Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’
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.
Here is one resignation letter from a veteran teacher, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y.:
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As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and educators on the planet.
I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.
A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. 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. The repercussions of these ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable in our careers and in the education of our children?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/06/teachers-resignation-letter-my-profession-no-longer-exists/?tid=pm_local_pop
= new reply since forum marked as read
...not much lies ahead if we continue to depend on the same system. Einstein was right. It is crazy to do the same disastrous things over and over again and expecting a different (beneficial) outcome. But it's also a classic lemons-2-lemonade situation. Every tragedy is a victory turned inside-out. If you can figure out how to do it.
- What is needed is for good teachers to start their own schools. And thanks to GREED and POLITICIANS, they can.
Cooperative-run schools
I left in 1989...
Two of my three sisters left after several years as well.
A termination is only a termination if teachers go through a "due process" hearing and "lose," which they almost always do because these sham tribunals are more often than not rigged in a district's favor. Few teachers recommended for firing ever go through them, and many teachers who do didn't do anything wrong but chose not to take a settlement for fear it is an admission of guilt. They also want the right to sue a school district in court.
A non-renewal is the firing of a person who doesn't have a continuing contract (misnamed "tenure" . A principal can fire this person for any reason at all or no reason, as long as the person isn't in a protected class.
A "settlement" in a resignation isn't a true settlement as in a court settlement. It is, in fact, a separation package negotiated with a school district in lieu of a dismissal. The vast majority of teachers who are recommended for "dismissal" take these agreements with gag orders not to talk about them or to sue them in court. Teachers take these fake "resignations" in some mistaken hope they have a better chance of getting a job than if they go through the sham hearings. There is no evidence at all it helps their chances of getting future employment. The remainder of teachers pushed out of the field take early retirements, if they qualify.
A RIF is a true layoff. So is a temporary contract that isn't renewed when it is grant-funded or is a position that is being temporarily filled while the incumbent is out on leave.
School districts have a whole arsenal of methods to get rid of teachers they don't like. It is a very easy process, indeed, to get rid of them.