To paraphrase Warren Grymes of Big Brothers Big Sisters; Last year’s release of the film Waiting for Superman was a sobering wake up call, that people will believe anything put in front of them. Mr. Grymes wrote the first part, i wrote the second. Now where he is correct our education system has many issues, Waiting for Superman through misinformation and staged scenes exacerbates those problems by selling solutions, charter schools and vouchers that don’t work and by contributing to the false “bad teacher narrative” being sold by the maker of the film and its billionaire producers.
However Mr. Grymes in his guest editorial to the Times Union wasn’t all wrong. Our children do need mentors and organizations like Big Brothers/Big sisters provide them. Studies show that for every proactive dollar we spend, we save 7-11 dollars in reactive (remediation, incarceration, affects of crime, public aide, etc) dollars. Now where we do need mentors, do you know what we need more?
We need a school system that is filled with rigor and discipline, a system which is determined that every child comes out a productive citizen ready to maximize his or her potential not just put on an assembly line to college. You know basically the opposite of what we have now.
I appreciate Mr. Grymes and his valuable organization and he might not have realized it but we already have a lot of supermen and women in our community and in our schools working with our children, instead of referencing a piece oh blatant anti public education propaganda, he should have just said, that but we need a lot more too.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
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