Increasingly teachers are speaking out against school reforms that
they believe are demeaning their profession, and some are simply
quitting because they have had enough.
One letter of resignation from a veteran teacher, Gerald J.
Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse,
N.Y. was shared in a recent Washington Post article.
Read the
entire letter here.
He talks about the changes over the years and how the teaching profession and the classroom have become devalued and pushed by testing to get funding.... here is an excerpt:
In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us
by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education.
The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by
failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against
this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad
reluctance that I say our own administration has been both
uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff
and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are
Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been
exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing
to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so
constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a
conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at
every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence
and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale.
He closes his letter with this:
After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my
profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as
though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a
timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the
goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and
all of the rules altered.
For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the
blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, “Words Matter” and
“Ideas Matter”. While I still believe these simple statements to be
true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have
any inkling of what they mean.
[Source]
