empty classroom

An empty classroom in a file photo

(Express-Times File Photo)

By Frank Breslin

What is the policy of evaluating teachers on their students’ performance really about? Ostensibly, it is designed to improve public schools by holding teachers accountable. However, by failing to take into account several factors that impede student learning and over which teachers have no control, this policy is, in essence, a punitive measure that demoralizes teachers and drives many of them out of the teaching profession. The result will be the increasing privatization of education and the destruction of America’s public schools.

Moreover, when linked to merit pay, a divide-and-conquer strategy to pit teacher against teacher, this evaluation will also weaken the National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union with its more than three million members, a development not unwelcome to corporate America.

How can public schools, many of which are located in inner-city poverty zones of crime, unemployment, poor housing and drugs, be realistically expected to educate children in such hopeless conditions, when city, state and federal government walked away from these inner cities decades ago?

This is a dark chapter in our country’s history, when Washington, D.C., state capitals and municipal government forsake the poor, writing them off as expendable. The richest nation in the world, the City on the Mountain, has become a third-world country for more than 46 million of its people, who go to bed hungry!

How can teachers educate these children when so many of them come to school hungry, malnourished or sick, without proper health care, and when often not even a school nurse is present? In such bleak environments, in ramshackle classrooms of more than 30 children, how can teachers even begin to motivate children to learn?

The solution to these appalling conditions, which can be laid squarely at the door of government’s abandonment and neglect of millions of its people, is not blaming the poor for their poverty or moral exhortations to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but one that has always been an open secret in Washington: a new Marshall Plan for our inner cities. What has been lacking is moral conscience and political will.

Short-term, what is needed is a massive infusion of funding into these schools to hire more teachers to teach children in smaller classes and offer them rich and diversified programs that will help them grow both as students and persons. Preaching feel-good, self-help rhetoric to spin golden tomorrows from the straw of today only imposes guilt trips on victims of government’s lack of concern. In pressing for social justice abroad, we must first cure ourselves at home.

People live in the short term, not the long term of government’s kicking the can down the road until the next party’s in office. What is needed is a solution today, one that will banish the despair in which children live now.

What isn’t needed is pointing fingers at teachers for “not doing their job,” when their efforts are already stretched to the limit. If we really care about children and their chances for a good education, we will move heaven and Earth to see that they get it. Not just inner-city children, but all of our children, wherever they live. Children are our immortality. If we don’t care for them, who do we care for? What are we about as a nation and people?

Our children are more than worth such a major investment. After all, if we can find untold billions to bail out big banks and Wall Street and billions more for military ventures of dubious nature abroad, we can certainly find billions to invest in our children, our future.

This can be our finest hour — to Halliburtonize America, not just the countries we destroy to later rebuild. "The people don't exist for the king, but the king for the people!" said John Milton. A nation exists for its people, not the people for the State!

The interests of the people should be paramount. Their wishes should prevail – not those of the wealthy, or corporations, or multi-billionaire Wizards of Oz, who, behind their curtains of secrecy, trash our democracy and play with our lives like their little toy soldiers, while government, which should protect us, does nothing but betray our trust.

The school is the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, heroically trying to hold back the sea. It alone is expected to deal with the lunar landscape of the inner cities and their schools, whose teachers do their best against impossible odds.

Hoping against hope for help to arrive, they never imagined that they, too, would be abandoned by government, which, rather than thank them, now turns on them for “failing their students.”

The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names. There is no “failed schools” problem in America. There is only government’s failed policy of “benign neglect” that has blighted the inner cities and their schools for generations.

It is the horrendous effects of this callous indifference that have consigned millions of school children to their present fate, not teachers who have been left to cope with the wreckage.

Frank Breslin has retired from the public school system, where he taught English, German, Latin and social studies for 40 years.

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