March 1998

Are the Milken brothers handing out money to teachers to honor excellence or to polish a tarnished image?

Well Said

I thought Howard Good's essay "Say What?" [January] was right on target. Last year, I retired as a special education teacher. I ended my career somewhat prematurely because I was a little tired of dealing with the increased paperwork, bureaucracy, and jargon. I, too, hope that real reform can take place without additional ridiculous labels and jargon.

It's no secret that public schools today lack credibility.

I grew up in a working-class Jewish community in the Bronx; attended Harvard University and then Teachers College, Columbia University, both overwhelmingly white institutions in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and did my student teaching and substitute teaching in schools that had a mixture of white and Puerto Rican students. However, during my first full year of teaching at P.S. 103, all 36 of my students were African American or Caribbean. The community was African American, bustling with all the complex and, to me, unfamiliar institutions of African American life. I remember a bounty of churches and mosques, some in storefronts or basements, others in imposing stone edifices. There were offices of antipoverty and community-based organizations, including the Harlem Tenants Committee, which during the 1964 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, ran its own "World's Worst Fair" calling attention to the terrible living conditions in Harlem. There were beauty parlors and barbershops, bars, candy stores, small restaurants, coffee shops, a diner, and an occasional family-run supermarket or bodega. The community was poor but cohesive, and many of the families had lived there for several generations.

No teacher in my district had ever spent four years outside the classroom and returned. I hadn't meant to.

Like television, I'm going to tell some stories so that maybe from the mustering of a few intimate details we will arrive at the Bigger Pixel.