Freedom Writers arrives at local movie screens this weekend, putting another hero teacher out there as a model, teaching us all that even poor, tough kids from troubled schools can achieve great things, if only someone will take the time to get through to them some important lessons about life.
Frankly my dear, we don’t need another hero teacher.
But I’m not the first to think that. Bronx 10th-grade history teacher Tom Moore wrote an opposite-editorial page piece published today in the New York Times — Friday, January 19, 2007 (free subscription required, and free probably only for a week).
He writes:
While no one believes that hospitals are really like “ER” or that doctors are anything like “House,” no one blames doctors for the failure of the health care system. From No Child Left Behind to City Hall, teachers are accused of being incompetent and underqualified, while their appeals for better and safer workplaces are systematically ignored.
Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.
He’s right. Go read it. (Still working out solutions for middle schools . . . perhaps this weekend.)
Tip of the old scrub brush to reader R. Becker.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Walsh makes a good point, but one that is not on point to what Mr. Moore says. I link to the Freedom Writers Foundation above in the hopes people will go see.
Moore’s point is that we cannot rely on a few heroic teachers bucking the system either to achieve outstanding schools or to realize in a good way the potential of kids now turned off of and turned off by schools. We don’t have enough heroes in teaching. We don’t have enough time. The heroes who go into teaching tend to drop out after five years or so.
There is something wrong organically with our schools. That Erin Gruwell’s story is not common is a symptom of the problems; that Gruwell had to leave teaching and set up a foundation is another symptom.
There are a lot of good teachers out there still working, but they are not respected by the students, public at large, nor especially by policy makers (my time in national education policy is a few years ago, true, but I see little change for the better especially in this administration). W. Edwards Deming wrote extensively about the tendency in business to discover an error, and then fire the person closest to it, the person determined by management to be “responsible.” But the truth is, Deming argued, that 85% of what happens wrong on the front lines is management’s fault, and firing the person closest to the actual error only perpetuates the committing of the error.
Is there any evidence that Gruwell’s school sought someone like her to replace her when she resigned? Has the district invited Gruwell back to set up a program to save all the students like the ones she taught directly?
Before Gruwell it was Jaime Escalante, and a principal with a baseball bat in New Jersey. There are other examples in literature of the lone ranger teacher riding to the rescue of a few kids.
We need an army of such rangers, backed by their administrators, staying in the traces for 15 and 20 years.
Is there any hope for anything close to that?
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You might want to consider reading “The Freedom Writers Diary” to help formulate your opinion of the movie “Freedom Writers” and Erin Gruwell.
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Will this make my No Child Left Behind stocks on trendio rise? http://www.trendio.com/word.php?language=en&wordid=2254
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