The Story Behind the Resume

Most people establish their expertise by listing their academic accomplishments. However, it’s not what I gained from school that’s important. It’s what I lost to the system that matters here because those experiences are a metaphor for all the reasons we can’t solve the problems in our schools. What I lost can best be summarized in the following experiences.

• I was in high school when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and Congress responded by passing the National Defense Act of 1958. The purpose of this legislation was to prepare American students to beat the Soviets in the arms and space races. Students who excelled in math and science became heroes. Those of us whose talents and interests lay in the humanities became second-class citizens as schools began what would become a systematic elimination of the arts, the denigration of the humanities, and a commitment to measurable objectives as the standard of academic success.
• My career as an English teacher began in 1965 in the small mill-town high school from which I graduated. I saw how in just five years, the effects of white flight and shortsighted cold-war education policies had left the school even less prepared than it had been to educate the underprivileged.
• My life in school spanned most of the last half of the twentieth century. While most of my experience was in inner-city high schools, I taught at every level from third grade through college, in private and alternative schools, and in affluent and middle-class neighborhoods. During that time, I saw how a series of reforms based on political expediency and fad eroded the quality of American public education throughout the system. I also saw how the dehumanization of the education system created a bias against dissent and innovation that marginalized the very ideas that could have prevented its collapse.
• In 1983, I won an award for my method of teaching writing as a problem-solving strategy. But when my students used what I taught them to bring an end to the gang activity in our inner-city school, our principal stifled the student effort. I wrote a book that described what happened. In 1993, the National Council of Teachers of English published the book entitled Home of the Wildcats: Perils of an English Teacher. In 1994, I was banished from the teaching profession without cause. The principal won a $25,000 Milken Award for outstanding educators and went on to become a lobbyist for education.

Find the whole story in my memoir:

Prisoner of Second Grade
My Life Under the Thumb of That Other Cold-War Enemy—
The System That Stifled Art, Humanity, and Reason