To the scared administrators: Stop hurting education
Teachers aren’t being allowed to teach.
The bureaucratic burden of administrative hoops already in place, combined with the trend of school boards unleashing their wrath on teachers who dare to step outside the box to reach their students, spells trouble for public education. It’s cause for worry at Franklin College, where education is the most popular major.
Connie Heermann, a 27-year teaching veteran at Perry Meridian High School, had her career bludgeoned by an overzealous school board this summer simply because she broke from the same vanilla teaching methods.
The Perry Township school board suspended Heermann for a year, without pay, because she used "The Freedom Writers Diary" in her classroom. Some school officials objected to the racial slurs and sexual content in the book. Though she’d discussed using the book with administrators before passing it out – and had parents sign permission slips, too – the administration changed its tune after she’d already handed it out.
Our question to the administrators: Could you possibly be more dense? Of course some of the book’s content is questionable. It’s a collection of highly personal, and graphic, success stories of inner-city teenagers.
What book could have been better for her classroom? What happened to the idea of putting the educational needs of students first? So Heermann was insubordinate. Good for her. In the same building students are being taught civics and history, it’s only appropriate that such feckless administrative nitwits be ignored.
These imperious school bosses need to know: By killing ideas, they’re killing idealism. We can only hope that the future teachers Franklin trains – who will be paid too little and pressured too much as it is – won’t be afraid to push the envelope when it’s necessary to put students first.
Minds are, after all, terrible things to waste.
