How I Joined Teach for America —and Got Sued for $20 Million

City Journal ^ | Winter 2003 | Joshua Kaplowitz

[Valin]

It was May 2000, and the guy at Al Gore’s polling firm seemed baffled. A Yale political-science major, I’d already walked away from a high-paying consulting job a few weeks earlier, and now I was walking away from a job working on a presidential campaign to do . . . what?

Well, when push came to shove, I didn’t want to devote my life to helping the rich get richer or crunching numbers to see what views were most popular for the vice president to adopt. This wasn’t what my 17 years of education were for.

My doctor parents had drummed into me that education was the key to every door, the one thing they couldn’t take away from my ancestors during pogroms and persecutions. They had also filled me with a strong sense of social justice. I couldn’t help feeling guilty dismay when I thought of the millions of kids who’d never even tasted the great teaching—not to mention the supportive family—I’d enjoyed for my entire life.

I told the Al Gore guy, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Weird as he might have thought it, I had decided to teach in an inner-city school.

Five weeks later, I found myself steering my parents’ old Volvo off R Street and into a one-block cul-de-sac. There it was: Emery Elementary School, a 1950s-ugly building tucked behind a dead-end street—an apt metaphor, I thought, for the lives of many of the children in this almost all-black neighborhood a mile north of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. I had seen signs of inner-city blight all over the neighborhood, from the grown men who skulked in the afternoon streets to the bulletproof glass that sealed off the cashier at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. This was the “other half” of Washington, the part of the city I had missed during my grade-school field trips to the Smithsonian and my two summers as a Capitol Hill intern.

I parked the car and bounded into the main office to say hi to Mr. Bledsoe, the interim principal who had hired me a few weeks before. As he showed me around the clean but bare halls, my head filled with visions of my students happily painting imaginative murals under my artistic direction. I peered through windows into classrooms, where students were bent over their desks, quietly filling out worksheets. I smiled to myself as I imagined the creative lessons I would give to these children, who had never had a dynamic young teacher to get them excited about scholarship the way I knew I could. Their minds were like kindling, I reflected; all they needed was a spark to ignite a love of learning that would lift them above the drugs, violence, and poverty. The spark, I hoped, would be me.

As the tour ended and I was about to leave, Mr. Bledsoe pulled me aside. “The one thing you need to do above all else is to have your children under control. Once you have done that, you’ll be fine.”

Fine. But as I learned to my great cost, that was easier said than done.

[isthisnickcool]

Gads! I read the whole thing. Amazing.

[SuperLuminal]

Another liberal a__hole gets his eyesopened.......good!

[expatpat]

This is an old one.......but probably worth reposting.

[Lil'freeper]

Gads! I read the whole thing. Amazing.

Me too. Isn't it amazing how the mandate requiring children with disabilites to be placed in the "least restrictive environment" (as cited by an administrator in the article) for education has morphed into a catch-all excuse for anarchy in schools?

Also illustrates why teachers, many of whom disdain unions, join the NEA- millions of dollars in liability insurance. Only a fool would teach without a safety net like that these days.

[MoralSense]

bump

[Blood of Tyrants]

It all depends upon control. If you aren't allowed to control the trouble makers, there will be no learning in the class. Bring back coporal punishment and institute a "loser pays" tort system and every crappy school in the US will turn around in a year.

[Valin]

The nuns who taught me back many many years ago had a little different idea of just what "least restrictive environment" meant.

[Perseverando]

A very worthy BTTT!

A lengthy, but very worthwhile read, especially if you still have some hope that public schools can provide any semblance of an education.

[Mr. K]

A well written and stunning look at the inside of an inefective school and its incompetant politically correct principal.

[PhilipFreneau]

This teacher's plight demonstrates what I have long believed: that liberalism in school administration and public policy is the sole cause of the deterioration of public schools. Only a fool would blame the teachers (no offense, President Bush). My wife is a public school teacher, and she is so fed up at having her hands tied by leftist administrators and brain dead parents that she has become a firm believer in home schooling.

[Lil'freeper]

I've come to believe (after several years teaching chemistry in a public and a private high school) that the least restrictive environment for any student is not necessarily in a classroom and that it should be up to parents to decide where that environment is, not a school "system".

[Warhammer]

Its partially because of stuff like this that I homeschool. That and the opportunity that my wife and I have to make sure that they indeed do learn and that their love of learning is not squelched by the need to survive.

[SJSAMPLE]

[Mr. Burns]Excellent.[/Mr. Burns]
The self-genocide is all going to plan.
Really. Do we even need a KKK, anymore?

[Question_Assumptions]

Recording security cameras. In all classrooms. With the recordings stored off-site. It's amazing how school bus cameras and police car cameras have put an end to lies about what really happened. It could work here, too. Oh, an a camera in the principal's office, as well.

[Valin]

The problem with liberalism is way too often their cure is worse than the disease.
A question I've been asking lately is, on the big questions when has the left been right about anything in the last...say 30 years?
So far no answer.
That being true, why should I believe them about anything?

[Question_Assumptions]

I don't know. I don't think the Klan was smart enough to come up with a better plan to destroy black families and keep them in poverty than what the liberals have done trying to "help" them.

[Valin]

You and a great many others.

[jz638]

The more I read about the "Teach for America" program, the better my opinion of it gets. If it wasn't for that experience, Joshua Kaplowitz would believe to this day that inner city schools just need more federal money for better teachers.

[The Glaswegian]

I'm glad someone reposted this...read it a couple of weeks ago...absolutely worth the read.