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On Cory Booker’s Nausea: A Teacher’s Meditation

By Anthony Cody — May 22, 2012 1 min read
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Guest poem by Bill Schechter.

So who dares criticize Private Equity?

Who has the temerity to malign Private Enterprise,
- or suggest that Bain actually was a bane?

But when it came to trashing Public Education & Unions

the businessmen were first in line, with their Roundtables, their Councils, their Chambers, their PACS, followed by their Hedge Fund and Equity colleagues, with their phony grassroots groups, their bought education commissioners, their for-profit charters, their testing companies feeding at the public trough, their dollars counting double our votes,

and the bashing of teachers -- fifteen long years now -- why not?

Let the mandatory assessments proceed:

Wasn’t it teachers whose voracious greed drove the economy off the Wall St.

cliff?

Didn’t my kids’ teachers deceive us into a war in Iraq?
Isn’t it their munificent salaries that have enthroned vast inequalities and

destroyed democracy?

Haven’t their callous lesson plans condemned millions to poverty?
Aren’t they the ones who refuse to invest or hire, while they calmly sit and

grade papers?

Isn’t it they who are raking in gads of unprecedented profits?
And the Achievement Gap? Didn’t millions of uncaring teachers cause it?

You say, no?

Perhaps one day, the mayor of an American city, let’s

call it Newark, New York, or Boston, or a school committee

member, or a town selectman, or the even the President of the United

States will have the guts to speak out/say/state/declaim

at a press conference, in a meeting, or on Meet The Press,

that attacks on America's teachers are
nauseating" and must stop.
Sitting here...waiting.

Bill Schechter


Bill Schechter
was a high school teacher for 35 years at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional H.S., in Sudbury, Mass. He attended Cornell University, Harvard University, and U.C.- Berkeley, but nothing made him prouder than graduating from DeWitt Clinton H.S. in the Bronx. He now volunteers as a tutor and mentor in the Boston Public Schools.

The opinions expressed in Living in Dialogue are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.