Judith Tannenbaum

Dear President Obama:

There are so many ways in which I am deeply grateful that you are our president. I could write you a long ode with many stanzas of praise. Such an ode would be heartfelt, but also heartfelt is this note that raises my deep concerns about much of the Arne Duncan education policy, a policy you seem to whole-heartedly support.

I write as someone who has been a community artist working in public schools and state prisons for over thirty five years. I know the consequences of the “achievement gap” much more intimately than my heart can bear. I feel no need to defend the “education status quo” (though that label often means “teachers,” and decades of observation have put public school teachers near the top of my list of heroes). I agree with you and Secretary Duncan that the nation needs a sincere, open conversation about how best to educate all of our children.

But some of the terms and assumptions underlying this conversation need more precise definition. It is taken as a given by “school reform” advocates that improved test scores equal better education, but I have seen nothing that proves this assumption. When I read most “school reformers,” I feel that I’m reading the equivalent of reasoning that goes something like: “teacher accountability will be tied to an increase in the number of students who wear purple” or “school improvement will be measured by how many students have good posture.” I see no evidence – on paper or in the real lives of young people I know – that improved test scores equal knowledge, the ability to think critically, or to a greater connection between oneself and the wider world. Whereas I see a great deal of evidence – in these same young people and in the people I know well in prison – that doing more of what hasn’t worked (more focus on testing, a greater reliance on measurement) will lead to even more children who feel separated from the possibilities we want to be theirs.

A primary reason I worked so hard for your election is that you place such a high value on moving beyond rigid positions. You have urged us to look for what we share (as human beings, as citizens); you’ve encouraged us to build policy from this shared ground. But we can’t do that – in education or in any other sphere – unless we have a real conversation about what we mean by words like “education,” “success,” and “equity.”

Prayers for you, your family, and the decisions you have to make on so many crucial matters.

I’m glad no one took my blood pressure as I watched “The Class,” for it would have been soaring. The movie – which takes place almost completely inside a high school on the edge of Paris  – is great (as nearly all reviewers agree). So it wasn’t the quality of the film that nearly gave me a stroke.

I’d done two site visits that day, watching WritersCorps teaching artists share poetry with San Francisco teen-agers – kids who had a lot in common with those in the movie – and at first I felt I was on another site visit. Most of the teens in the movie (or their parents) had come from elsewhere – Morocco, Mali, China, the Caribbean. Most were lively, bright, curious and insistent. They probably had more skills, and were more willing to get down to work, than many of our students, but the two groups of young people shared a lot.

There’s much to be said about the adults in the movie, the ways they speak to each other in the teachers’ lounge, and about school policies and how these were implemented. One of the particulars that was so great about the film was getting to witness all this, as though in a Frederick Wiseman documentary (another observation made by many reviewers).

But what did my blood pressure in was the teacher whose class was “The Class.” This teacher was played by François Bégaudeau, who wrote the autobiographical novel on which the movie is based and who himself had been a teacher in a school similar to the one portrayed. The good news is that François wasn’t a “white savior teacher” – this wasn’t that kind of movie. The bad news is how profoundly he let his students down.

I could go on and on about the details of this “let down” – all the ways the teacher did not listen to what the teen-agers tried (generously, it seemed to me) to tell him about what was important to them, about their cultures, about himself, and about power. Instead I’ll let you see the movie for yourself.

But please watch the climax scene closely. Please note how François, embarrassed by his students calling him out, lets one of those students (who, aware of his anger, wisely tries to leave the classroom) take the fall.

Please watch carefully, too, the penultimate scene. Notice how that student speaks so deeply from her heart, and how the teacher replies with platitudes.

I ask you to watch closely because I’ve been shocked – in reading reviews – how many threw up their hands at the kids, or the multicultural reality, or the Failure of the Education System.

We at WritersCorps loved the French students, though, so much like our students. And we were angry, sad, or disappointed at all the ways their teacher failed them.

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