Where Have All the Veteran Educators Gone?
By: Wilma de Soto 

While no one wants to read yet another statement from yet another teacher considering leaving the profession, I feel I have to remove myself from the food chain of the corporate sociopaths who are behind school reform.

We are just more food and energy for them and they're not going to change. Sociopaths cannot change while accusing those of us opposed to them as not being able to accept change. They will not stop until they have what they want. They just amass new confederates, allies and victims when the former ones are consumed, leave or move on.

My biggest regret is that the message of what is really happening in schools today is not getting out to the people in the way the opposite message about privatization is. 

Teachers believe that above all someday, someway, somehow people will see and appreciate the good we do for children. They don't. If they do care it doesn't matter because they see it as part of what we're supposed to do anyway. They don't see it as above and beyond.

Teachers have also enabled this behavior by stepping in and correcting situations that we had no real business doing, such as furnishing school supplies with our own money because we did not want our students to do without and we wanted to be able to do our job. That allowed others NOT to be able to do THEIR jobs such as administrators, parents, the school boards, etc.

We just continued to accept more and more with less and less and hoped deep down people would see this and understand and perhaps give us a helping hand. Their response was to administer the coup d'grace while the masses danced around the bonfires that we finally got our comeuppance because we have summers off and they don't.

We have allowed them to brick by brick, stone by stone, person by person de-professionalize us, demoralize us until we were whipped into such a frenzy that we went on, (what the people were led to believe), a self-righteous, self-serving rampage while not really getting the facts out to the people in a manner they could hang their hats on. That is my biggest regret.

I hope those who choose to stay a while longer get this and change how we disseminate our message, because when they re-invent the wheel 20-30 years from now, they will have lost access to any educational legacy of superior, veteran educators forever and we will deeply regret playing a part in allowing that to happen.