INTRODUCTION

I found it quite appealling that Chancellor Joel Klein likened the daunting task of providing excellent education to the disadvantaged children -- mostly from inner cities -- to the civil rights movement. Parenthetically, the concept may be the driving force behind many people from the industry -- young and old -- joining the teaching profession otherwise despised. I was soon turned off when he singled out the teachers and their union, as the roadblock to excellence. This is evidently pure politics because he could not possibly miss the root cause of the persistent failure of so many schools, as encapsulated by Bill Cosby's caustic but salutary talk :

"People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around. ... The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting (...)
Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. “Why you ain't where you is go, ra.” I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house (...) People putting their clothes on backwards. Isn't that a sign of something going on wrong? Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. (...)
These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There's no English being spoken, and they're walking and they're angry. Oh God, they're angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don't have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza? And then run to the poor cousin's house...".


Teachers deal with the behavior all the time : in and out of the classroom. A colleague summed up our plight in a letter to the New York Post's editor :

To borrow from a bumper sticker, "I you can read this, thank a teacher" ("Teachers-Union Hypocrisy", Letters, June 2,2005). To all those who wrote in to "dis" the entire teaching profession ( or at least 50,000 New York City public-school teachers) : Are you the same people who are instructing your children at home on how to artfully abuse teachers in the classroom, disrupt lessons or wander the hallways ? For the record, our master's degrees earn us a pay scale that is thoroughly mediocre. In this profession, the daily abuse level is second to none -- save the police, who put their lives on the line daily. Teachers even put their safety on the line sometimes, such as when we have to confront intruding thugs -- some of whom outweigh us by 100 pounds -- and are not allowed to touch them. We must only ask them in a civil tone to leave. All they do is laugh. And how about disgruntled students who do no work, then expect to pass ? And is it teachers' fault that metal detectors are needed at so many schools ? As for the trope that teachers get the summers off, it's really more like two-thirds of the summer. And that time is often used to work other jobs, in order to bring income up to the rest of the working world's average. Paul Gammarano, Staten Island

As if that was not bad enough, many such schools are run by blacks with shaky credentials, and loose morality -- a betrayal of the civil rights activists who paid the ultimate price for equality. Some of the "brothers and sisters" are in the business of cultivating the victim status in students while projecting a fraudulent image of nurturers. They hurt both students, parents and teachers. Former Chancellor Joseph Fernandez notes : "How some of the people there [ New York City] ever got into education in the first place is beyond me."

In Frantz Fanon words, "Every generation has a mission : it fulfills it or betrays it."