For the last few years, I have been a teacher in several Chicago Public schools. The question that had been on my mind from day one was why? Why are the kids not learning? Why do a lot of people not care? Why are the people running things so ignorant? Why is there not a lot of money to fund the schools? Why don’t we have an air conditioner? Why am I in a classroom with 30+ students? Why are so many teachers so unmotivated?  Why so many teachers are quitting? Why does my whole school operate on ONE copier? Why don’t the parents care? Why don’t we have enough books? Why are teachers being attacked in the media? Why is it just the teachers’ fault? Why do we keep testing those kids? Why are the students being set-up to fail? Why are we lying to them? And that is just the start.

Okay, so I lied, it is not just one question. Some of these questions have simple answers and some have highly complicated answers that require a volume of books.

All these questions are of course related and they affect each other in more ways than one. If we put the first question as the umbrella under which all the other questions are related, we would be wrong. I believe that they all interact with each other. For example, is the department of education the reason the students are not learning or because the students are not learning we end up with a department of education that is trying to salvage the problem? Is the government the problem? Are teachers the problem? Are parents the problem? Or are students the problem? 

These are a lot of questions I know and questions are always a good start assuming we are trying to answer those questions. So where do we start? Well, first we need a little history.