ABSTRACT
After 11 years of teaching in Title I schools in Brooklyn, New York, I left my high school with great heaviness in my heart to teach at a community college. Throughout my career the job had gotten increasingly harder. A struggling school, we were victim to a bevy of new reform measures; each year we scraped to make Adequate Yearly Progress for No Child Left Behind until eventually we were put into a transformation model for Race to the Top money. Because of these stresses, the administration and teaching staff constantly shifted, and this hurt the student body, which was becoming increasingly poor and lower skilled (in regard to what was measured by the high-stakes tests). My teacher friends, some of whom had taught with me but left our school for one less “high needs,” would ask passively insulting questions like “Why are you still there?” or “Why don’t you go teach at a real school?” I never knew how to answer their questions at the moment, but I do know this: I walked into that building one person and left a different, better one.
