Rani Dasi - On trusting and investing in teachers (clip)

Kathryn Wall (KW): It seems like there’s an increasing amount of political pressure around what gets taught in the classroom and what you can and can’t say and…?.

Rani Dasi (RD): Yeah, and I go back to trusting the people who train to do this work, who study best practices about how children learn to make decisions in the classroom. I heard [sighs] a recommendation for legislation that teachers would have to present their curriculum to anybody who wanted to have access to it. And you would never ask a doctor to show me your health plan for every patient you’re going to see, because everybody has a different need! And you just trust them, you invest in them, you give them what they need to do the work. And you—look—I’m not saying you don’t have accountability. But I’m saying, let them do their jobs! They’ve shown success in it for a very long time. Now granted, there were some, there were places where we clearly needed to do better. But we can talk about that without the politicizing of, and taking away, the teachers’ ability to make decisions in the classroom..

KW: It does seem like, in so many different things right now, that there’s, that politicization and that division seems so much stronger. Like it used to be that everybody agreed that kids shouldn’t go to bed hungry. How you get there was the distinction between different political, you know, different politicians and different ideas about how to achieve that goal that we all agree is a good thing. And it seems like now, that things like that are in question..

RD: Yes! And I know some of these politicians and I don’t think that they’re bad people. I just feel like we’ve gotten so far off kilter for our sense of community that we need a reset to get back to how we care about each other. .

KW: It seems like our schools could be a great place to do that..

RD: Oh they could. And they are! Even in the midst of this defunding and the horrible conditions that exist, there’s so much beauty and so many success stories, and students thriving, and teachers investing more than even they have, and their time and their energy, and you just could imagine what could be possible with a little more investment and value added to the school districts.