Joshua Kaplowitz's long, heart-wrenching piece in the current City Journal is worth a close read and careful thought. Kaplowitz tells the story of how, after graduating from Yale, he decided to devote his life to teaching in an inner-city school in Washington, D.C. The article describes in relentless detail how he was prevented from doing actual teaching by the web of poor training, bad policy, corrupt administration, and parental negligence that effectively gave control of his classroom to disturbed and disruptive kids more interested in hijacking the education of their fellow students than in learning anything themselves.

Kaplowitz describes how the Teach for America training program spent more time on therapeutic consciousness-raising than on how to teach:

the training program skimped on actual teaching and classroom-management techniques, instead overwhelming us with sensitivity training. My group spent hours on an activity where everyone stood in a line and then took steps forward or backward based on whether we were the oppressor or the oppressed in the categories of race, income, and religion. The program had a college bull session, rather than professional, atmosphere. And it had a college-style party line: I heard of two or three trainees being threatened with expulsion for expressing in their discussion groups politically incorrect views about inner-city povertyófor example, that families and culture, not economics, may be the root cause of the achievement gap.

The irony of all this, Kaplowitz soon found out, is that his ability to teach was crippled by a combination of rabid racism (from parents, students, and even fellow teachers who felt he had no business teaching at a primarily black school) and misguided "progressive" policies (Kaplowitz was investigated more than once for the crime of corporal punishment--not because he hit unruly kids, but because he broke up their fistfights).

Taken as a whole, the piece is an argument for school vouchers, an indictment of inner-city public schools, a commentary on the atrocities wrought by PC educational administration, and an impassioned plea for parents to become involved in and accountable for their children's education. Read it and weep.