Who Gets to Sit at the Table? (poem)

Who Gets to Sit at the Table?


Millionaires and billionaires
people who went to private schools
who grew up with silver spoons in their mouths
and went on their European vacations
or ski getaways.

Know about poverty?
Know about learning language
and
Chemistry,
Biology,
American History,
Trigonometry,
PE,
all in a new language?

I don’t think so.

Even our President has taught ---

at college,
BUT
our Secretary of Education was only
a tutor
without a teaching license.

Why did I get my master’s degree
and go into debt
and become a teacher
to help better a society
and to give of myself,
my time,
my resources,
my talents?
Just so that a bunch of rich people
can get together and tell me I’m doing it wrong?

Just so that a Race To The Top

will become a race to see who can circumvent the rules
the fastest
is more like it -

This is a hustle.
A hustle for money-
for test prep,
for private companies
and bookmakers,

and online Smartboard programmers
and Apps.

The Common Core is a ruse,
a verbose euphemism for
what teachers already do.

THIS
is about the haves and the have-nots
and who gets to sit at the table.

THIS
is about eliminating unions and isolating
all laborers so that they acquiesce.

Who gets to make the decisions?

Not us,
the teachers,
the counselors,
the nurses,
the librarians,
the teaching assistants
and para-professionals.
The people and staff who work with your children every day
and who know what is good for them –

None of us would march into an office
of a dentist,
or a doctor,
or an artist,
or an engineer
and tell them how to do their jobs,
so why is it okay to do it to teachers?

Why are we criminalized for the nation’s devastating poverty levels
when two wars have been waged in the past decade
in the name of national security?

Why does Johnny’s score tell me I’m a bad teacher
when Johnny didn’t eat last night or this morning,
has no heat in his house,
no clean clothes to wear and
certainly no quiet place to do his homework?
His mother is in jail,
his father is gone.
Little Johnny lives with grandma
who doesn’t have enough money to pay for her medicine and whose first language isn’t English.

Why don’t you blame our social evils on those who have distracted you
from the true problems
and economic vacuums of the day:
War
Wall Street Greed
Poverty
Broken Health Care
Corruption
And let’s not forget Lies.

Lies are what they tell you
to make you feel comfortable about yourself,
to make you not question the real problems of the day.

Yes,
teachers are the problem,
Mr. King,
Mr. Cuomo,
Mr. Duncan-
that’s how you got to where you are today.


By Jennifer Wheeler-Ballestas