of them well, some of them just a little. There is a second ‘tier’ of reformers however and though they will probably see the ‘B-List’ as some kind of insult, I think it’s way better to be an ‘B-List’ reformer than an ‘A-List’ one.
Joel Rose is the co-CEO of New Classrooms
, and education ‘non-profit’ that designs and consults on how to use technology to personalize math learning. Formerly called ‘School of One’ when Rose created it as an employee of the NYC DOE, the new program is called ‘Teach to
, and education ‘non-profit’ that designs and consults on how to use technology to personalize math learning. Formerly called ‘School of One’ when Rose created it as an employee of the NYC DOE, the new program is called ‘Teach to 
