The Chicago Blackhawks hockey team defeated the Boston Bruins to win hockey’s Stanley Cup for the fifth time in history last month. Previous wins have come in 1934, 1938, 1961, and 2010. It was an “insane finish,” wrote Sean Newell on deadspin.com.
But not only is that old news by now, it’s not even the most impressive thing about this year’s championship series. After winning the cup, the Chicago team took out a full-page ad in the Boston Globe to publicly acknowledge the graciousness and hospitality of the people of Boston in coming in second place this season. The ad read, in part:
On behalf of the Chicago Blackhawks organization and the entire Wirtz Corporation, we want to personally express our heartfelt appreciation to your city, the Bruins organization, and especially the citizens of Boston for the remarkable welcome you showed our team and the many Chicagoans who visited. … Please know we tip our hat to your city’s big heart and gracious spirit. You lead by example and have set the bar very high for others to follow.
There are few noble institutions who spend millions on their players like our professional sports teams do, but schools also invest millions—key word being “invest.” In the case of sports teams, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And when you lose, somebody else, in another city, wins. It should be like this in our schools, but it’s not: when cities like Philadelphia or states like Illinois find themselves unable to pay for schools to function properly, it’s not because some other school is getting a higher quality education; it’s because some corporations are getting rich by taking tax dollars away from the schools.
As a recent example, I heard from the principal tonight at an elementary school, who also serves as a district’s superintendent. He was responding to one of our employee’s requests for information about musical theater productions at Illinois high schools, but his news was bleak. He informed me that because of the budget situation in Illinois, schools in his district had to drop their music program four years ago. He wrote, “The music program in the … district was dropped … due to financial concerns. Illinois is going through a very difficult time in terms of the state budget and many school districts are struggling. So in answer to your question, there were no musical performances or theatrical performances … during the 2012-2013 school.” Despite the graciousness of his reply to us, the sadness in his response could only be compared to that feld by Boston hockey fans.
Can charter schools just admit they’ve not defeated the public schools on average? Can test-driven reformers just admit they have burned billions of public dollars to develop standardized tests that are of low or mediocre quality?
We’ll be gracious, I would hope, and appreciate reformers for their worthy motives, but at the final buzzer, we have to know, deep down, that the score is, at best, tied. And probably, it’s in the favor of educators who know how to stand in front of a classroom and get through to enough kids to keep the motor running for those kids to come back the following year.
The truth is, our schools are not filled with really bad teachers, just with teachers who are trying to help kids learn. Now, if we promise to be gracious, can you reformers stop getting in their way? Can you stop bleeding money from our public schools so you can design tests that are of lower quality than those designed by most teachers in their sleep? Can you?
If so, this would be my full-page ad in the Misguided Education Reform Journal:
Dear Ed Reformers: Thank you for opening our eyes to things in our schools that needed a light to shine upon them. We will no longer let special-needs children or students in any other subgroup slack off on trying to achieve at the highest level possible for each of them. We can advocate our different perspectives and push forth our varied points of view, but after the schools have made their decisions, we go out and go back to our camps, where we deliver an adequate and fulfilling education to children who rejoice to have the right to get that education, because it’s chock full of fun and encouragement for a lifetime of learning and discovery.