Will Hillary Throw Teachers
in High Poverty Schools
Under the Bus? By Dr. Mark Naison, PhD "Some of the best teachers in the country
work in schools where students don’t test well.
They nurture, they inspire, they protect and
guide students whose lives are filled with hardship.
Punishing them for their choice is
the height of cynicism."
When
I was doing community history projects in Bronx schools—they were all
pushed out when the testing mania struck and New York City’s Bloomberg
Administration started assigning schools letter grades—I met some
incredible teachers in schools whose test scores marked them as
troubled or “failing.” Most of them were women, many of them Black and
Latino, quite a few products of neighborhoods similar to the ones they
were teaching in.
When presented with an opportunity to add excitement and energy to
their classes with innovative history research, they took what I put
before them and reinvented it in creative projects that reached
students and their families in ways I could never have imagined.
So,
when I hear that Hilary Clinton plans to close public schools
throughout the nation whose performance is “below average,” I think of
those Bronx teachers. Basically, she is willing to throw them—and
teachers like them—under the bus because they chose to teach in high
poverty schools. Nothing could be more unfair or more counterproductive.
Some of the
best teachers in the country work in schools where students don’t test
well. They nurture, they inspire, they protect and guide students whose
lives are filled with hardship. Punishing them for their choice is the
height of cynicism.
BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Dr. Mark Naison, PhD
is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham
University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the
author of three books and over 100 articles on African-American
History, urban history, and the history of sports.
