{I dedicate this column to the eternal Ann Cordelia Inman, who left this earth on 11/6/08...She was a superb teacher and mentor...AB}

Educating young children is one of the greatest joys of my life. I have earned national teaching awards because I love my students and inspire them to excel. I have spent many years of my life educating children and adults. My academic specialty has been early childhood education. My preference has been first grade.

I was born into a family of legendary black educators. I was taught to revere education and intellect more than anything else. My passion for learning was meticulously nurtured by intellectual parents who loved me and wanted me to live an excellent life. All children become what they are exposed to. Successful black intellectuals defined my childhood. So, I always loved and excelled in school.

My parents were buppies in Chicago when I was born in 1963. They taught me that absolutely nothing was cooler than education. And, they taught me that Caucasians had no monopolies on diction or success. I thank them for those liberating lessons eternally.

I began my formal academic career as a 12 year old undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in its unique accelerated University High School program. My passion for learning is eternal. And, teaching will always be in my DNA.

Teachers are America's most valuable resource and greatest s/heroes. Every successful and productive American citizen is the product of great teachers. Yet, teachers are grossly abused and slandered daily.

Recent cover stories of the National Education Associations (NEA) magazine have featured the nationwide exodus of teachers and lamented abusively low teacher salaries. Epidemic violence against teachers, that has spawned the new YouTube generations sport of recording teacher beat downs via students cell phone cameras, has also recently appeared as a NEA magazine cover story. To date, I have seen no features on toxic parenting in this magazine.

At 44, I am less patient with toxic parents and the toxic students they breed. I have resigned from a profession that I adore. And, I am currently mending a broken heart...

By choice, I have never been pregnant. I will never be a biological mother. So, I have truly loved and nurtured my students as if they were my own children. I have chosen to resign because toxic parents and children have just become too difficult to love and nurture anymore.

For years, I strove to inspire my students with the intellectual contagion of my passion for learning. This is increasingly difficult when my students come to me with no skills, except dancing and rapping. I have seen students who can name every superstar rapper, yet cannot spell their own first names or identify primary colors.

Horrid parenting is Americas most grave crisis and best kept secret. Teachers are being ruthlessly scapegoated for literally everything that is so very wrong in American schools. Toxic parents sabotage education. Toxic students are the undereducated leaders of tomorrow. Someday, every person in America will suffer, directly or indirectly, from the parents and children who exclusively torture teachers today.

Toxic parenting is universal in America. It knows no boundaries of race or class. Reality television proves that rich white parents are often even more toxic than poor black ones. Toxic parenting entails: Parents who begin abusing children chemically in their wombs, with recreational drugs and toxic diets; Parents who poison wombs that leave permanent damage inside childrens brains and nervous systems; Parents who do nothing to give lonely fatherless boys mandatory male role models; Parents who routinely physically and verbally assault teachers, but never spank or reprimand their children; Parents who buy children breasts and noses, rather than teach them to become surgeons; Parents who buy students expensive designer clothes, but never show them how to obtain free library cards; Parents who abuse drugs and dress like whores and thugs, as they actively encourage their children to become consummate mini clones; Parents who never attend a teacher conference, but never miss a field trip or party; Parents who are always on time at hair salons or nightclubs, but never bring children to school on time; Parents who harass or ignore teachers as they coddle or neglect children; Parents who brazenly place schools'/teachers' phone numbers on "call block", so that they are not bothered when their children bother others during school hours; Parents who hijack schools as babysitters, even on days when classes are not in session; Parents who brazenly enroll their children in first grade classes, fully aware that these children have never attended Pre-Kindergarten/Kindergarten; Parents who never read any books, and never read to their children; Parents who never teach children any moral intelligence, because they are amoral themselves; Parents who never teach children to sit still, behave, listen, and concentrate; Parents who hate children and dare to demand that teachers and other surrogates fully parent their own children; Parents who never teach children to do their homework; Parents who are intellectually incapable of helping children, or seeking tools/tutors to help children, with their homework; Parents who have no concept of proper child nutrition or sleep patterns; Parents who neither do or assign any chores; Parents who are irresponsible and incapable of teaching children to be responsible...

Students who never behave will never learn. Students who are never taught to revere education at home will never excel in schools. Students who torture teachers will never encourage superior educators to remain in classrooms.

Academic ability is more important than ever before in our global economy. Children must now compete with global intellectuals. Retirement is a fiscal fantasy in an increasingly technological world, where students must learn many skills for perpetual job changes. Today, an inability to learn is suicidal.

Politicos will only continue to scapegoat and betray teachers. Those acts of cowardice are easier than dealing with the complex socioeconomic realities of toxic parenting. Fatally flawed, racist, and elitist federal educational programs like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will never repair broken American schools. They only serve to sabotage the minority of students who revere education.

Typically, private schools do not adhere to any of the genocidal and mindless tenets of NCLB. Private schools do not tolerate misbehavior or enable abusive or absentee parents. Teachers at private schools are allowed to teach, while public school teachers are forced to compulsively test and perpetually discipline. This is a tragic national disgrace!

As I grieve about leaving the wonderful babies and positive parents that I adore, I religiously read two books as therapy: Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors by Bill Cosby and Dr. Alvin Poussaint, and The Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol. I recommend these two classic books to anyone who cares about education. I hope they heal your emotional wounds as they do mine.

I have never been angry at Bill Cosby, because he has courageously initiated a belated and necessary public discussion. I respect him for daring to do so. I will never kill any messengers. I will always address their urgent messages. Rather than insult Cosby, talk to a teacher. Or, visit a public school classroom. You will find that Cosby has been far too reticent and kind.

When rappers tell uncensored truths about ghettos, they call it our CNN. When Cosby tells glaring truths about toxic parenting, his detractors call it airing our dirty laundry. Toxic parents and students are destroying academia in America. Our schools are fatally wounded. All wounds heal best in open air!

My superior education has blessed me with limitless career options. I return to my niche in corporate sales with a wounded spirit. When I left corporate America to become a teacher, I sincerely planned to retire inspiring first graders. I will miss teaching wonderful children with supportive parents forever. I will continue to educate adults and inspire them to be superior parents.

We have lost far too much for far too many generations. These losses remind me of a classic poem by Alice Walker entitled Women. It praises uneducated rebel ancestors who defiantly revered the education of their progeny. We must save ourselves now as we did then:

"Women"
by Alice Walker

They were women then
My mama's generation
Husky of voice
Stout of Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged Generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
Must Know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves.

We remember the injustice of how slavers brought our people to America, but we have forgotten the brilliance of our response - how we sneaked around late at night and taught ourselves to read, taught ourselves secret signals to resist, taught ourselves pride and will and love. We have to draw on that history of persistence.

[The elites] are buying things for their kids $500 sneakers for what And wont spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics!

The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting.

One advantage that African-American kids have over most people in the world is the ability to speak English. It's the international language of business. To be a success anywhere on the globe, you have to speak it. But we're letting this advantage slip away too. Many of our kids don't want to speak English. In our day, we used to talk a certain way on the corner, but when we got into the house, we switched to EnglishWe used to blame the kids for talking this way until we heard some of their parents. Some black parents couldn't care less.

Most black employers we know want to see the entire community prosper. But even they don't want to hire boys who can't dress properly, and who speak as if English were a second language. When we see these boys walking around the neighborhood, we imagine them thirty or forty years down the road wandering around just as aimlessly, and we want to cry.

A mother can usually teach a daughter how to be a woman. But as much as mothers love their sons, they have difficulty showing a son how to be a man. A successful man can channel his natural aggression. Without that discipline, these sons often get into trouble at school because many teachers find it difficult to manage their "acting out" behavior. If you think we're exaggerating, talk to a teacher.

A working parent can also introduce [children] to a rather simple device that all of us hate but that most of us have learned to live with an alarm clock. Getting up when you're tired and going to school or work is not something that comes naturally to anyone. It's something that kids have to learn at home.

There are whole blocks with scarcely a married couple, whole blocks without responsible males to watch out for wayward boys, whole neighborhoods in which little girls and boys come of age without seeing up close a committed partnership and perhaps never having attended a wedding.

Certain people tell us that we are picking on the poor. Many of those who accuse us are scholars and intellectuals, upset that we are not blaming everything on white people as they do. Well, blaming only the system keeps certain black people in the limelight, but it also keeps the black poor wallowing in victimhood.

Pediatricians and psychiatrists may be disturbed to hear of schools where recess is truncated or abolished by the desperation to carve out a bit more time for drilling children for exams.

I thought the tests-and-standards movement had been loaded with a coarse utilitarian toxicity and a demeaning anti-human view of childhood right from the start.

By giving every particle of learning an official name, we strip it of its uniquenessFascination and delight, no matter what lip-service we may pay to them, become irrelevant distractions.

Teachers who come into elementary education with some literary background tell me that they sometimes feel they are engaging in a complicated kind of treachery, when they are forced repeatedly to excavate a piece of poetry, or any other literary work of charm or value, to extract examples of official skills that have some testable utilityNothing could be less efficient than this misappropriation of a teachers energy and hours.

The difference in too many schools like P. S. 65 is that nearly the entire school day comes to be a matter of unnatural theatrics that cannot be improvised to any degree without the risk of teachers being criticized by their superiors.

Leaving these kids so utterly adrift in time and place seemed like an act of state-determined cognitive decapitation.

In a nation in which fairness was respected, children of the poorest and least educated mothers would receive the most expensive and most costly pre-school preparation, not the least and cheapest, because children in these families need it so much more than those whose educated parents can deliver the same benefits of early learning to them in their home.

The inequities in educational provisions that we give, or do not give, these children from the starting gate are given less attention.

The look of tortured dignity in the eyes of many [educators] who had welcomed me remained as one of the most stirring memories of that experience.

Arkansas Department of Education - Praxis III Score: 57/57 - 2004

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