A few weeks back, I wrote something about why would anybody want to be a teacher in Arizona. Some guy e-mailed me and suggested that I’m a shill for public schools because my wife is a public-school teacher. He said that I should do that full-disclosure thing so that the readers can take what I write with a giant grain of salt. In truth, it really doesn’t matter what my wife does for a living. I’m smart enough to know that, without great public schools, America wouldn’t be America.

The greatness of this country doesn’t come from Wall Street or from gun ownership or from capitalism. (We’ve never really had capitalism in this country; the system has always been rigged, never more so than today.) What made America great was an overarching love and appreciation of freedom, a public school system that gave everyone—from the richest to the poorest—a chance at getting an education, perchance to better one’s life, and a national willingness to defend that which is great and had been earned through hard work and sacrifice, both individually and collectively.

The ruling class might attend snob academies in New England, but the people who make up the true guts and sinew of America were educated at the Dunbar Schools and Valley Unions of this country. And they were taught by people who put selflessness ahead of personal income, a desire to help others ahead of an itch to help themselves.

(I hate it when politicians and radio talkers bitch and moan about American public schools while touting other countries where the kids have higher math and science scores. They fail to mention that, in those countries, there is a profound respect for the public-school system and the teachers who work therein, as well as a pay scale that makes America look like a Third World country.)

On a more personal level, I’ve mentioned (probably too many times) that I grew up in abject poverty. I was blessed to have a mom and a dad, but due to physical limitations brought on by a car crash and World War II injuries, respectively, neither was able to work. I saw the suffering in their eyes as they struggled to raise my sisters and me with extremely limited resources. (Big surprise: The VA dicked my dad big time.) But at least my parents knew that their kids were getting a good education.

Willie Nelson’s heroes might have always been cowboys. Mine have always been teachers and coaches. I’m not going to say that they saved me from a life of drugs, crime, and self-destruction. I was never headed in that direction. But they did push me when I needed pushing, they listened when I talked, and they talked well enough to make me want to listen.

There was my 6th-grade teacher, Mr. Carpenter, a man about whom I could write a book. Mr. Carpenter was so cool, he would have made Miles Davis feel like Urkel. He was proudly African-American way before anybody else. He had played pro football and occasionally sang with the Metropolitan Opera. He made these giant tapestries of Zulu warriors; each one sold for more than he would make in a year as a teacher. He lived in Bel-Air, right next to Vincent Price, but he taught elementary school in the ghetto out of a sense of duty. He taught me how to play chess and never let me win. When the other kids were being tested on the multiplication tables from one to 12, he asked me to multiply 18 times 17 in my head. He always pushed and I’m eternally grateful that he did.

Oh yeah, he wrangled some tickets and took me and some of my classmates to our first-ever concert—The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.

There are too many teachers to mention, but I admired them all and I tried my best to learn from each one of them.

As for my wife, Ana, she’s my current hero and has been for a long time. In a couple days, she’ll be inducted into the Sunnyside School District Hall of Fame, a rare honor, well-deserved.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of days she has walked through the door at 5 or 6 o’clock after having stayed after school to provide tutoring, carrying a stack of papers to grade. No shortcuts, no skipped steps. She has over 300 units of college credit and, as a Latina woman with an armful of advanced degrees and certificates, you can only imagine the number of cushy job offers that have been thrown her way. But she stays in the classroom because she likes teaching.

She’s the advisor for National Honor Society and for Future Business Leaders of America. Every year, she spends a week of her summer in some far-off city, watching her FBLA students compete at the national level. (If she weren’t such a good teacher, her kids wouldn’t have done well at the Regional and State levels and wouldn’t have made Nationals.) She’s the Department head, runs the Student of the Month program, and serves on every committee known to man.

But she’s not the reason that I am steadfast in my support of public schools. I’m a good American, and supporting public schools is the American thing to do.

This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2014.

15 replies on “Danehy”

  2. ” I’m a good American, and supporting public schools is the American thing to do.”

    Then I also must ask how you felt when you heard that TUSD was accepting grant money from a Qatar organization that funds Hamas and other middle eastern terrorist groups?

    Hasn’t the public school system bastardized itself?

  4. And then there’s the La Raza thing where some of the teachers were espousing various textbooks that advocated “violent overthrow” of the U.S. in order to get the S.W. U.S. back to Mex. Also, a member of the TUSD board, Adelita Grijalva, an avid proponent of La Raza, was going against the other board members in trying to keep these same texts in the schools. Finally, the AG had to order them out. Some of which had statements like ” send the whites back to Europe” and “kill the gringos”.
    And then we have people graduating from H.S. that can’t add and have no clue as to our history. Most can’t even tell you who Christopher Columbus was! It’s referred to as the “dumbing down of America”.
    Teachers, if they’re doing the right thing, are invaluable. Unfortunately, there are many that aren’t doing the “right thing”.

  5. My sense is that there aren’t many who can muster what it takes to be a teacher. Danehy sounds like a lucky guy even if his description of his wife is half accurate. My guess is that the guy who delivered 3 tons of gravel in my driveway yesterday may earn more than a public school teacher in this town. Teachers are always on the job. Their lives revolve around the information that they convey to their students because like us and our world, that information is always evolving. So to keep up, they must keep up. That means during summer, winter, fall, and spring breaks teachers are researching and focusing on the needs of their students. I read about a teacher recently who spent on average a $1000 a year of her own money in order to purchase materials for her classes and to do her job. Subtract that $1000 from her salary base salary. How many of us spend a penny on the institutions that employ us…subsidizing their budgets? I don’t believe the guy delivering gravel buys the gas for the truck or would even think about it. At the end of these random thoughts, I guess what perplexes me is why public schools are not a priority for all of us. Why do we sit back and allow a teacher to reach into her own bank account to complete a budget for our kids, and then bitch about public schools?

  6. Rick Jason, I believe it was Christopher Columbus who, upon landing at Plymouth Rock with the Pilgrims and Jesus, said ‘Listen it don’t really matter to me, baby, you believe what you want to believe’

  7. 1. We actually had a pretty effective capitalistic system in this country until the primary problem it raises (profit seeking leads to monopoly) was handled first effectively by Teddy (Republican, Tom), and over the past century has been handled less effectively. Unions early decided to pursue profit for their members by creating monopolies that have not been challenged, unfortunately. Write a column about the challenge union monopolies create for regulation-forbidden business monopolies, and even worse, capitulated-to unions government activities try unsuccessfully to cope with.
    2. Facts, such as comparing private salaries/benefits with union-driven adequate salaries and lavish benefits teachers receive. Identify, please, any business that gives an employee benefit called ‘tenure’ by whatever name you wish.

  9. someguy posted one of the funniest comments I may have ever read here.

    You can scroll up to take a gander.

    The only problem I have with someguy’s post is that I fear that 98% of Americans will believe that Columbus, the Pilgrims, and Jesus Christ – Himself! – actually did land at Plymouth Rock.

  10. Hey someguy,

    You forgot to include the part where he mentioned that they didn’t have to live like refugees.

  12. The fact still remains that American public education and the teachers are the common denominators. Stop trying to reduce them to the lowest common denominator.

  13. Let me put in a shameless plug for a well-written book that provides a world of context for the attacks on public school teachers. It is called “The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession.” It was written by Dana Goldstein. It turns out that blaming teachers for the problems of our country is not a new sport at all. It has been going on for more than two hundred years. The attacks have generally been led, as they are now, by the very rich who resent like hell having to pay more taxes to pay teachers a living wage in order to educate the children of the poor. The Pima County library has about a half dozen copies. The copy I have will be returned in a few days …so reserve it now or buy it for $18.00 or so from Amazon.

  14. chuckj says: “Facts, such as comparing private salaries/benefits with union-driven adequate salaries and lavish benefits teachers receive. Identify, please, any business that gives an employee benefit called ‘tenure’ by whatever name you wish.”

    First off, it is a fatuous exercise to compare teacher salaries with salaries in the private sector. The real comparison is comparing teacher salaries in right-to-work states like Arizona…where unions have zero power and zero clout…with the salaries of teachers in collective bargaining states, like Massachusetts and Minnesota. After you do that, compare the student achievement results from the right to work states with the union states. You will note that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence between states with high student achievement and strong teacher unions. It is called the law of supply and demand. Teachers with highly marketable skills will move to states where they can earn six figure salaries…you can pick your jaw off the floor…instead of languishing in states were they earn so little they are eligible for food stamps.

    As far as tenure is concerned, there is no “real” tenure in K-12 education. At the college level, tenure is a property right and tenured faculty cannot be fired unless they commit some crime or sexually abuse students. Tenured faculty…like the one from UA recently in the news…have even plagiarized the work of students and retained their jobs. At the K-12 level, what is called tenure is nothing more than due process. It ensures that teachers who are accused of incompetence or malfeasance have an opportunity to defend themselves against these charges before a neutral third party, i.e. an arbitrator or a judge. At any rate, there is no public school teacher in Arizona who enjoys this right since the legislature has decreed that all public school teachers at at-will employees and can be fired without any cause at all. And we see how that has really improved the quality of education in our state. It is one thing to fire a teacher; it is a whole other proposition to hire a better one in a market where the salaries are so low most great teachers have little or no desire to work here.

  15. You forgot about APS trying to buy their own personal Corporation Commission. Or Jim Click trying to buy the whole State.

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