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This makes me sad. About 15 years ago, the company I worked for sponsored a program with PS 27, where we (very junior staff in a large corporation) went into the school twice a week for a year and worked with the students. These students, then as now, came from extremely challenged families; the obstacles they faced were enormous. And yet so many of them were neatly dressed and obviously well-cared for. They were enthusiastic about the work we did (writing activities). We worked with two classes: one had a veteran teacher who was a star by any standard. Her classroom–bilingual English-Spanish–was the controlled chaos that I’ve come to recognize as a first-rate learning environment. The other teacher was young, male, and a dictator, whose insecurity showed itself in his inability to allow the students to express themselves except at his direction. The children were firmly under his control–but were they learning? It is telling that in the first class, the writing that the children produced was, in some cases, original and occasionally very moving. In the second classroom, the children copied off one another, sure that there was a “right” answer. I think about those kids and wonder if any of them survived the system, and I feel very fortunate that my child is in a school where there are far more of the first kind of teacher than the second. In both PS 27 then and in my child’s school today, the principals are committed professionals, and the students and famlies in the school community are fortunate to have them there. But in both cases, teachers, principals and students struggle against challenges not of their making, and that experience so long ago taught me more than anything else I can think of about the effects of class, race, and bureaucracy on the lives of our children.

District 13 mom