If you want to put children first, you must also put the adults who are working closest with them, their parents and their teachers, first.
The corporate education reformers love to talk about putting students first. Uber-reformer, Michelle Rhee, loves to say it so much she named her multi-million dollar non-profit StudentsFirst. When reformers attack teachers and teacher unions, they say it is because they are putting students first. When they support lawsuits attacking teacher job protections, it is because they are putting students first. The reformy state appointed superintendent in Newark, NJ, Cami Anderson, says that too many adults are getting in the way of her plans to close neighborhood schools and hand them over to charter operators “for the kids.” Even Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, who has sytematically decimated public schools in Philadelphia through budget cuts, claimed he was putting students first with an agreement to raise a cigarette tax to aid Philly schools.
To paraphrase the immortal words of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “You reformers keep saying students first, but I don’t think you know what that means.”
Allow me to explain what it means.
