Teacher to Trump’s education pick: Let’s ‘address the elephant in the room.’ It’s you.
He is Patrick Kearney, fspent 25 years as a band director in private and public schools of Iowa, and is a past-president of the Iowa Bandmasters Association and past co-chair of the Iowa Jazz Championships. He was also a founding board member of the Jazz Educators of Iowa. His wife teaches in the Des Moines Public Schools and his son is studying education at Drake University.
Here’s the letter, which first appeared on Huffington Post. Kearney gave me permission to republish it.
Dear Ms. DeVos,I don’t think we’ve really met yet; we are America’s public school teachers. There are about 3.1 million of us. We teach in large urban areas, we teach in the suburbs, we teach in small rural communities, and we teach in some really remote parts of our country. The most important thing to recognize is that we teach every kid who shows up. We don’t pick and choose the types of kids that we will teach, we teach ALL of them.Because we haven’t really had much interaction, we thought it might be nice to share a little bit about the public schools we teach in. First of all, we are very proud of our schools. Public schools today have the highest graduation rate inTeacher to Trump’s education pick: Let’s ‘address the elephant in the room.’ It’s you. - The Washington Post:
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