“[Education] isn’t a fashion show, a multiracial, multilingual hoe-down (or riot), a social worker’s office, a psychologist’s federally supported laboratory, a soap opera, a Nintendo game, an NCAA farm team, a sex orgy (or sex education class), or a political football. My 8th grade teacher, Sister Marian, summed up real education in most eloquent terms: ‘We work here.’”
—Craig Bowman, a junior high school English teacher and columnist for The Rocky Mountain News
“They had no right to cut it. It was like a police state.”
—Texas beautician Hanna Murgatroyd on learning that her son’s hair was cut by a teacher because its length violated his school’s dress code
“Professors of higher education do not and should not reside in ivory towers or in ivy-covered cocoons. Higher learning extends secondary education, and college professors should regard elementary and secondary teachers as partners pursuing the single goal of preparing their students for life.”
—L. Elisabeth Beattie, a Kentucky high school English teacher, in an article in The Louisville Courier-Journal
“Your editorial condemning corporal punishment … is hardly justified by history. How was it that the British public school system produced so many brilliant and motivated leaders in all areas of expertise in the last century, when the bundle of birch switches … proved so potent?”
—Kenneth Watten, in a letter to The Chicago Tribune
“I don’t want to read [President Bush’s] lips; I don’t want to see a thousand lights. I want to see my young people getting ready for my future when I hit that rocking chair. What we need is money.”
—A parent speaking to U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos at an open forum on school choice in East Harlem, N.Y.
