A Teacher's Plea to President Obama
I became a teacher after Supply Side economics and the Reagan era banking collapse devastated our neighborhood. Three hundred houses were abandoned and the "Hoova" set of the Crips set up dozens of crack houses in vacant properties.
Mr. President, I became attached to the children in the drug houses and became an inner city teacher. Twenty years later, not long after I returned from campaigning for you in Iowa, the Great Recession hit. The economic collapse of 2008, however, was not nearly as disastrous in my community.
Why not?
We were rescued by your American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Your Stimulus also saved 100,000 teachers' jobs. President Obama, I sincerely thank you.
Sadly, President Bush's and your education policies had the opposite effect on schools. NCLB-type testing and choice drove my run-of-the-mill Oklahoma City low-income school into The Wire, as brutal as the worst in Baltimore. By the time you took office, accountability-driven reform had turned our neighborhood schools into classic examples of schools with such intense concentrations of children from generational poverty and trauma that they became virtually impervious to improvement (at least by the policies that were allowed during your presidency.)
You had far more pressing issues on your mind when you agreed to sacrifice my students and profession to the test, sort, and punish regime known as corporate school reform. You had your political reasons for endorsing the mass dismissal of teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and across the nation, even though the overwhelming majority of us were guilty of nothing more than choosing to teach in schools where it is harder to raise test scores.
Worse, your Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put NCLB-type testing on steroids. That discredited law only subjected 20 to 25% of our nation's classrooms to bubble-in accountability. Under Duncan, nearly 100% of teachers and students are subject to some sort of punishment by some sort of bogus metric. So, even though your A Teacher's Plea to President Obama | John Thompson: