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Sunday, October 25, 2015

Special ed teacher quits: ‘I just cannot justify making students cry anymore’ - The Washington Post

Special ed teacher quits: ‘I just cannot justify making students cry anymore’ - The Washington Post:

Special ed teacher quits: ‘I just cannot justify making students cry anymore’






Wendy Bradshaw is a mother and a teacher in Florida’s Polk County who specializes in working with children — infants through fifth grade — living with disabilities to help improve their educational and life experiences. She has undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in education. Bradshaw loves to teach but she has reaches a point where she cannot tolerate working within an education system focused on standardized test-based accountability that forces children to perform developmentally inappropriate tasks.
She is, she said, tired of being forced to make kids cry.
Here is her resignation letter, which I am publishing with permission. This appeared on the website of the  The Opt Out Florida Network, a nonprofit organization that advocates for public education and against test-based school reforms. She is an administrator for the Opt Out Polk group within that network.

Here’s what Bradshaw wrote:
I consider it baffling that telling parents the truth about the harm being done to their children in the public education system is considered an ethical violation of my teaching license, but making their children cry and hate school is not. This affects students and teachers even more so in my field of specialization, Exceptional Student Education (ESE), with our most vulnerable students. Today, I resigned from my school district. I would like to share with you my letter of resignation:
To: The School Board of Polk County, Florida
I love teaching. I love seeing my students’ eyes light up when they grasp a new concept and their bodies straighten with pride and satisfaction when they persevere and accomplish a personal goal. I love watching them practice being good citizens by working with their peers to puzzle out problems, negotiate roles, and share their experiences and understandings of the world. I wanted nothing 
Special ed teacher quits: ‘I just cannot justify making students cry anymore’ - The Washington Post: