It worked for a bit, but as it began filling with water, energy was diverted from paddling to bailing. Our cement canoe is full of parents, teachers, children, principals, school board members, legislators, and educators. It's not the people in the canoe causing the problem, it's the canoe itself. Attempts to blame educators for educational system failures prevent them from looking at the merits of alternative ideas. They just return the ad hominem attacks.
Most educators are good people trying to do good work.
But they're caught in a system that doesn't work, the cement canoe of socialism. Andrei Sakharov won the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics in 1975. From his position of eminence within the Soviet Union, Sakharov courageously denounced the failures of communism within his own country. We need educators who have worked within our educational system and have witnessed its failures first hand to do the same - we need School Sakharovs. With Education Glasnost, we'll help educators feel safe enough to break their code of silence, as did John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.