Right and responsibility
A few disclosures. I am a teacher, my mother was a teacher, my daughter is a teacher.
So was my sister, so is my husband, so are innumerable friends and neighbors.
And, yes, I can still name almost every teacher I had from kindergarten into high school,from the one who taught me how to tie my shoes, to the one who invited me to sing (albeit off key) in the elementary school glee club, to the one who reached out to me when I was the new kid in class. Then, too, there was the one who inspired my love of words, the one who helped salve my math anxiety, the one who coached me through high school biology.
So, in our house growing up, it wasn’t just father (and mother) who knew best, but our teachers, those near godlike beings who taught us to diagram sentences, conjugate French verbs, and master geometry. And it was our public school system, revered by my parents, themselves products of the New York City Public Schools, that provided all that and more to my sisters and me.
My parents were fervent advocates, not only for the basic education the public schools imparted, and the inherent possibility to better their lives and then ours, but for the opportunities the school house provided to make them Americans. Where else to learn civics, and civility, how our nation got along and we got along with each other, to understand the things we had in common and the things that made us different, and to appreciate and respect both.
So I came to believe that public education was like so many things, both a right and a responsibility, an essential to the workings of our democracy and an essential beneficiary of our support. Which leads me to next Tuesday’s special election and Proposition 100.
The downturn of our economy has had dire consequences on our state budget with severe cutbacks in essential human services. Schools districts statewide are already reeling from the reductions and stand to suffer even more in the coming year. And by schools, I mean students and teachers, kids whose futures depend on those fundamental building blocks of reading, writing and arithmetic, and the skills of professional educators who work at building them day by day. And teachers who are valued not only for their ability to impart knowledge but for their wondrous capacity to inspire creativity, but who are paid so woefully little for the great responsibility with which we entrust them.
The three- year one cent increase in the sales tax will provide a temporary boost to education funding. Without it, class size likely will increase, art, music and physical education offerings will be further reduced and support services, such as nurses and librarians, will be decreased.
Our kids deserve better, our teachers deserve better, we deserve better.
At the very least, on Tuesday, go to the polls and vote yes.
14 May, 2010 >
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