Sherry Robinson writes, “That sucking sound you hear is our future going down the drain.” (Rio Grande Sun, page A7, Aug. 20, 2009, “One Person Education Task Force”) After reading this sad diatribe on the education of our children, I think a more appropriate comment would be, that flushing sound you hear should be Robinson’s “Report from a One-Person Education Task Force” going straight into the toilet where it belongs.
Did she really write, “some children should be allowed—even encouraged to drop out of school”? And who I wonder, would she propose make the decision as to which children should be encouraged to drop out? Especially when a lack of a high school diploma means an almost certain a life of poverty and misery. Perhaps the self appointed, “One Person Education Task Force” could make that call along with her other self righteous and sanctimonious pronouncements about the state of the public schools.
I was one of those children who was not only encouraged to drop out, I was given an engraved
invitation-which I graciously accepted. It wasn’t until I ran into someone in my life who was
able to look past teenage rage and told me I was someone who could achieve an education
and actually encouraged me to go back to school, that I did.
College seemed an even further stretch, but I did that too. And by the time, the dean of the law school told me maybe I really wasn’t cut out for law school after all, that was all I needed to hear to make me remember how many times I had heard that same message. But over the years I had learned the incredible skill of translating that negativity into the phrase, “Just watch me, chump.”
The whole basis for Robinson’s incredibly biased opinion seems to be the experience of her son who apparently didn’t get a close enough look at the educational system through his internship when he was supposed to be learning what a real teacher is. What a wake up call for him. Too many students in a class with too few books. Surprise, surprise. He likes the children but hates the system. Take the rose colored glasses off and smell the bacon, dude.
The one-man salvation show is not what the education system needs. Our education system needs committed teachers who are willing to work in the tough, underprivileged schools. Those teachers are the real heros and they don’t just “like the children”, they love them-because they are our future. And they need us now, more than ever.
Contrary to Robinson’s incredibly insensitive dribble, “Not every wounded soldier can be saved on the battlefield,” students are not wounded soldiers on a battlefield to be viewed as collateral damage for “the good of other students and teachers”. Make no mistake. We’re fighting a war for these children. So step up and strap up.
These children are worth fighting for. Not some of them, not just the easy ones, not only the smart ones -but all of them. The ones with the reading disabilities and speech problems and families with drug problems. They are children, our children, your neighbor’s children, everyone’s children.
And guess what? Teenagers are by definition rude and even profane at times. I know I was. Why? My mom died, and I was madder than hell. But if people who write these kinds of columns that emit the sour smell of arrogance and entitlement could learn to have empathy and compassion for where these children come from and what they have to deal with, they might just see the human beings struggling to grow up in a world that too often looks at them as collateral damage in the war against the real enemies of education: ignorance and intolerance by people like Robinson.
If superior teachers like Robinson’s son can make the same pay as they do in the tough schools, let them. That’s where they belong-working with children who are privileged enough to have a socio-economic cushion and who never have to go to school hungry, with a single parent who spends most of the time trying to figure out how to survive in this ever worsening economy. But make no mistake about it. Those teachers are the real drop outs.
Kit Ayala is a Santa Fe resident and former prosecutor for the first district attorney’s office.