enough men to argue about later on anyway.... The best thing I can do for you ladies is to give you some strong young men and keep them alive.... Now if I can start with the fourth grade young men and each year add another level on, in eight years I would have covered them all and the older young men can be role models for the younger men. You start your own gang. Why would I use communitybased people and stay away from schoolteacher types? When schoolteachers go home at night they really go home. When these communitybased people go home they just go down the street. They have ownership 24 hours a day. Everybody knows them.... You’ve got to return community control to some extent to the people. And when I talk about community control I’m talking about control over their own lives.... My idea of utopia and parent involvement is that in every classroom on any given day across America, while the teacher is teaching, a parent of one of those children is sitting in the back of that room smiling. Then I believe the quality of education in that classroom would improve 200 percent and you wouldn’t have to raise a teacher’s salary 10 cents. That’s parent involvement.... I’d like to see somebody talk about allowing people who have kids in public schools to be released from their jobs to come to the school on a daily basis, a monthly basis, to see their kids. The public and private sector spends billions of dollars every year retraining people who are functionally illiterate.... Instead of tuition tax credits we should be talking about corporate tax credits to let people go. To visit schools, to be part of that process once a month. You might ask, what is the precedent for that? There are lots of precedents. We support the criminal justice system right now in that way. You get a subpoena to go to court. You get called as a witness in a jury trial. Your employer will pay your salary. The law says they are required to pay your salary while you serve the criminal justice system. Well, what about the educational justice system? If we can’t support that we will continue to have clients in the criminal justice system.... I’d like to have police officers have a whole different job to do. They should be coaching ball teams instead of beating up kids with billy clubs, and I know some people who need beating up. I am not condemning police officers. I am just trying to redefine their jobs. I’d like to redefine a lot of jobs. Teachers ought to redefine their jobs too.... If we took a survey of what teachers think is the most important criteria for a schoolteacher they would say knowledge of subject matter. If you ask students the same question they will say, that a teacher have patience, that a teacher have understanding, that they be able to communicate and that they demonstrate love.... Kids don’t know how much the teacher knows. They just know you know more than they do. As a matter of fact they don’t care how much you know as long as they know how much you care.... They are not going to learn from you if you don’t care.... I want to leave you with a couple of concepts. First of all, your goal in life should not be making money. Materialism is a terrifying thing. It can make you do some terrible things. Your goal in life should be service to people. Your goal in life is not becoming a doctor. Your goal in life is not going to college. Your goal is not being a lawyer. Your goal in life should be service. You use medicine to serve people. You use law to serve people. You use your college education to serve, you use your art, your music, your talent, your education to serve. Otherwise your goal is exploitation. If your goal is exploitation you can use medicine and law and music to exploit people. To take advantage of them, to make them ignorant, and keep them uninformed.... Instead of using your art to uplift the spirit of 10 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 If you don’t teach the kids to love don’t be surprised when they turn into predators and scavengers in your community. people they’ll have you making beer commercials and cigarette ads to keep the people sick and uninformed. Because you are very talented you have to be careful of what you let them do w ith your ta len t. Just because money is on the line they’ ll put you in movies that degrade you spiritually, physically, morally, every other way.... Money is not rich. You don’t believe that. Have you ever heard somebody say “ poor Elvis Presley” ? He had plenty of money but he was poor. .He died a recluse. Poor John Belushi, poor Liberace, poor Michael Jackson sits in his room talking to dummies everyday. Got plenty of money. Yet I know individuals who have no money at all and nobody called them poor. Martin Luther King died poor. Nobody says poor Martin. Ghan- di died half-naked. Nobody says poor Ghandi. Jesus didn’t have a pocket or dollar to put in it. Nobody says poor Jesus.... They had the wealth of love surrounding them. That’s what you have to be prepared to generate and institutionalize through your system. Schools can work for kids. The people on the school site have to make that commitment.... Don’t be so vainglorious that your degree and your title and your education make you special. You are only special to the extent that you serve. The schools in America can be changed at the school site level. You don’t need massive legislation to do that. Just decide that’s what you want to do. Surround yourself with some caring parents, some caring teachers, and make the thing happen. I don’t mean to tell you it ’s easy to d o . . . . I am ju s t saying i t ’ s possible.... I had to fight real hard. It took three years to get control of my school. I had 117 teachers when I came there and in three years 100 had gone, had left. They decided they didn’t want to buy into this. And yet they are still teaching someplace. They call that teaching. I don’t call it teaching. By my standards they hadn’t learned how to teach yet. But by their standards I was the bad guy because I asked them to do some things that they weren’t prepared to do. “ You can’t make me give homework. You can’t make me do a lesson plan.” ... The pu b l ic schoo l system doesn’t reward the competent. It punishes the competent. Business is run differently. There if you are a competent you get perks, you get a typewriter that works, a secretary who can spell, and a parking lot with a parking spot with your name on it and'a window view.... (But) in schools the good teachers come early, stay late, never get to eat lunch, kids hanging around them all the time, they get to tutor kids, they get to pull the curtains at the talent show, they get to sponsor this club and that club, call kids, love them, grading papers all night long. The group (of bad teachers) could care less about that. They never come out at night. They’re scared to death of the kids, always in trouble, complaining, whining, griping, always crying about something. They can’t handle tough kids. So what do we do? A difficult child enters the school and we give them to you because you can handle them. You already have 35 but we give you more. Smitty can handle them. Don’t give them to Brownie. Brownie cries every time you give them. He only has 12 in the class but he can only handle 12. Don’t give him any more. She is always going home sick because she can’t handle this. But this lady over here can handle them all so we put more work on you because you can do the work. Very inequitable. And then this group gets to go home early because they don’t have all these responsibilities. Guess what they do every night? They go to college at night and get an administrative credential and become your boss. Yes, there are some sorry administrators out there too. There are sorry administrators and some sorry teachers and if we.don’t clean out the sorry mess the system will stay sorry. The system can work if the people want it to work.... It is not about the students. The s tu d e n ts have no cho ice anyway.... We can’t keep condemning people. We must reach out to people and educate them. We owe it to them.... Reach out to them, create that vehicle that is a support system. If we demand that kids get a C average to participate in extracurricular activities, then where is the support system? How come the lib ra ry doesn’t stay open as long as the gymnasium?... We condemn the athlete because he can’t get a C. So we stop him from playing ball. He still can’t read and we don’t have a program to teach him how to read. He is just a big dumb jock.... Now he is six foot ten and he is out of school and he is on the street. Now do you feel safer? Be serious. Be real serious. You can’t turn people onto the street and act like you are doing him a favor.... (We must drop) this adversary relationship that we have with our young people.... You give a test in class and in two weeks you give another test .and the child does poorly, and you give another test, and after four of these tests in eight weeks he has got four D minuses or F pluses. You never take the time to retest all that information to see if maybe that old stuff that he didn’t know when you first tested him is now starting to make sense.... Teachers say, well, he didn't know it when I asked him. What difference does it make when he demonstrates mastery? It’s not a competition between you and him. “Well, it ’s not fair to the other kids.” He’s not competing against the other kids. You are just trying to get him to learn something.... Maybe he just doesn’t take tests well. Maybe the pressure is on. Maybe every time you give him a test he won’t do well, but if you ask him that pre-learned material over and over again and keep including it in your testing it ’ll start making sense to him. Those definitions and terms that he didn’t understand in the beginning he learns a little better now. And he can feel better about coming to school because he is now beginning to make better grades, even though he is still struggling with (the new) information.... He s t ill figures, “ I got a chance. I got a chance. I am not too far behind. I’m only two weeks behind.... I have got minimum mastery. I can move on into the next section....” Schools should be fun. Education is all we have. Education is more important than employment. Because if I employ you and then turn around and unemploy you, you don’t know how to get re-employed. If I educate you well, no matter how many times I unemploy you, you can employ yourself, turn around and take the job and employ me, because you are well-educated. Being educated is critical. Being uneducated is not as bad as being mis-educated because when you are uneducated you know you don’t know.... When you are mis-educated you think you know. You don’t know enough to know you don’t know.... I ab so lu te ly believe pub lic schools can survive if we want them to survive. I don’t believe that we should turn our back on them and institutionalize our non-responsiveness. Thank you for your attention.
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