Tom Hoffman, in his post Social Work and School Reform, cites an article from January’s Washington Post – DC School a Test of Teachers’ Grit:

There’s a knock on the door, and a parent whose child is causing trouble at Truesdell Educational Center warily opens up. Six Truesdell employees, loaded with pizza for dinner and plans to change the child’s direction, trundle into the apartment — the boy’s teacher, two social workers, a psychologist, a behavior specialist, and the principal, Brearn Wright.

And this:

"Any Saturday, we’re here," says Jackie Hines, a kindergarten teacher and the union representative. "We signed up for longer hours. We own these children. Our attitude is not what can’t they do, but instead, they come here with so much stuff from home, so what can we do for them?"

Two of my personal goals for my own life is this — I want to be a great father and I want to be a great husband. I want to be powerfully involved in my childrens’ lives. I want to be the husband my wife deserves. If the only way I can be a great principal is to sacrifice those goals, then it’s not interesting to me. If I’m not home for dinner with my family (and dinner is often at 7:00 pm) at least three nights a week, it’s a bad week. I don’t want to miss a Saturday T-ball game because I’m at school. I’m in school from 8 am until 6 – 6:30 almost every day. After my wife goes to be at 10:00 pm, I sit down at the computer and work until about 1 am almost every night. I put in between 60-70 hours every week, and if that is not enough, then I am not interested in the job anymore.

We have to come up with a better model of urban school reform than the messianic workaholic model. It is unsustainable and it requires Faustian bargains that no one should have to make. The danger of KIPP… the danger of Dangerous Minds and Stand And Deliver and all the newspaper articles that talk about the unmarried / childless teacher / principal who makes their school their entire life is that it excuses us — as a society — from envisioning a healthier model of school.

If we expect teachers to have an ethic of care about our students, we have to have an ethic of care about toward our educators. Asking them to sacrifice their lives to teach doesn’t get us there. And it certainly doesn’t get us toward systemic reform.

Let’s start having that discussion… and every time someone talks about / writes about / makes a movie about some teacher who sacrifices everything to be a great teacher, let’s demand that the authors answer one question — Why can’t we imagine successful schools in our cities that don’t require Herculean effort to succeed? And what does it say about us — and the underlying assumptions we make about teachers, schools and cities — that we cannot.

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Tags: urbaned