President
Trump
The White
House
1600
Pennsylvania Ave
Washington
D.C. 20500
24 February
2017
Dear President Trump,
Today I have the privilege of speaking to a large room full
of teachers about some ways they can be better teachers. On a Friday, they will be focused and engaged
and will ask me har questions about how to connect content with students in a
meaningful way. Then next week, they
will be back in the classrooms, managing large numbers of students, caring
deeply for each one of them, sharing their passion for learning and making a
difference in the world. When they have
finished teaching for the day, they will go home and grade papers for another
three or four hours before going to bed.
I have watched my wife do this for nearly thirty years and she cares as
fiercely for her fourth-graders and her subject matter as she did the first
year she taught – probably more.
I am not at all clear about how you hope to impact
education. To be honest, based on some
of your other initiatives, I am rather apprehensive about what that impact
might be.
I would ask you, however, whatever programs you propose, to
think first not of the educational testing corporations who might profit, not
of how the proposals might impact the owners of charter schools or what impact
it might have on teachers’ unions. I
would ask you to think first of the students and second of their teachers and
consider how you might make teachers’ work easier, how you might act to honor
them, and how you might celebrate their good
work rather than contributing to a culture that blames teachers for the
shortcomings of the political system within which they work.
Regards,
Bill Boerman-Cornell
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