A letter to the Chicago Tribune...printed but without the names of Paul Vallas, Ron Huberman, and Arne Duncan!

Dear Editor:
After reading the July 5 article about Marshall High School's "Turnaround," two things prompted me to write. First, I appreciated the balanced reporting by Azam Amed. This reporter allows readers to make their own judgement about the most recent policy of the Chicago School Board.
Secondly, I was struck by senior student Katrina Graham's comment, "People don't know this school like they think they do." That's when it became clear to me that school administrators like Chicago's Ron Huberman, New Orlean's Paul Vallas and Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who have had virtually no actual classroom teaching experience, can not possibly understand a fundamental truth about a public school. It is that school is a community, in the truest sense of the word, with comraderie, support, and a sense of shared purpose with other individuals.
I'm not just talking about the teaching staff. Support staff, para-profesionals and maintenance workers, parents and administrators, also make up this community of people committed to making school a safe, clean and engaging place for learning and growing. But creating community takes time. When the powers that be completely replace one of these vital groups with a new one (like the custodians in my school who were replaced by minimum wage workers for a private company) there is a sense of loss in that building.
Some people may say my opinion smacks of sentimentality, but I would argue that most of us believe in the adage, "It takes a village to raise a child." Part of that village is the family of workers and educators in a public school. The "turnaround" policy is devastating this family.