Speak Up

Speak Up

Op-Ed

by George McDermott

The purpose for the PhilWP Journal—and the theme of this inaugural issue—is to provide a space in which teachers (re)assert their voices. Which implies, of course, that those voices have somewhere, somehow, been silenced. As indeed they may have been.

Some teachers’ voices have been silenced by outrage—buried beneath the rhetorical fallout from politicians and pundits who claim to be outraged over the failure of American public education. Most of them treat this alleged failure as if it were fact. And none has any trouble assigning the blame—loudly, vindictively, and with a characteristic disregard for things like data from validated research studies.

In other cases, teachers’ voices have been silenced by the increasingly hostile and outrageous circumstances of our professional lives … the frustration of a teacher who is increasingly required to do things that are not teaching … the isolation of a teacher whose knowledge is unheeded and even vilified … the alienation of a teacher whose practice is subject to constantly shifting demands, secret agenda, and Kafka-esque accusations and judgments.

But perhaps the greatest outrage is the silence that is of our own making. The silence that results from the inability or unwillingness of teachers to speak up for themselves. Inability or unwillingness—doesn’t matter which. And it doesn’t matter why—fear, disengagement, simple lack of time. There can be no justification for silence, no rationale for passivity—especially not in the face of the kind of coordinated attack that’s being waged against teachers today.

It’s not yet too late. We must believe there still is time. There are still voices raised on our behalf. Matt Damon, for example, has recently been saying that “the idea that we're testing kids and we're tying teachers’ salaries to how kids are performing on tests—that kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher-order. We're training them, not teaching them."

But Matt Damon is, unfortunately, an endangered species. Increasingly, even our traditional allies are distancing themselves from us.

We can depend no longer on friendly voices, so we must raise our own. Because silence, dear colleagues, will make us complicit in our own betrayal.

George McDermott is an English teacher at Simon Gratz High School. George joined PhilWP as a teacher consultant in 2009.