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Authors: Tom Brokaw
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and he has a good attitude. And being around people like that lifts your spirit. It helps you be a better person. So it’s all about Mr. Betts.”
It was not just a parlor trick for Betts. He told every student that he cared about them.
Tragically, Betts was murdered in his home in the spring of 2010. Two young men he met online were charged with killing him and stealing his car. His death was front-page news in the nation’s capital, and his students and their families mourned deeply for weeks, with good reason. Not enough inner-city students have a Mr. Betts experience.
The absence of a teacher who is also a surrogate parent is not a condition confined to African American or Latino children. In the 1980s, in a documentary called To Be a Teacher , I interviewed Lenny Stanziano, who taught math in Toms River, New Jersey. He, too, stood at the schoolhouse door and greeted students by name, saying he was often the first person to acknowledge them that day.
Many of his students were white, working- and middle-class kids, who lived with single parents or in households where both parents rushed off to work before dawn. Every student I talked to had high praise for Mr. Stanziano as a teacher and because he saw them as someone other than just a name in roll call.
Stanziano worked weekends in a large liquor store, stacking beer cases in the refrigerator to supplement his meager teacher’s salary, which was just over twenty-six thousand dollars in 1976. His classroom skills and commitment to education paid off. For the past eleven years he’s been principal of Toms River High School South.
Can we take a moment to remember Mr. Betts? And hope for more Denise Garisons and Lenny Stanzianos?
They’re out there in small and large school systems across the country. I’ve come across them in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Omaha, Montana, rural Texas, Georgia, and Maine—the foot soldiers of American education: dedicated and inspirational teachers and administrators who for six to eight hours every day take responsibility for educating, comforting, and protecting our nation’s most precious resource, its children. It is hard and noble work and, yes, it is not always done perfectly, but the failures of the system ought not to be blamed on the teachers alone. We all have a stake.
CHAPTER 4
Old School Ties and
New World Requirements
FACT: The best economic argument about education is in the numbers, period. With every passing year more education means more income in the short and long term. The median annual income for a wage earner with a bachelor of arts degree is $55,700.
On average, that’s close to $22,000 more annually than a high school graduate can expect to earn. Wage earners who have completed just some college courses earn on average 17 percent more than high school graduates.
QUESTION: What exactly does higher education mean in a modern global society, and how should it be organized for the masses as well as for the intellectually and financially elite?
F or all the income advantages of a college education, there are mitigating numbers as well. The increasing cost of higher education is a number that has to be factored into the dividend of getting a degree. College graduates entering the workaday world in the middle of an economic downturn may not do as well as, say, a high school graduate with a capacity for fixing or demystifying a computer program.
The societal value of a well-educated citizenry is self-evident, but no one should have any illusions about the demands of the global economy. When young people with obvious aptitude announce they’re going to college to be a “mass com” (mass communications) major, adding that they hope to be an anchor on a news program shortly after graduation, I have to temper my reaction.
While I try not to discourage them, I explain that the best journalists I know studied political science, history, economics, or biology, adding that they mastered their professional craft by
It was not just a parlor trick for Betts. He told every student that he cared about them.
Tragically, Betts was murdered in his home in the spring of 2010. Two young men he met online were charged with killing him and stealing his car. His death was front-page news in the nation’s capital, and his students and their families mourned deeply for weeks, with good reason. Not enough inner-city students have a Mr. Betts experience.
The absence of a teacher who is also a surrogate parent is not a condition confined to African American or Latino children. In the 1980s, in a documentary called To Be a Teacher , I interviewed Lenny Stanziano, who taught math in Toms River, New Jersey. He, too, stood at the schoolhouse door and greeted students by name, saying he was often the first person to acknowledge them that day.
Many of his students were white, working- and middle-class kids, who lived with single parents or in households where both parents rushed off to work before dawn. Every student I talked to had high praise for Mr. Stanziano as a teacher and because he saw them as someone other than just a name in roll call.
Stanziano worked weekends in a large liquor store, stacking beer cases in the refrigerator to supplement his meager teacher’s salary, which was just over twenty-six thousand dollars in 1976. His classroom skills and commitment to education paid off. For the past eleven years he’s been principal of Toms River High School South.
Can we take a moment to remember Mr. Betts? And hope for more Denise Garisons and Lenny Stanzianos?
They’re out there in small and large school systems across the country. I’ve come across them in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Omaha, Montana, rural Texas, Georgia, and Maine—the foot soldiers of American education: dedicated and inspirational teachers and administrators who for six to eight hours every day take responsibility for educating, comforting, and protecting our nation’s most precious resource, its children. It is hard and noble work and, yes, it is not always done perfectly, but the failures of the system ought not to be blamed on the teachers alone. We all have a stake.
CHAPTER 4
Old School Ties and
New World Requirements
FACT: The best economic argument about education is in the numbers, period. With every passing year more education means more income in the short and long term. The median annual income for a wage earner with a bachelor of arts degree is $55,700.
On average, that’s close to $22,000 more annually than a high school graduate can expect to earn. Wage earners who have completed just some college courses earn on average 17 percent more than high school graduates.
QUESTION: What exactly does higher education mean in a modern global society, and how should it be organized for the masses as well as for the intellectually and financially elite?
F or all the income advantages of a college education, there are mitigating numbers as well. The increasing cost of higher education is a number that has to be factored into the dividend of getting a degree. College graduates entering the workaday world in the middle of an economic downturn may not do as well as, say, a high school graduate with a capacity for fixing or demystifying a computer program.
The societal value of a well-educated citizenry is self-evident, but no one should have any illusions about the demands of the global economy. When young people with obvious aptitude announce they’re going to college to be a “mass com” (mass communications) major, adding that they hope to be an anchor on a news program shortly after graduation, I have to temper my reaction.
While I try not to discourage them, I explain that the best journalists I know studied political science, history, economics, or biology, adding that they mastered their professional craft by
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