Connecticut Local Politics

In my “other” life (the one that actually provides me with $ and, get this, FAN MAIL from time to time) I write books for young people. One of my author colleagues, Jordan Sonnenblick, is a successful author of books for teens, and, until recently, a middle school language arts teacher.
Given the recent hoo ha on this blog about NCLB, I thought it worthwhile to post a link to this op-ed Jordan wrote about NCLB, and how it drove him from the teaching profession.

It’s well worth taking the time to read the whole piece, but here are a few of the highlights.

I should be marching away from my classroom in victory, but instead I feel like slinking away in the dead of night. People talk to writers all the time about the triumph of leaving one’s day job, but I didn’t have a day job—I had a 24/7 career. So why am I running away?

Four words: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.

I’d been on the fence for months over this decision, until yesterday, when I went to have lunch with my dear, old friends on the eighth-grade team at my school. I was in the building for less than two hours, and three different people took me aside to give me unasked-for life advice: my mentor in the English department, an administrator, and a librarian. Eerily, all three said virtually the same thing: “Don’t come back. It would kill you.”

No Child Left Behind has done to my school what it has done to untold thousands of urban schools. Our arts programs are gutted, our shop courses are gone, foreign languages are a distant memory. What’s left are double math classes; mandatory after-school drill sessions; the joyless, sweaty drudgery of summer school. Our kids come to us needing more of everything that is joyous about the life of the mind. They need nature walks, field trips, poetry, recess.

What they’re getting is workbooks. Never mind the shameless profiteering that underlies the testing system. Never mind the fact that the state tests are insanely invalid, that they’re graded by the lowest bidder, that the test-prep materials are rushed to press by fly-by-night companies, riddled with errors and stinking of the absolute worst in half-baked pedagogy. Never mind that the expense of hiring these companies as “consultants” sucks the lifeblood out of libraries and tech budgets. And never mind the ultimate irony, that replacing every good aspect of school with test prep will undoubtedly result in lower test scores. The reality is that the leaders of this great nation are working very hard to turn our children into undereducated test drones. And we are letting them get away with it.

As a lover of literature and the written word, and a true believer that a putting the right book in a child’s hand at the right time can make a difference, this is why I understand Jordan’s decision to give up the security of the day job, the health insurance, the regular paycheck (things that as a freelance writer I can only dream about):

What I loved most about teaching middle school English was the books, the stories, the poems. I loved putting great thoughts into the hands of my students, and watching what I really, truly saw as a holy communion between child and author, with me as the officiant. And it kills me to know that if I went back, I wouldn’t have much time to teach literature, which is increasingly seen as a frilly extra. So I’m leaving the classroom because my colleagues were right: going back without time for books would kill me. But it hurts very, very much to know that, in my absence, the classroom is killing my peers and my would-be students anyway.

One of the most important quotes a teacher gave me when I was in school – in fact, it was the topic of my entrance essay to Duke – was that “a child is not a vase to be filled by a fire to be lit.”

NCLB is creating a nation of vases being filled with information on how to take tests, instead of the bright, thinking, creative sparks we need to take this nation forward into the 21st century. It’s a crying shame. And we’re losing great teachers like Jordan because of it.