Toughest assignment:
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT RESCUING THE CLASSROOM I admit to reacting with a cynical smile when I saw those thirty-second Bill Cosby spots on TV last spring. You may...
...Fifty years from now there will be people who remember her influence in their lives and call her blessed...
...A goodly number, I have found out since...
...A friend wrote of a young teacher, "I am glad that a person of her caliber chose teaching...
...One of the most interesting was that of the young woman at Princeton University who conceived the idea of a teacher corps for inner-city schools akin to the Peace Corps, and within a year had enough support and enough volunteers to make it a reality...
...She had always remembered, she said, my urging her to go to college and my efforts to find scholarships for her...
...The purpose of the experiment (Brinson's idea) is to provide continuity and an enduring role model for children whose lives outside school are filled with uncertainty-who come to the comparative haven of school through devastated and dangerous "war zones" from homes of no fixed address...
...They touted teaching as a career and urged graduates to choose teaching because of the way a teacher could change a life, have a permanent effect on a young person's future...
...The other documentary was the PBS special, "Schools That Work," anchored by Roger Mudd, which showed children enjoying learning in schools with innovative approaches to curriculum and structure in Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas...
...A Washington businessman, who has spent $250,000 of his own money to provide at-risk children with a study environment, told an interviewer (Washington Post, September 17,1990), "One person cannot do enough....We have to learn to look at schools as holistic development centers for our youth and our future...
...Caring teachers like Brinson and the highly motivated young people of the teacher corps cannot rescue these children one by one...
...She had just graduated from college and was going on to graduate school-this after raising a family of eleven children...
...ave a chance...
...There are, however, places where bureaucracy has been overcome and fruitful experiment has been possible...
...Their efforts were supported and abetted by the resources of family and community...
...Most of them are not meeting the special needs of our poor and disadvantaged children....And too many students leave school without ever knowing that learning, for its own sake, can be a joyous experience...
...A year ago I heard from a woman who-more years ago than I would like to say-was my student in high school...
...There was the young man intending to teach for a year to earn money for graduate school who fell in love with his Hispanic students and wanted to stay because of their need for him...
...And what young people would choose to teach in the chaos of today's elementary and secondary education...
...But, like the traditional farm girl she was, she had chosen an early marriage instead...
...This was demonstrated forcefully in two recent television documentaries-which not only highlighted the problems but suggested solutions...
...In my day teachers were poorly paid but their status in the community and the visible results of their work outweighed, at least in part, their financial sacrifice...
...A recent news article tells of an experiment here in Washington, D.C., in an elementary school where teacher Johnny (sic) Brinson was allowed to move on to the third grade with the youngsters he had taught in first and second grade...
...Then there were the volunteers from far-away states willing to give a year or two of their lives to augment the teaching staffs of Mississippi schools struggling to help dis-advantaged students...
...The solutions were illustrated by the examples of schools where new ideas have been tried and have worked-in Virginia, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Ohio, etc...
...He thinks he can get funding from corporations for a pilot project...
...If the rest of us think the schools can be rescued, and will to rescue them, the new teachers will have a chance...
...One was the CBS (special, "Toughest Assignment," which Charles Kuralt introduced by saying, in part, "Our schools are not providing this country with the educated work force we need to compete...
...Once my interest was aroused, examples seemed to pop up all over the place...
...The layered bureaucracy of administrators, education departments, and teacher organizations that hamper teaching today was just beginning to grow, and there were no violence-ridden school systems...
...And, now that the business community and the Labor Department have been alerted to the incompetent and half-literate work force coming from our schools, perhaps he can...
...You may remember them...
...That was proved true in my own life...
...Teaching does have great rewards and it is good that young people are turning to it once again...
...His plan is to form clusters of neighborhood schools and make them "webs of love and learning" where children are kept occupied from eight in the morning until after study hour at night with the help of cooperating parents and teachers...
...Yet I am acutely aware that the educational world young teachers enter is a far cry from mine...
...And two young people of my own acquaintance who spent their summer as counselors in a camp for homeless children trying to give them the social skills necessary if school was to help them at all...
...Today, although there are efforts at reform, that bureaucracy with its absurd qualifying requirements and mounds of unnecessary paperwork not only makes entry into the profession difficult for bright, idealistic young people, but stifles their creativity once they are part of the system...
...When she needed a life of her own, so many years later, she fell back on my faith in her abilities...
...Cosby himself had left a teaching career for something far more lucrative, I thought...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 17
