Word: children
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...school system in which the children of ghetto classes are burdened year upon year with unbroken lines of substitute teachers--teachers unfit, unprepared, inexperienced, teachers who are not teachers, teachers who are fill-ins, who are temporary, who work at night or after school in other jobs, who do not know children, who do not know education, who are not concerned, who are not involved, who do not and cannot care about the lives expiring before them...
...systems use substitutes when regular teachers are unwell. But the ghetto schools of Boston bear the sinister distinction of having used substitutes in place of regular teachers in dozens of ghetto classrooms month after month, year after year. I have known children who have had as many as 25 substitute teachers in three months. I have known children who have not had one, single, serious, permanent, competent, fully trained teacher during the course of three full years...
...Those children who do get permanent teachers--it might as well be said now--are at times scarcely more fortunate. It is close to heresy in Boston to speak badly of the teachers. The word is out that we are to call them dedicated. The message has been given even to our daily press that, whatever else is wrong, the regular teachers are good-hearted, serious, and capable...
There are far too many, however, who should never in their lives be allowed to go near children, and certainly not near children whose color they despise. How they get to them--how they have been slotted in these classrooms--by what process of political string-pulling they have ended up here, most of us will never know. But the fact remains--it is a bitter one indeed--that the Boston schools are riddled with mediocre, unwell, ignorant and brutal teachers. Alcoholism, creeping senility, mental instability in permanent faculty members are thoroughly documented, known well both to children...
...other schools, overt racism has been common. Teachers new to the system are appalled by the conversations, by the style of easy and automatic condescension, by the casual assumption of inherent inferiority in the black children and in their lives and families...