Dear President Obama:

 

Um… we are having some trouble in our war here in the front lines. The troops are getting very disillusioned. We thought things would improve in 2014, as that was when we were lead to believe it would end. Also the materiels needed to continue the fight just aren’t showing up. I mean the real quality ones required. Not the items the politicians say we need.

    It’s heartbreaking to tell the truth. After all we all pretty much volunteered for this assignment – we have a job to do.

    President Bush told us No Child Left Behind would end in 2014, but Congress is dilly-dallying. Teachers are blamed for conditions way beyond our pay scale. Why we even heard that YOU are responsible for that nasty plan that went totally FUBAR called Race To The Top.

   Next, this may shock you, but a lot of our own people are taking us out of the fight. They get close to us and frag us with VAM (Value-added Measure), Drive by Testing, or Evaluating our troops with bogus data. Oh, and we hear those against us (Voucher and Charter schools) are just proxies for Daddy Warbucks venture fund capitalists in a place called Wall St?  Rumor is circulating that a guy in England called Pearson has lots and lots of undue influence. Could you get some Intel on both of those, please?

      You gave us hope with the Surge and the Awakening (Common Core) but it’s just not at all what it claimed to be. Really totally off track. Harmful even. Sure, lots of technology and new mantras we have to swallow (standards, grit,) - Pretty scary stuff, doesn’t at all deal with the central issues. We need to fight this war from the ground up, not from the profiteers’ needs down. But that’s pretty much how it’s always been - Poor Man’s Fight – Rich Man’s War. 

    Demoralization is so rampant many veteran troops aren’t re-upping – even with bonuses.  Our corps’ soul is just ripped out. And the hit and run contractors in expensive sunglasses appear, make a killing – then poof off they go – gutting whatever they touched. And they make containers of money doing it.  The money never really mattered a lot to us as we are patriots from A – Z, but they make ten times as much - for the same job. Oh yeah, and those contractors seem impervious to accountability, often they even have immunity.

    Bottom line - it’s the lack of support up the food chain which hurts so much.

    Anyway - we teachers are really getting hammered out here. The poor kids are still poor.  We need to engage the enemy (poverty) directly - not just push around the edges testing, testing, always testing.

    Sorry about this part…we don’t like to complain about leadership, but a lot of us, especially the veterans, aren’t really comfortable with the current general. I won’t mention his name but you used to play B-ball with him.  He never was in the trenches and just doesn’t have street cred.  Did you know he wants us to fight this war with charts, graphs, and punishing numbers?  Couple weeks in the trenches with us and we’d have him fighting properly. He can’t be a total dufus - story is he’s a Chicago boy– they’re pretty solid – used to be anyway.

I didn’t want to bring this up but P.T.S. shows up everywhere - You know  - (Pathetic Teacher Salaries.) And the I.E.D.s (Insipid Educational Degradation) explode all around us – terrifying - with long-term impacts, very tragic.

        So there it is. Longest war we’ve fought.  So much to lose… you know democratic public schools– so little support.

       Makes it real hard to put our gear on in the morning and go and engage.

       But we have a job to do and we do it as best we can.