I was trained as an English teacher. Nobody ever taught me how to teach reading. So i went back to school and took elemnetray reading courses just to learn how to teach my kids... I became a reading teacher by default.
Months after Jane began teaching, Martin Luther King, who penned his great letter from the Birmingham City Jail, was shot dead. Jane remembers the "tremendous sadness" in her classroom the day Dr. King died. Her students had lost their hero, and along with him, much of their hope. "It was a terribly distressing time," she says. For the next three decades Jane remained in the South Carolina public schools. She's been around long enough to understand the complexities of education policy and she has a lot to say about how we're failing America's students, especially poor ones. That's why she attended today's education town meting event with Barack in Florence, South Carolina. Below is a picture of Jane and a shot of students from her former school district.
"Im a pragmatist politically," says Jane, "but also an incredible optimist."
She calls Bush's No Child Left Behind plan "a farce," and says "not only is it underfunded, but it tries to punish students into getting better. That's not how learning works."
And it's completely unfair with regard to second language learners and special education students. You've got kids whove been in this country less than a year and they have to take the same test everyone else takes in English! I have sat with kids who were mentally retarded and had to take that test at grade level and just cried because they just couldn't do it.
I care about universal health care deeply because pre-natal and early childhood care affects people's ability to learn. In the district I worked in, 92% of students qualified for free or reduced-priced lunch. Those kids used the emergency room for health care. They didn't get any preventative care. We had a much higher than average number of kids in special education, and I trace that to inadequate pre-natal and early childhood care.
But before any of these issues can be addressed, Jane believes America must move beyond the current climate of fierce partisanship. "Partisanship is a huge barrier to getting education issues solved," she says. "People are just so polarized and what they fail to realize that it's not what we disagree on what moves us forward. It's what we can manage to agree on."
"I'm optimistic about Senator Obama because he understands that what we need to ask is, 'What is it we have in common? What is it that makes us better?'"
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