Full Text of Anthony Mullen's 2009 National Teacher of the Year Speech
July 5, 2009
Thank you very much, President Van Roekel, and thank you all. Good afternoon. I must say the view from up here is beautiful.
The heart and soul of every union is its local. I’m blessed to be a part of the Greenwich Education Association. They literally have my back today here, our President Cathy Delahanty.
And our locals wouldn’t have teeth that could bite if they were not supported by a strong state union. And I’m also blessed to be a part of the Connecticut Education Association, led by Phil Apruzzese.
Yes, I saved the best for last, the NEA. The NEA is like the big brother you always wanted when you were young and things got rough. And things are getting rough for teachers. America’s teachers and education support professionals live in very challenging and stressful times. Incredibly, many of the nation’s economic problems are now directed at unions. We have become easy targets for some misguided government officials, economists, and media talking heads who believe it is time for us to give back and to share the pain. Well, teachers and education support professionals have burdened the pain of being underpaid and overworked for too long.
And since we have been given very little, we have nothing to give back. Teachers did not leave their classrooms and abandon children when the best deal in town was to work in the financial services sector. We did not join the legions of people that became wealthy by sitting in front of a computer and selling stocks and managing hedge funds. We did not envy friends and neighbors who prospered during the 1980s and 1990s and bought McMansions and took trips to Bali. No, we stayed with our students because we believe that education and our nation’s children are too valuable to be abandoned for a new sports car. So we accepted our meager raises. We worked harder to narrow the achievement gap and did more with less to help our nation prosper. And now, some of the very same people who once asked me how I could live on a teacher’s salary, are now asking me what I can do to help the economy. What my union is going to do to help the economy.
And I tell these people two things: One, teachers did not crash the economy. Greed and corruption by people entrusted with our country’s financial health collapsed the economy.
And two, unions are helping to recover the economy by protecting the rights of their members. Unions are making sure that what has made our country great, the middle class, will not be sacrificed for the decadence of Wall Street.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I’m a teacher. And inevitably the next question is, what do you teach? It’s a rather straightforward question, but one that misses the priority of our profession, because what I teach is not as important as whom I teach.
And we all teach our nation’s children, our country’s most valuable human resource. Teachers are given a critical task of not only educating children, we are responsible for developing caring, ethical, and industrious young adults, and we do our jobs well. We do our jobs well because we never forget that if teachers fail as teachers, we have failed a child. And that is a burden our hearts cannot endure. I often wonder during these challenging times if teachers really understand their true value to our society. So I would like to spend a few minutes to tell you about your value.
Teachers, more than any other group of people, have transformed the world for the better. Take a moment just to look at this magnificent convention hall. Everything you see around you has been made possible by teachers. The architects and the engineers who designed this building did so because teachers taught them how to read and to write and calculate and design.
Your value as a teacher is right here. And your value as a teacher can be seen wherever you see or feel or hear or taste or smell something created by human hands, because teachers held those hands. And teachers guided those hands. Teachers affect us tremendously all through our lives because the greatest institution ever created to improve a society is a school, and the most powerful instrument of a school is a teacher. No other democracy created by man to promote the welfare of all people has ever existed. Schools and teachers have always been the catalyst for human progress because knowledge and learning have created the world in which we live. And the world in which we live today, with all the advancements in technology and medicine and engineering and food production, has largely been a product of American public school students taught by American public school teachers.
This year I will be traveling across our nation promoting the teaching profession and advocating for the rights of children. And one of the fundamental rights of every child is the ability to graduate high school. This year, over 1 million high school students will drop out. Nearly one-third of all public high school students will fail to graduate with their class. And we have over 2,000 high schools in our nation where less than 50 percent of their student body graduates. Shouldn’t these shocking statistics be treated as a national crisis rather than a postscript to a failed education?
Hasn’t the time arrived to place some perspective on the priorities of American education? How our nation compares to Asia or Europe on math tests or reaching a consensus on national standards are minor matters when every 60 seconds, two teenagers drop out of school. Now is the time for government officials and education policymakers to look at the graduation rate with as much urgency as they do high-stakes testing results.
The over 1 million young people dropping out of school will be entering a world unprepared for the competitive global job market. These students will have neither the academic nor vocational skills needed to acquire high-quality jobs. The stakes could not be any higher. If our education system continues to lose over 1 million dropouts each year, our nation will no longer be able to compete in a global economy. More and more jobs will be exported overseas and too many students will never have the chance to achieve the American dream to live a better life than their parents did. The students we teach today are driving down a path of an unknown future and much uncertainty lies ahead, but what is certain is the object in the rearview mirror. The object in the rearview mirror is a student in India, China or Eastern Europe chasing the future prosperity of our students by seeking those high-quality jobs. And it is our task, our most critical responsibility, to make sure that the objects in the rearview mirror do not catch up to our children.
I have the privilege of teaching teenagers, an interesting population of people that are no longer children but not quite adults. So I call them apprentice adults, and like all apprentices, they need to be taught new skills and be mentored by adults who want them to succeed.
I decided to switch careers and exchanged a pair of handcuffs for a set of textbooks, hoping to convince these young people suffering from emotional and learning disabilities that the sum of all their yesterdays does not equal the value of one tomorrow.
I wanted to be part of a profession that enabled me to be proactive rather than reactive in the lives of young people, young people destined to drop out of school or spend their lives in a prison cell. I want to perform the small miracles I witnessed teachers achieve when I was in school and believed that my family circumstances and background would define my future. And I wanted to be able to remind my students that origin is not destiny.
And with the help of some very supportive colleagues, I am working on one such miracle right now. She is a 16-year-old girl who became a mother when she was 15. She has covered herself with tattoos and pierced parts of her body that just aren’t meant to be perforated. She is consumed with anger. She is angry at the father who left when she was an infant; angry at the mother who placed her in foster care when she was a child; and angry at a world that she soon will enter as an adult, a world that won’t see much value in her as a person. She is combative, rude, vulgar, basically the type of person who does not believe that the meek will inherit the Earth. She feels comfortable hiding behind a mask of anger, keeping a safe distance between herself and adults. It’s been very challenging to make her understand that teachers care about her and we will not abandon her. So we used the tools that many teachers use. We applied ample measures of passion and perseverance until finally we were able to help remove the mask.
And one day a breakthrough occurred. She approached me during a lunch break and thought to ask some questions. She asked if I was once a New York City detective. And I said, “yes.” And then she asked if detectives are good at finding things. I said, “Sometimes.” And then she asked a question that I believe has been troubling her since childhood. She asked if I could help find something, something she had lost. Something she had been seeking for a very long time. She asked if I could help find her daddy. And suddenly, it was not difficult to see a lonely, frightened 16-year-old girl who needed a teacher in her life. Her daddy is long gone and probably will never be part of her life. But every day, I have the opportunity to help prepare her for actual life. Every day I find moments to remind her that she is a young lady with value and purpose and a promising future. Every day I am given a chance to save one child at a time and to prevent another dropout.
These are the riches. These are the riches that we are given as teachers and educators.
President Calvin Coolidge famously remarked that the business of America is business. No, it’s not. The business of America is education.
And I know that the people here today, teachers and education support professionals who are engaged in the business of education, share a common aim, a common effort, and a common responsibility to protect our rights as teachers and the rights of every child to receive a quality education. I would like to close my remarks today by clarifying who I am. The title National Teacher of the Year implies something that I am not. I am not our nation’s best teacher. That title belongs to the many unsung teachers here today and across our great nation, teaching and inspiring and healing children every day.
I am the National Teacher of the Year, and I hope to be your voice for the next year.
Thank you and God bless.
