59. One
Lawyer Equals 3,000 Reams Of Paper: The Underground HIstory of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
One
Lawyer Equals 3,000 Reams Of Paper
Once, a long time ago, I spoke
before the District 3 School Board in Manhattan to plead that it not retain a private lawyer
when all the legal work a school district is legitimately entitled to is provided free by the
city's corporation counsel. In spite of this, the district had allocated $10,000
to retain a
Brooklyn law firm. This is standard technique with boards everywhere which seek legal
advice to get rid of their "enemies." They either prefer to conceal this from the
corporation counsel or fear such work might be rejected as illegitimate. One school board member
had already consulted with these same attorneys on five separate occasions pursuing some private vendetta,
then submitting bills for payment
against the school funds of the district. Sometimes this is simply a way to
toss a tip to friends.
My argument went as follows:
In order to emphasize
the magnitude of the loss this waste of money would entail — emblematic of dozens of similar wastes
every year — I want to suggest some alternate uses for this money which will become impossible once it's
spent on a lawyer none of the kids
needs. It would buy:
Three thousand reams of paper, 1,500,000
sheets. In September six of the schools in District 3 opened a school year without any paper at all.
Letters from the principals of
these schools to the school board, of which my wife has photocopies,
will attest to this. It would buy
enough chemicals and lab specimens to run the entire science program at
I.S 44 and Joan of Arc, nearly
2,000 copies of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare as discounted by Barnes and Noble in
hardcover, enough sewing machines and
fabrication supplies to offer six modern dressmaking classes. In light
of the fact New York City's
fashion industry is a major employer, it would seem a saner use of the
funds. How many musical
instruments, how much sports equipment, wood, ceramic materials, art supplies does $10,000 buy? The
Urban League's "Children Teach Children" reading project could be put
in the district, displacing armies of low-utility, $23-an-hour consultants. With $10,000 we could pay
our own students $l-an-hour — receive better value — and see our money in the pockets of kids, not
lawyers. Invested in stock or even
30-year treasury notes as a scholarship fund, this money would return in
perpetuity enough interest yearly
to pay a kid's way through City University. The money in question would buy 50,000 pens. Eight computer
installations. Two hundred winter coats for kids who are cold.
I concluded with two suggestions: first,
a referendum among parents to find out whether they would prefer one of the options above or a lawyer;
second, to buy 10,000 lottery
tickets so we all could have a thrill out of this potlatch instead of
the solitary thrill a Brooklyn
lawyer would have banking our check.
Four years later, I
appeared before the same school board, with the following somewhat darker statement:
On September 3, 1986,
my teaching license, which I had held for 26 years, was terminated secretly while I was on
medical leave of absence for degenerative arthritis. The arthritis was contracted by climbing 80 steps a day to
the third floor for more than a
year — at the express request of the co-directors — with a badly broken
hip held together by three large
screws.
Although papers for a
medical leave of absence were signed and filed, these documents were destroyed at the district level,
removed from central board medical offices. The current management apparently was instructed to deny papers
had ever been filed, allowing the
strange conclusion I had simply walked away from a quarter century of work and vanished.
The notice
terminating my teaching license was sent to an address where I hadn 't
lived for twenty-two years. It was
returned marked "not known at this address. " This satisfied the board's contractual obligation to
notify me of my imminent dismissal, however nominally.
When I returned to
work from what I had no reason to assume wasn 't an approved leave, I was informed by personnel that I no
longer worked for District 3, and that I could not work anywhere because I no longer had a teaching license.
This could only be reinstated if
my building principal would testify he knew I had properly filed for leave.
Since this would involve the individual
in serious legal jeopardy, it isn 't surprising my request for such a notice was ignored.
From September 1987
to April of 1988 my family was plunged into misery as I sought to clear my name. Although I had personal
copies of my leave forms at the first hearing on this matter, my building principal and the district
personnel officer both claimed their
signatures on the photocopies were forgeries. My appeal was denied.
Just before the
second hearing in March, a courageous payroll secretary swore before a public official that my leave
extensions had always been on file at Lincoln, signed by school authorities. She testified that
attempts had been made to have her surrender these copies, requests she refused. Production of her affidavit to
this at my third hearing caused an
eventual return of my license and all lost pay. At the moment of disclosure
of that affidavit during a third
grievance hearing, the female co-director shouted in an agitated voice, "The District
doesn 't want him back!"
I am asking for an investigation of this
matter because my case is far from the only time this has happened in District 3. Indeed, all over New York
this business is conducted so
cynically that administrators violate basic canons of decency and actual
law with impunity because they
know the system will cover for them no matter how culpable their behavior.
No comment was ever
forthcoming from that Board of Education. Two years after my restoration, I was named New York City
Teacher of the Year. Two years after that, New York State Teacher of the Year. A year later, after
addressing the Engineer's Colloquium
at NASA Space Center, invitations poured in to speak from every state in
the union and from all over the
world. But the damage my family had sustained carried lasting effects.
Yet I proved
something important, I think. On looking back at the whole sorry tapestry
of the system as it revealed
itself layer by layer in my agony, what was most impressive wasn't its horrifying power to treat me
and my family without conscience or compassion, but its incredible weakness in the face of opposition.
Battling without allies for thirty
years, far from home and family, without financial resources, with no
place to look for help except my
native wit, nor for courage except to principles learned as a boy in a working-class town on the Monongahela
River, I was able to back the school creature into such a corner it was eventually driven to commit crimes
to get free of me.
What that suggests is
cause for great hope. A relative handful of people could change the course of schooling significantly by
resisting the suffocating advance of centralization and standardization of children, by being imaginative and
determined in their resistance, by
exploiting manifold weaknesses in the institution's internal coherence: the
disloyalty its own employees feel
toward it. It took 150 years to build this apparatus; it won't quit breathing overnight. The formula is to
take a deep breath, then select five smooth stones and let fly. The homeschoolers have already begun.
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