Call This The Empty Chair by Patte Carter-Hevia

Today I attended a National Education Association Listening Tour stop. Dinner and then a keynote speaker and then a panel discussion. The theme was "How do we create the public schools that our children deserve?”

The keynote speaker was a business owner and author. He told the story of how he came to learn that a business model is not what education needs. Interesting. Engaging. Informative. Entertaining.

Please, God, from his mouth to corporate America’s and the policymakers’ ears.

The panel discussion that followed included an education lawyer, a university professor from the college of education, a university coordinator of urban education, a state representative, the school superintendent, and the school board president. All wrapped up in a bow with the union president as the moderator.

All advocates of public education and educators.
All well-informed individuals.
All intelligent and articulate professionals.
Each with much to bring to the proverbial table.

And, as far as I could tell from what I have been able to discern, not a current public school teacher in the bunch.

Instead we were the audience. We were once again being talked to and talked about. Once again, the discussion, as good as it was, ended where it should have begun.

Pity the poor colleagues of mine who were seated on my right and my left.

I had a LOT to say. No, I wasn’t shouting; I just wasn’t whispering either.

I think a colleague of mine was correct, when we spoke afterwards, in saying that perhaps the discussion should have been open mic.

With no teacher at the adult table, we were instead again the kid in the class who knows the answer but that the teacher won’t call on.

During one point in the discussion, the superintendent commented that she had been invited by the local newspaper to write an op-ed piece on the newly appointed secretary of education. She said she declined the invitation. She declined the invitation because she didn’t know anything about the SoE. The superintendent is coming to the end of a forty-plus-year career in education. During her career, she has been to multiple meetings on education and educational policy. She has read research. She has read journals. She has served on committees. She has been visible at the local, state, and national levels.

In all that time and attention and service to education, she has never seen or met the current secretary of education.

She stated that when she wanted or needed the services of a doctor or lawyer or accountant, she sought out professionals in that particular field.

That generated a round of applause.

I commented that that is what she should have written in her op-ed.

The implication of her comments was that the appointment of the current secretary of education was wrong on several levels.
Yet I realize as I consider the members of the panel for this evening’s discussion and I hear teachers scream for a voice and a seat at the “grown-up” table, that tonight’s event, as good as the discussion was and as passionate about education as the members of the panel were, was still a microcosm of what is wrong with education.

And we’re still no closer to making it right.