“There is not one educator who wants any child to fail. Not one,” says Deborah Broxton of Fernandina Beach, Florida. “Treat us like the professionals we are.”

Broxton teaches in an alternative program for some of the toughest high school students, many of them violent, in North Florida. And she sums up the feelings of many NEA members after two years of being told that tens of thousands of public schools are failing—and that the problem lies largely with them.

It’s not the kind of news that inspires, but then good news about educators seems in short supply of late. Truth is, these are not feel-good times. The revamped Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the so-called No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), spurred not just a reexamination of how America educates its children, but lots of soul searching among educators about how politicians regard them. Do politicians really understand the struggles of educators? Do they appreciate educators’ commitment to one of the most challenging jobs in America?

As the nation stands poised to pick a new President, NEA members are not so sure. When asked in an NEA poll last May what education issues were most important to them in this election, “respect” trumped the list, followed by the closely related issue: fixing NCLB. It’s a law many members say is based on the notion that they won’t do their jobs without Washington standing over their shoulders telling them who, when, and what to test; how to grade the tests; and what punishments they will suffer when students fall short.

“There’s total disrespect from the federal level,” said a Pennsylvania teacher. “It’s as if the last people in the world you would ask to figure out how to help kids learn are the teachers.”

Fueling that feeling of rejection, members say, is an apparent disregard for the complicated social issues that make learning—and parent involvement—so difficult, and a resistance to paying for higher professional salaries and smaller classes.

“I have a class of 45 kids trying to learn with 12 special ed kids in there. How is that even remotely possible?” said a young teacher from Las Vegas, Nevada. “I’ve turned into a babysitter.”

Those who suffer most are students, members say. Discussing the impact of burgeoning testing requirements, one teacher reported, “I have kindergartners and first graders saying, ‘I’m stupid.’ That’s heartbreaking.”

Whichever candidate they support, members want our next President to hear and respect their firsthand knowledge of education.

Here are some of their voices.

“Really poor teachers?!”

Photo by Steve Pope

RESPECT  Dennis Linn doesn’t think he’s a failure. And yet, this summer, the Iowa math teacher received a national Republican Congressional Committee-sponsored poll in his mailbox asking him, “Why is public education failing?”

“They listed a bunch of reasons [to check off] but the one that really got to me was, ‘Really poor teachers,’” Linn recounts. His response: “If you keep taking money out of the public education system in your belief that it has already failed, then it really is going to fail.”

This latest mailing from the nation’s capital affirms for Linn that educators have become the Rodney Dangerfields of professional America. They get “no respect”—and worse, to use the language of his kids at Pella High School, they’re “dissed” by those who should model the nation’s values.

Take the No Child Left Behind law: When it transfers power from local schools to federal offices, that’s disrespectful, he says. “Pushing issues and not funding them—that’s disrespectful,” he adds.

In recent years, Linn, a lifelong Republican, has felt that disrespect from his own political party. It has become near impossible to bring up Iowa State Education Association ideas at Republican state caucuses, he says.

And so, after 31 years working over math equations, Linn wonders if the current variables add up to a future in teaching. It’s not that he wants to retire, but he wonders if public schools can survive the current attitude of disdain. Even when citizens want more money put in schools, elected officials refuse.

“They say ‘No, that’s not our agenda.’”

The para test: judging what?

Photo by Cheryl Gerber

RESPECT  Terri Prough wants the President of the United States to come see her.

Prough, a special education paraprofessional in LaPlace, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, has invited several politicians to visit her class, but none has shown up. 

If the President came, she says, “he would realize these children have serious problems. He would learn that we do a lot more than the people in Washington think we do. They think we’re stupid. They think they wrote the book on special education, but they know nothing about it.”

Prough took the ParaPro test to comply with the so-called No Child Left Behind law. The test covered reading, writing, and math, but “nowhere did it ask me what I should do with the child who eats chalk, bugs, or anything else he can shove in the mouth, or the emotionally disturbed child who throws chairs at other students.”

Prough knows that paras, especially at the high school level, do need academic skills. “Of course you need an education, but not college-level. A high school diploma should be enough,” she says.

“Let every school district evaluate their paras by observing them in the classroom. Does the para treat the children with respect, and follow through with the teacher’s instructions? Is the para dedicated enough to want to come back year after year, and willing to do the extra dirty work?” 

The testing, says Prough, is a waste of money. “Let them spend that money on classes for us about how to work with special education kids.”

Left behind in language limbo

Photo by Peter Zuzga

FAIRNESS  Jeanne Sanchez-Bell has students from Mexico, Pakistan, Guatemala, Colombia, Japan, Turkmenistan, and all corners of the non-English-speaking world. They come to her Mary D. Bradford High School classroom in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with little English and spotty school histories.

Some will disappear quickly to work in local factories or care for younger siblings at home. Others will stay and, after a couple years of classes, can ask for directions to the bathroom and navigate simple books. At that point the so-called No Child Left Behind law will demand that they take and pass standardized reading and math tests in English.

“It’s just impossible,” exclaims Sanchez-Bell.

While her kids may understand how plants rely on sunshine to grown and breathe, they’ve no idea how “autotrophic life forms” use “electromagnetic radiation” during “photosynthesis.” Even after an overdue revision this year, NCLB still expects immigrant students to perform as well as their native-born peers. When they fail, so do their teachers and schools.

To Sanchez-Bell, a second-generation American and fluent Spanish-speaker, the federal education law desperately needs fixing (and funding).

Regular rulers won’t work

Photo by Craig Mitchelldyer

FAIRNESS  When Michelle, an eighth-grader in Hillsboro, Oregon, first came to Raymond A.

Brown Middle School, she was sweet and even-tempered—and still is—but, because she was different from most of her classmates, she didn’t have any friends.

Now, despite a cognitive disability, she plays cards with buddies, has company at lunch, and even goes to sleepovers. She’s ready for high school, says Michelle’s case manager, Patty Craig, while wiping tears from her eyes.

Of course, that kind of progress won’t be noted by any measure of the No Child Left Behind law. A special education student’s ability to make friends, use the bathroom, or focus on a teacher can’t be measured by standardized tests.

And it’s not that tests are bad, Craig says. “I’d like to see us continue to give tests that are appropriate to kids, but make the focus their own progress at their own level,” she adds.

Since Craig began her career 12 years ago, it seems testing has been stealing more and more instruction time from her kids. Each student requires about seven hours of individualized testing—multiply that by 10 and you’ve lost two weeks. At the same time, class sizes have skyrocketed and support services have been cut.

It makes her angry that citizens—from the White House to the neighbor’s house—don’t seem to realize these burdens. “People in my building are competent and professional and you’d be amazed at the number of cars here at 10 p.m.,” Craig says. “But this is compromising my ability to do my job.”

*NEA Member Survey, May 2004

Your marriage or your life

Photo by Sandy Schaeffer

HEALTH CARE   Homer Adams wants a President who would save his friends’ marriage.

It may seem a lot to ask, but in this case, their marriage of nearly 50 years is on the rocks because of our nation’s dysfunctional health care system. The husband needs expensive medical treatment. The only way he can get it without losing his home is to put their house in his wife’s name and divorce her.

“They don’t take their marriage lightly,” says Adams. “The divorce goes against their fiber and what they feel they stand for as human beings. But what else can they do?”

The escalating health care crisis is probably the number one domestic political issue on retirees’ minds because it is so immediate and so threatening. Adams, chairperson of the Ohio Education Association-Retired, says he is hearing more and more personal tales of financial disaster because of medical problems.

He himself is diabetic and, in the last two years, his drug co-payments have ballooned from about $7 a month to nearly $100. The new Medicare prescription drug benefit was supposed to help, but Adams finds the drug companies have boosted prices enough to more than make up for the discounts. So Adams and his friends are worse off than before.

“It galls me that the new law specifically forbids Medicare from trying to bargain those high prescription drug prices down,” he says. The Veterans Administration negotiates low drug prices for veterans, but Medicare, he fumes, is prohibited from bargaining lower prices for seniors.

Lab rats get more room

Photo by D.J. Meeks

CLASS SIZE   There’s such a thing as too many living organisms in the petri dish that science teacher Lyn Slygh calls her classroom. When it gets crowded—38 students!—she has to change the way she cultivates little minds.

Fire is out. Instead of asking students to sterilize equipment over a flame, the Lake Worth High School veteran buys expensive pre-sterilized equipment. Gas is out. Sadly, even microscopes are difficult to manage. (Try this problem: 38 kids divided by 24 electrical outlets.)

Slygh, who was voted Florida’s best biology teacher by her peers this year, isn’t about to let the kids suffer. While her colleagues switch to worksheets, she spends more time on preparation and clean-up, and moves faster.

“All their hands are up and I’ll just systematically go around and say, ‘You’re just going to have to wait, I’ll be there eventually,’” she says.

To grade papers and prepare labs, she arrived to school last year at 8 a.m. and left 10 hours later. Her largest Advanced Placement class wasn’t bad, but younger kids… “The bigger the class is, the more kids think they can get away with.”

Come November, class size—an investment she says would pay off—will be one of the many issues on Slygh’s mind. (Don’t get her started on testing. Kids don’t learn to think anymore, she says.)

 “You put a rat in a lab cage and they’ve got better conditions,” she says. “You can only put so many rats in each cage, and then you regulate the temperature and fix things when they break.”

Making do

Photo by Stacy Edmonds

FUNDING  During the winter months, many of the kids in Vaughn Spencer’s eighth-grade social studies classroom wear their coats inside because the boilers aren’t always working. By August, the same kids are sweltering because the school can’t afford air-conditioning.

Like many urban schools, Southern Middle School in Reading, Pennsylvania, has a scarcity of commodities and a surplus of challenges: aging buildings, lack of funds, high teacher turnover, and a large percentage of non-English-speaking students.

“Right now, urban schools are carrying the weight of NCLB because we’re the ones who lack the funds but who have the numbers,” says Spencer. The “numbers” are the student subgroups—including English-language learners and low-income students—whose scores are make or break under the federal law. Because of their low scores, Spencer’s school and five others locally have been targeted by NCLB. In response, the district has filed a suit against the state, claiming that it has an unfair burden compared to surrounding suburban districts.

“The irony is that NCLB is hurting the very kids it was supposed to help,” says Spencer. “We no longer have the time to introduce our kids to experiences outside of their daily environment—experiences their suburban counterparts take for granted.”

Activities at Southern Middle School now center on raising test scores. Teachers have fewer planning periods and there is little or no time for field trips or the interactive projects the students love and that help make the curriculum meaningful to them. 

“We’re the second poorest school district in the state and we’re underfunded,” says Spencer, “but we’re still expected to come through.”

Not worth a dime?

Photo by Alan Smith

FUNDING  Minneapolis English teacher Opal Ehalt is in the front ranks of the fight to “leave no child behind,” and she’s wondering why the President wants to cut her loose. Ehalt works with students who are as likely to be left behind as anyone—teen parents, 80 percent of them on public assistance, many from families that have been on welfare for generations.

Her project is funded by one of the 38 education programs zeroed out in the Bush Administration education budget for next year. The Administration tried to ax it this year, but Congress restored half of the money.

Ehalt says many of her students’ families move frequently, so they disappear from school records. Under the so-called No Child Left Behind law, there’s an incentive for schools not to find them because they might drag down a school’s test scores.

But she and her colleagues simply won’t give up on these students. One strategy is to connect school and work, making school directly relevant to the students’ lives. For example, there’s a chef training project in which students cook for the soup kitchen run by the church next door.

Ehalt is adding a high-tech strand to the program, putting courses online, adding chat rooms, and teaching 21st century computer skills.

“One of my girls designed her own Web page including music. She’s headed for college,” Ehalt reports. The federal dollars in this program do double duty because each young mom pulled out of poverty brings her baby along with her.

So how about some help?

And if THAT’S Not Enough…

You Can Become a Party Person

No, not the kind that parties at the nightclub with a drink in each hand and confetti in the hair. We’re talking about the kind that parties at the Republican or Democratic national conventions with a flag in each hand and confetti in the hair. For NEA members Jerry Roe and Karla Bradley, and the thousands of other delegates that attend the RNC and DNC, democracy is a participatory business.

RNC in the House

Photo by Sandy Schaeffer

“Educators are more involved in politics than they’ve ever been before,” says Jerry Roe, an American political systems professor and alternate Michigan delegate to this year’s Republican National Convention. “Teachers are out there running for office, serving as precinct delegates, and working on party committees. We have a profound influence, inside and outside of the classroom. The message we give our students is that all Americans have a stake in the political system, no matter what their beliefs.” 

Roe, who has been active in Republican politics for years, has sage advice for aspiring activists—those who campaign from their couch and computer and those who hit the trail:

IF YOU’RE A HOMEBODY, BE PROACTIVE. Read and watch the news and write letters to the editor and members of the legislature and Congress. Be informed so you can discuss the issues.

IF YOU’RE A BUDDING POLITICIAN, JUMP INTO THE FRAY. Make your voice heard and be a part of the group that makes decisions.

DNC in the House

Photo by Sandy Schaeffer

Karla Bradley, elementary school teacher and First Vice Chair of the Democratic party of Arkansas, wants her fellow educators to know they have more clout than they realize. A super delegate to this year’s Democratic National Convention, Bradley enjoyed hearing Senator Kerry’s sister, a teacher, speak about education. “Teachers don’t realize how important we are politically,” says Bradley. “We have the ear of policy makers and the respect of parents.”

Bradley believes that educators are the perfect candidates for political activism because a combination of service and idealism is what brings them to the profession. Who has time for political action? you ask. Bradley offers guidance to both ardent and armchair activists:

SUPPORT CANDIDATES YOU REALLY BELIEVE IN. Even if they’re not perfect, you have a chance to make them better.

TAKE NOTHING FOR GRANTED—NOT EVEN THE BASICS. Make sure you, your family, your friends, and your co-workers are registered to vote. If possible, cast an early ballot. 

—Sabrina Holcomb

School House to State House

Sometimes you think, “If I were in charge…”

Well, what if you were calling the political shots? “I figure the person who can best represent me is me,” says Earnest “Coach” Williams, a physical education teacher—and two-term representative in Georgia’s House of Representatives. So go for it! Running for office just takes a little drive, a little cash, and “a friendly smile helps too,” Williams says.

Illustrations by Stuart Goldenberg

Judy Solano was eating at a Benihana restaurant when she realized she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d been chatting with a nearby mom about her obviously precocious 6-year-old son, and recalls saying, “He must just love school.”

He hates it, the mom told her. His classroom work wasn’t creative or engaging—it was just test preparation all day. They fought every morning to get the little guy onto the school bus.

“We’re killing the love of lifelong learning,” says Solano, a former Colorado fifth-grade teacher and Democratic candidate for Statehouse. “I said, ‘Okay, that’s it, I’m doing it.’”

This is Solano’s first foray into politics—and it’s not easy, she admits. There’s a lot of self-promotion, which she’s getting better at, and a lot of asking folks for money, which she still hates.

Still, Solano believes ordinary teachers have to get involved. “People in the Legislature who don’t know anything about education are making decisions for educators. It’s time for us to be more politically involved.”

Thirty-plus years after George McGovern’s failed bid for the presidency, retired librarian Ted Kneebone remains a fan of his fellow South Dakotan. “McGovern is still a saint….He showed you can win, even if you don’t win.”

Nonetheless, Kneebone does plan to win, even as he takes on a 10-year Statehouse incumbent in his first run for office. And then, when he gets to Pierre, he plans on making a little noise.

Take the so-called No Child Left Behind law—in fact, take it all the way back to Washington. “It’s a vicious, nasty attack on teachers…obviously cooked up by somebody who doesn’t know anything about education,” he says. “It’s time for us to say we don’t need the money.”

Although his name has never been on the ballot before, Kneebone has been active in Democratic politics for decades. He signed up for the union in 1955, and remembers marching for civil rights with his 8-year-old son a decade later. “When my ox gets gored, I’ve got to fight back,” he says.

You might think the statehouse and schoolhouse are worlds apart. Not true, says Donna Sweaney, an elementary school guidance counselor running for a fifth term in the Vermont Legislature.

“There’s not much difference between elementary and the Legislature,” Sweaney laughs. “My first impression was these people haven’t learned to listen to each other—and that’s exactly what I teach the kids to do.”

Still, Sweaney understands candidacy can be scary—even after years of local activism, it frightened her too. “Teachers, for the most part, are more introverted. We go into our classrooms and shut the door,” she says.

Talk to people with experience, she advises. Accept help from others. When Sweaney first ran, her friends threw a hugely successful Mexican feast to raise cash, she recalls.

In Vermont’s Legislature, there are doctors, dentists, lawyers, and loggers, but there should be teachers too. “I can be a voice on the House floor who says, ‘Wait a minute, what do you want us to do now? And what do you want us not to do?’”

Last year, on the first day of school, fourth-grade teacher Theresa Dudley had 42 kids in her class. After another teacher came on board, she had 29—but lunch still started at 10 a.m. and the media center was constantly overwhelmed, she says.

“When we had our union meeting, I stood up and asked, ‘Why are we supporting candidates that do nothing about growth?’” Dudley recalls. Maryland voters deserved an alternative, she decided.

“Democracy is healthy when it’s challenged,” she says.

For Dudley, that also means taking aim at the No Child Left Behind law, so that it returns some responsibility to parents. “They’re hitting us over the head…and then kids show up without their homework. Parents have a job to do too,” she says.

Being a Green Party candidate for U.S. Congress doesn’t mean you automatically get a lot of that, well, green stuff. But you can campaign cheaply by knocking on doors and introducing yourself in person, she says. And, she hopes, cheap is effective. “Ask me on election night,” she says, laughing.

Five years ago, Steve Smylie was sitting at a picnic table, “belly-aching about the latest actions of the Idaho Legislature,” when a friend said to him, “Funny, I don’t see your name on the ballot.”

“Basically, it was put up or shut up,” Smylie recalls.

He put up.

Smylie, a junior-high history and Spanish teacher, hopes to keep his seat in Boise this year, where he’s one of seven NEA members in the Legislature. A good run just requires “connections, connections, connections,” says Smylie, a Republican and the son of a former Idaho governor.

Being a teacher helps that way, he says. In some neighborhoods, “they all know Mr. Smylie….I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bumped into former students, who’ve become some of my strongest volunteers.”

But at the same time, Smylie is wary of being pigeonholed as “The Teacher,” he says. “You’re generally not effective if you stand up and say ‘I’m speaking for all my fellow teachers.’ What I’ve found is a lot of my colleagues quietly come to me.”

When Tammy Starnes picked out signs, she chose an apple and a cute message, “Dedicated to the core.” And when she met voters, she gave them packages of Chex Mix that said, “Check the box for Starnes!”

“That was probably a teacher thing,” Starnes laughs.

Considering this is her first campaign, it makes sense that Starnes, a former fourth-grade teacher who works for the state education department, still feels more like a teacher than a politician. Soon, she’ll also feel like Autauga County, Alabama’s newest school board member. With the promise of more equitable hiring and a teacher recognition program, Starnes won the Republican primary in July and faces no more opposition.

“[The campaign] was stressful and hot, but it was actually fun,” Starnes says. Like most teachers, she’s comfortable “talking to whomever,” and cash wasn’t a big issue after family members chipped in for the $2,500 campaign.

Now Starnes hopes she inspires other teachers to run. “I hope educators see this and won’t be fearful about standing up for themselves.”

Dale Stephens has driven a school bus for 25 years, which is also about the length of his political career. He first ran for office at the advanced age of 24.

“I lost by 97 votes and then I ran again and lost by six votes. And then I swore I’d never do it again,” Stephens chuckles. And yet, here he is, talking to local vets at the VFW Post, and hoping to regain the Statehouse seat he lost two years ago.

The tireless activist knows firsthand the effect of state budgets on local finances—teachers here haven’t had a raise in two years—and he can throw in a savvy two-cents on educational and workplace issues.

Still, it’s not easy. During his first year in office, he spent 134 days in the Capitol. “Do you have family? Business obligations?” he asks. It’s a part-time job that doesn’t feel like one—but his school-district employer often appreciates his role. “They know I’ll sit down with them.”

It took four or five years, but Connecticut State Rep. Ken Green finally convinced his colleagues in 2001 to boost the dropout age to 18, making it more difficult for his students to disappear without their diplomas.

“They weren’t seeing the future. They were saying, ‘I’m 16 and I’m outta here,’” Green recalls. But now, with few exceptions, they’re forced to grow more mature before making that decision.

When you’re a school social worker like Green, you bring real-life experience to the House floor. “It’s not research that I’ve done or statistics I’ve gathered, it’s my real life,” he says.

Offering that perspective “is our civic responsibility,” says Green, a Democrat. And, not only that, it shows students that activism is appropriate.

This year, Green has a few new battles. For one thing, the state needs to do more to encourage diversity among teachers—like a program to help classroom a