I can't speak about the principal during Coach Carter's days, but I seriously doubt that the principal "didn't care" about her students. I taught English, ESL and Stagecraft there for four years, but left the year before he arrived. During my tenure there the principal (Al Acuna) did his very best under very difficult circumstances. Understand that this was a 4% school. I taught Freshman English; 170 students (many of whom read at 3rd grade level), 20 languages, 25 gangs.
Principal Acuna offered me a Special Education position which I turned down, telling him that although I think I could do it, I would rather wait until I could teach English. Four months after he offered me the job, an English teacher moved into the Counseling office. My first semester there I taught mostly seniors, including AP English and Black Literature. Being a white Berkeley liberal do-gooder, I taught the students how to write a thesis paper and analyze literature. Later I received letters from students who made it to college and thanked me for helping them. That's one reason I became a teacher. In the Black Literature class I convinced Barnes & Noble to donate a class set of "Sula" and worked it with the class.
Two days before my second year there I get a call from the Vice-Principal that I'd be teaching Freshman English. "Uh, a little heads up would have helped." "What's the problem, you're an English teacher, just teach." While teaching Animal Farm some students complained when I started talking about the Russian Revolution "Hey, this isn't Social Studies, why are we doing this?" I didn't directly tell them that one thing teachers were doing was collaborating across the curricula integrating everything we could. I told them "We're going to tie this in to revolution in general, everything we can think of from Rousseau and the French Revolution to Gandhi, MLK and Malcolm X. The bottom line is questioning "capitalist pigdom" and "sticking it to the man."
I became a teacher because school sucks. I wanted to make a difference in student lives and I did. In 1996 I helped these students get published internationally using a new thing called "the Internet." Read more about it at http://snurl.com/netc1 and email me at [email protected] with your opinions. I don't know of anyone in education who entered the vocation with any other motive than to help kids. A lot of things conspire against this aspiration (demographics, politics of ed vis a vis NCLB and even today's "Race to the Top.") Education isn't a contest, it's about helping each student develop, engage and maximize their own capabilities.
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