There Are No Shortcuts: How an inner-city teacher--winner of the American Teacher Award--inspires his students and challenges us to rethink the way we educate our children - Hardcover

Rafe Esquith is beginning his eighteenth year at Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles. He is the product of the Los Angeles public schools and a graduate of UCLA. His many honors and awards include the 1992 Disney National Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award, a Sigma Beta Delta Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, Parents Magazine’s As You Grow Award, Oprah Winfrey’s Use Your Life Award, and an MBE from Queen Elizabeth. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Barbara Tong.

Chapter 1

Curtains

It's dangerous to think too much about public education. So many things are wrong with it that it's easier simply to go on a search-and-destroy mission and write only about the horror of it all. Those of us who have survived school have plenty of scars. Any person who has taught for more than a few years has met administrators, teachers, parents, and children who, as Mark Twain once remarked, "make a body ashamed of the human race."

That's not my mission here. More than anything else, this book is meant to be a reminder of what public education can be. But to understand where we might consider going, it becomes painfully necessary to examine some things that we usually try to avoid.

I have one more objective, too: I want to give hope to young teachers who would like to run against the wind but are afraid of the consequences. I am living proof that you can have success as a teacher despite the many forces that are working against you. Like the Founding Fathers, I am a lover of independence, and freethinkers are not fash- ionable in public schools today. Instead, as public schools fail, bureaucrats are attempting to solve serious problems with simplistic solutions. They're afraid to examine the real reasons why our schools are failing, so they use fashion- able words or pretty new textbooks to try and solve the very real problems that are destroying our classrooms. Poverty, greed, and incompetent teaching are just some of the reasons why Johnny not only can't read but has no interest in reading. Using a new reading series or changing the classroom environment isn't going to solve our problems. Most tragic of all, many districts are trying to take charge of education by forcing all teachers to use uniform lesson plans, by which all students will be guided in the same way at the same pace. This may be a comfort to young teachers who aren't sure what to do every day, but I already know the inevitable result of uniform teaching: things will continue to be uniformly terrible.

I've never been one of the masses, either as a parent or as a teacher. I will not let advertisers persuade me to see mediocre movies, and I do not watch a television show in order to converse with peers about it the following day. My life is my own. I don't feel I have to buy in to the popular culture in order to be a successful teacher, parent, or person. But there are those to whom fitting in with the majority is important, and I have respect for that path; it's just not the one I can follow, and these people may find the lessons I've learned irrelevant for their journey.

However, if you're a young teacher or parent who has often wanted to break from the pack but has been afraid to do so, I can tell you that I've done so and am still standing. I have many scars and bruises, but I have, as Robert Frost tells us, taken the road less traveled. And it's made all the difference.

Most teachers who are honest look back on their first years in the classroom through half-closed eyes. Teaching is a tough job at any time, and I've yet to meet anyone who excelled at it from the start. It takes years of experience to develop the wisdom that can lead to being a first-rate teacher.

I was definitely a slow learner, and I had an interesting but painful experience when I was student-teaching in UCLA's Graduate School of Education program. I thought I was doing a pretty good job and was vigorously supported by the master teacher who supervised my work in her sixth-grade classroom. She particularly liked the reading program I designed for the students, most of whom spoke Spanish as their primary language. Rather than using the boring school reader assigned by the school district, I'd been reading the classics with these kids, and their reading and enthusiasm for literature increased enormously. For our final project of the year, we read Romeo and Juliet. My plan was to take the kids to the Franco Zeffirelli film on a weekend. It was playing in a revival house that showed classic films (this was before video made the showing of movies in class much easier).

The children got very excited about this trip and read Romeo and Juliet with gusto. They were devastated on the Friday we finished when our principal sent me a note tell- ing me he had heard about my plan but that it was strictly forbidden to take students out on a Saturday. He went on to threaten that if the trip went ahead as planned, I would not receive a positive evaluation at the end of my student-teaching assignment.

I was furious and just crumpled up his note. I had worked for two months to get the kids ready for this trip. Their parents were supportive, and many of them were coming to the movie with their children. I couldn't believe the head of a school would want to prevent his kids from having a rewarding climax to their experience with Shakespeare. Looking back, I laugh at myself that a decision like that surprised me. I was so young.

I stormed into the office, gave the crumpled note to the principal's secretary, and told her to tell him where he could stick it. That afternoon, when I arrived at UCLA for my education classes, I was informed by one of the instructors that I had been suspended until a committee could decide if I had the moral character to be a good teacher. The fact that the movie trip was canceled was the least of my problems.

I went home too angry to cry, and terrified at the thought of never teaching again. I had spent much of my life planning to be a teacher and now I had to consider the possibility that because of this stupid incident I might have to do something truly awful, like go to law school. This frustration was exacerbated when I received my first lesson in educational hypocrisy. There were rumors that the principal who was angry with me was having an affair with one of the teachers (they were both married), and that she was pregnant. Now, I'm no saint, but it was hard to have my moral integrity judged by this hypocrite.

To make a long story short, they allowed me to go on being a teacher if I completely discounted the last six months of student teaching and repeated them. To punish me, they had me supervised by a struggling new teacher who had often come to me for assistance when we were attending class together the previous year. Despite her self-acknowledged shortcomings as a classroom leader, she graduated on time and got a job immediately. Well, I give them credit: if their goal was to humble me and teach me my place, they did so. I learned quickly that I was in no position to talk back to principals.

I wanted to be a teacher so desperately that I swallowed my pride, said all the right things, and received my teach- ing credential the following year. I was so glad to survive this ordeal that I didn't take the time to consider the les- son I should have been learning. I still mistakenly believed that this incident was an unusual one, and that when I was actually teaching and being paid for it, I'd be supervised by caring and able people who had dedicated their lives to the betterment of young human beings. I didn't realize that many people, who may be good people, feel that working in schools is just a job and not a holy mission. Instead, I was more interested in the fact that within the next two years, the principal who had written me the note went through a divorce; his wife had never forgiven him when his illegitimate child was born. Sadly, a year later he was diagnosed with cancer and died soon after.

I had missed a crucial lesson here, but I would be given countless opportunities in the future to learn it. Public education is a mess, and I had survived my first scare by allowing the powers that be to force me to do exactly what they wanted.

This is a natural danger for many young teachers. In truth, for many of us the initial objective is just to survive; we hope our lessons go smoothly and the clock runs quickly. For many novice teachers, there is no more wonderful sound than the dismissal bell signaling the end of the day. Consequently, in far too many classrooms the children's edu- cation is not the main objective. Older teachers often mentor the young ones by teaching them survival tips that are fine for the beginning teacher but not helpful to the student. As a result, many young teachers believe they're doing a good job when in fact they're using smoke and mirrors. They have beautifully decorated classrooms with all the school standards created by some bureaucrat hanging on the wall. Their kids walk in straight lines, and order carries the day.

It is painful to reflect on this, because that was my classroom for the first couple of years, and I, too, thought I was doing a good job. What's more, the kids liked me. God, how foolish I feel now, remembering those desperate days. I actually worried more about the kids liking me than if they were reading well.

But I was fortunate. I had planned to teach at a school in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood. Instead, I was assigned to a middle-class school with middle-class parents and middle-class values. There were only three hundred children at this school, and everybody spoke English. The kids had private music lessons at home. Everyone was on a soccer team or in a drama club or in an orchestra on Saturdays. They went to school liking their teachers before they had met them. I used to joke with my friends and tell them that I taught at a school called Camelot. I felt wonderful, until one day, by accident, a very nice little girl said something to me that started me down a different path.

Our school was having a fund-raiser, and every teacher was supposed to contribute something for a silent auction. One teacher contributed tennis lessons; another was taking four kids to the movies. Since I loved Shakespeare, I planned a trip to the Old Globe Theater in San Diego for a group of about twenty-five students. The plan was for some parents, teachers, and me to drive the kids down for a weekend and two plays. The parents would pay for the trip and add about $25 extra. In this way the trip ...