Trading Places
As a participant in an alt-cert program in Chicago, Charlie Bright moved from a career in finance to one in education. He then discovered just how hard, and rewarding, his new profession could be.
It’s a crisp October morning, and the sidewalk leading to Cameron Elementary School, tucked away on a residential street in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, is nearly hidden beneath a plush carpet of multicolored leaves. Inside the 1,200-student building, cast-iron radiators, their armor thickened over the years by countless coats of paint, hiss furiously as a class of 1stgraders ambles down the wide hallway’s hardwood floors. On the west wall, a 12-foot piece of butcher paper proclaims in large letters, “Cameron students say no to guns,” with the printed and sometimes scrawled names of dozens of children underneath. A girl with beaded braids near the back of the passing line pauses, smiles at me, and points to the banner. “My name’s right there!” she says.
Up two flights of stairs, in Charlie Bright’s 3rd grade classroom, the sound of 25 pairs of scissors gnawing their way through paper fills the air. As students busily cut out alphabet tiles for a “making words” game, the 33-year-old African American teacher, dressed in a blue button-down shirt and pleated khakis, bounces from group to group to check on progress or hurry stragglers. Around the room, bulletin boards and displays of student work provide a glimpse into what the class has been up to: Venn diagrams comparing modes of transportation; drawings of the life cycle of a butterfly; a chart on presidential politics; and colorful campaign buttons for an upcoming class election. One student’s button features a red background with blue balloons around the edges and the slogan “If you want to be free, just vote for Malik.”
I’m visiting Charlie for the first time since the 2002-03 school year, when he was one of 18 first-year “interns” in the Golden Apple Teacher Education alternative-certification program, which I helped coordinate for three years. GATE, which began as a partnership between the nonprofit Golden Apple Foundation and Northwestern University and later expanded to other Chicago-area university sites, provides an accelerated path for career-changing professionals to become...
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