Anna M. Donskoy

Anna Donskoy's Response:

The reporters of LA Times never fail to bring the attention to our schools, and somehow it is always a negative attention. While we try to use the positive in life to bring our kids out of poverty, bloody divorces, bad mornings, crying parents with no jobs..., the reporters use the negativity to improve the education and ultimately the life of our children. It does not work. I understand the reporters worked very hard to deliver the scores to us. It is just that your work will bear no fruit, just mold and puss.
OBGECTIVE ~What DID you try to accomplish? Did you try to let the public know that their teachers are not good enough for their kids. And? If my friends and I leave, who will teach them? You? You know that this job is not competitive enough for anyone. Not that I am planning to leave mind you. I happen to love what I do. By the way, are you going to let the public know that we are only paid for 6 hours of work, and we are to put in the two other hours in a day free? Are you going to let them know that our vacation is not paid? We get two weeks of vacation just like the rest of the population, but the society is under the impression that we are on a very loose schedule!
PARENTS ~ Now parents will be requesting other teachers whose scores are a bit better than the teacher who is currently teaching their child. They will stand in line in the office crying and raising their voices to get the best education possible for their kids, and they will be frustrated just like the Principal who will have to deal with them and the office staff who will have to calm them down. What are they supposed to do? The private schools are no better. Are you going to publish their scores as well? In my experience a lot of the private school teachers are not credentialed, they do not receive enough training, and the ones that I have seen so far do not measure up to the creativity and diligence of my colleagues.
STUDENTS ~ The students cannot succeed in a classroom knowing that the society does not show a lot of respect to the only adults who is in charge. You must lead the society and raise the respect for the teachers and the awareness of what they are going through in order to avoid burn-out and come to work every day. How will the students succeed in a class of the teacher whose picture you showed in LA Times. They will do even less now. After all THE NEWSPAPER even said he was bad…
TEACHERS ~ Your public documentation of a “teacher’s score” will do a lot of damage to the moral of the teaching staff. People will be looking at each other knowing each other’s scores… It takes a village to raise a child. Publishing the individual scores means that the teams are not in existence anymore. The village has been successfully destroyed, and we now stand on our own checking each other’s scores.
I sometimes think that due to your low sales you choose SENSATIONAL over GOOD, and you used me an d my colleagues this time. Sometimes though I think that you may have the best interests of the society in heart losing sleep over your little daughter starting kindergarten next year or your teenage son who cannot wait for his senior year to begin… Maybe you are wonderful and caring, you just forgot to think it through. And maybe you did not listen to the ones who have. I may have a suggestion that next time you may choose to publish the percentage of the teachers who are average, below average, etc., but maybe it would be best to avoid publishing their names.
I look in horror at the world around me. I am 42 years old. I am not that old, and I do not miss any old times… but sometimes I wonder… I see the world where privacy, decency and common sense have been torn apart by the reporters, the people who are to serve the society and its members. The world I live has ripped the very foundation of an educational system, its respect to the teachers, the ones who do it all, the people who put in hours and hours of work grading papers and creating projects for the thirty, fourty children they adopt for a year often to the detriment of their own families. Last year Daily News published our salaries, this year you publish our score as to how good a teacher we are… What will happen next year? My medical records will be up for a review by the public? Will there be a camera in my class? What’s next?