Teacher to Trump’s education pick: Let’s ‘address the elephant in the room.’ It’s you. - The Washington Post

Teacher to Trump’s education pick: Let’s ‘address the elephant in the room.’ It’s you. - The Washington Post:
Teacher to Trump’s education pick: Let’s ‘address the elephant in the room.’ It’s you.

 The selection of Betsy DeVos by President-elect Donald Trump as his education secretary nominee has been attacked by public school advocates who see her longtime support for school “choice” and private Catholic education as evidence that she does not support America’s public education system. In this post, that sentiment is explained by an educator who has written an open letter to DeVos.

He is Patrick Kearney, facilitator for Teacher Leadership in the Johnston Community School District in Iowa. He spent 25 years as a band director in private and public schools of Iowa, and is a past-president of the Iowa Bandmasters Association and past co-chair of the Iowa Jazz Championships. He was also a founding board member of the Jazz Educators of Iowa.  His wife teaches in the Des Moines Public Schools and his son is studying education at Drake University.

Here’s the letter, which first appeared on Huffington Post. Kearney gave me permission to republish it.

Dear Ms. DeVos,

I don’t think we’ve really met yet; we are America’s public school teachers. There are about 3.1 million of us. We teach in large urban areas, we teach in the suburbs, we teach in small rural communities, and we teach in some really remote parts of our country. The most important thing to recognize is that we teach every kid who shows up. We don’t pick and choose the types of kids that we will teach, we teach ALL of them.

Because we haven’t really had much interaction, we thought it might be nice to share a little bit about the public schools we teach in. First of all, we are very proud of our schools. Public schools today have the highest graduation rate in 

Teacher to Trump’s education pick: Let’s ‘address the elephant in the room.’ It’s you. - The Washington Post:

 ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson was a big booster of Common Core

 ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson was a big booster of Common Core