GOALS

To expose and prevent teacher abuse...

"When injuries result from worksite exposure to chemical substances, the offending institutions are compelled to introduce remedies. When the injuries originate from toxic human behavior, no less should occur."
Harvey Hornstein Brutal Bosses and Their Prey

1. Make teaching a FRONT OF THE BUS profession in the spirit of Rosa Parks. Attract and keep high quality young people into this profession.
   "All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind are convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth."
   Aristotle
2. Pass down the wisdom of seasoned veterans of teaching rather than discriminate against older teachers who have much to offer new teachers. Help protect against age discrimination in terms of driving older teachers out of jobs as well as in hiring older teachers.
   "The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn."
   Earl Warren
3. Make children the focus, rather than the front.
   "Let us have our faith that right makes might and in that faith let us to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
   Abraham Lincoln
4. Unite parents and teachers to take our schools back. Overcome the propaganda that makes parents mistrust teachers and vice versa. Make schools accountable to parents, while professional teachers remain as decision-makers. We must develop trust.
   "Never take anything for granted."
   Benjamin Disraeli
   "A harmful truth is better than a useful lie."
   Thomas Mann
5. Force administrators and state boards to operate legally and stop violating the rights of teachers and children.
   "Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom."
   Thomas Jefferson
6. Alert the federal government to state improprieties and engage their agencies, including but not limited to, the FBI, to make our schools accountable.
   "Indifference to evil is our enemy, for it negates everything that exalts the honor of man."
   Elie Wiesel
   "No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green, which it awakes into existence, needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted to the sower to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith."
   Albert Schweitzer
7. Expose the neglect, and possibly conspiratorial role that teachers’ colleges and universities play to protect their corporate interests. Professors constantly talk about teachers as decision-makers when the true model is teachers as soldiers. These higher level institutions need to be accountable for either preparing teachers for schools as they exist, or for influencing change. Neither is being done currently. They too should be obligated to reform education or suffer diminished enrollments. Presently, they either pretend not to know or take little or no responsibility in finding out where they are really sending their graduates. Ignorance is not an excuse; they are culpable by ignoring reality, protecting their financial interest, and enabling our schools to harm our children.
   "I hope I shall always have firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man."
   George Washington
8. Expose the NEA’s role in keeping teachers from having rights, and thus power.
   "Think of the life you are missing by not having the courage to be free. Thank God for the courage to think innovatively, to feel unique, to speak with conviction, to act differently."
   Rabbi Shoni Labowitz
   "Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened."
   Billy Graham
9. Encourage media to report the dilemma of teacher abuse. At this point the position media takes is that each case is so isolated, and there is no distinguishable pattern to indicate the necessity to report teacher abuse. As in the case of child and wife abuse thirty years ago, people do not believe it could be possibly happening. Contact newspapers as well as news magazine shows to get exposure via all types of media.
   "There is no wisdom like frankness."
   Benjamin Disraeli
   "Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody."
   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
10. Expose the corruption within our public school system and work together with dedicated leaders to reconstruct the system so that our schools will operate to the best of their ability. Dispel the myth that schools are dysfunctional merely due to lack of capital, teacher shortages, self-serving parents, spoiled children, or any reason that projects the blame away from the corruption in place.
    "The essence of government is power, and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will even be liable to abuse."
    James Madison
    "One falsehood spoils a thousand truths."
    Ashanti proverb
11. End institutionalized child abuse: Teachers are teaching with invisible burqas and children have the ability to see those "invisible" burqas just like dogs can hear those unheard sounds.
    "You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry..."
    Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 22:22:23
    "No legacy is so rich as honesty."
    William Shakespeare
12. Provide services for abused teachers to strengthen their resolve and fend off abusive administrators.
    "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can do only a little. Do what you can."
    Sydney Smith
13. Maintain a list of reading materials and books pertaining to educational reform, including links for purchasing relevant books.
    "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."
    Kurt Vonnegut
14. Keep updated links on the Internet that relate to relevant information.
    "I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God."
    John Dewey, Pedagogic Creed statement of 1897
15. Serve as a balance to the propaganda now distributed by our districts.
    "You come to know a thing by being inside it."
    Edmund Carpenter

Please inform NAPTA if you have any stories, articles, information or issues we can use on our web site to illustrate any of the following points. Email NAPTA with the particular goal to which it refers, and the information that will help to document that point or any other point you have noted on this site.