As Bad as They Say?: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx

Foreword

Foreword At a time of crisis and upheaval in the New York City school system, when tests, assessments, and school closings have left students and teachers feeling battered and demoralized and when leadership of the system has been handed from a prosecutor to a magazine executive, perhaps people concerned with education should begin listening to voices like Janet Mayer’s. Mayer, the author of As Bad as They Say? Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx, wrote her book not only to highlight the heroism of Bronx high school students and teachers in the face of poverty , violence, and shockingly decayed and understaffed schools but also to denounce the educational reforms that have come out of Washington in the past ten years, which, Mayer feels, have made matters much, much worse. Among the many critics of the two great national education initiatives , No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, Mayer stands out for embedding her critique in a detailed portrait of teaching and learning in one of the nation’s poorest urban school districts. No one has ever written more eloquently than Janet Mayer about what it takes to spend a large portion of your career teaching children in poverty. Those who read As Bad as They Say? will be inspired by her stories of fortitude and creativity on the part of students and teachers, but they will also come away enraged that voices like hers have been marginalized in the debate over how to improve America’s schools. Veteran teachers like Janet Mayer are the forgotten moral compass in America’s educational reform movement. We ignore what she says at our peril. ix x Foreword Mayer’s arguments have a special resonance with me because of the experiences I have had organizing workshops, lectures, and neighborhood tours for Bronx teachers for the research project I direct, the Bronx African American History Project. During the past seven years, I have spent time in more than thirty Bronx high schools, elementary schools, and middle schools and have come away from the experience incredibly impressed by the dedication and creativity of the teachers and administrators I have met, many of whom were, like Mayer, products of Bronx public schools themselves. These educators, put under immense pressure to raise their students’ test scores lest their schools close and their jobs be placed in jeopardy, still found the time to use the information we presented to organize displays, performances, plays, and festivals that celebrated community history, often involving students, parents, and grandparents to help with the research. Their dedication made a tremendous impression on me, and when Janet Mayer came to me with an early draft of her memoir, I saw an opportunity to give a whole generation of underappreciated Bronx teachers and principals a voice. As you begin reading As Bad as They Say?, prepare yourself for a view of teaching and teachers that is radically different from the contemptuous one often put forward by educational reformers, business leaders, and print and broadcast media. Janet Mayer grew up in a time, the late 1940s and early 1950s, when working-class New Yorkers revered teachers and were proud when their children decided to make teaching their career. Janet Mayer came from such a family, and becoming an English teacher in the New York public schools was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. She started teaching middle school in 1960, when she was twenty-one years old, and nearly quit several times because the job was so difficult; but with the support of family members and her own tireless efforts to discover new ways of helping students appreciate literature, she became a highly successful English teacher in a largely white public high school in the northeast Bronx. Mayer’s almost legendary popularity in that school derived from a few key things—her ability to get students excited about reading and writing by creating an electric atmosphere in her classroom supplemented by individualized assignments for students, and her willingness to defend students and colleagues against the excesses of an authoritarian and vindictive principal who ruled the school with an iron hand. Mayer approached these twin missions as a sacred calling, working long hours into the night and on weekends, protected in her efforts by that much-maligned institution the United Federation of Teachers, the union that had become the official bargaining agent for New York City Foreword xi teachers...