City School Stories

Teacher Stories

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy on October 18, 2011

In recent weeks, I have added a new post category to City School Stories.  It is titled “Teacher Stories”. Under this heading you will find the accounts of a team of teacher bloggers who work in the School District of Philadelphia.  In their posts, they will detail their daily experiences, challenges and triumphs as classroom teachers.

During the 2010-2011 school year, installments of my book, Confessions of an Urban Principal, were regularly featured on this site.  In this book, I offered an intimate view of my life as an elementary principal of an urban school.  It detailed the daily interactions and experiences I had with my students, parents and teachers.  Within this context I examined the multitude of challenges that I along with the members of my school community faced as we struggled to meet the accountability mandates prescribed by No Child Left Behind.

Hopefully the events and situations described in this book will illuminate for the reader the real challenges faced by dedicated teachers and principals across our country; challenges that cannot be described or measured by standardized test score data charts or political sound bites.

During this school year 2011-2012, the story and storytellers on this blog will expand.

This year the stories of classroom teachers will regularly be featured on City School Stories.  Already posts concerning authentic teacher assessment, quality of district professional development and the pain of dealing with a student tragedy have been the topics of pieces contributed by teacher bloggers.  As the year progresses, this group of writers will explore a wide range of issues that affect the professional lives of all teachers.

The purpose of City School Stories.com is to tell the story of urban public education in America from the perspectives of the principals and teachers who daily work and live in city school communities. These are the people who best know what is taking place in any particular school. Yet they are seldom offered the opportunity to describe or explain their work to the general public.

At this site teachers are invited to share stories concerning their own classrooms and schools. This can be accomplished either by making comments on posts or by submitting a post for consideration to f@cityschoolstories.com

The teachers and principals of our nation’s public schools daily accomplish their mission of educating the youth of our society.  They do so without fanfare and seldom do they receive any acknowledgement of their good work. Letting the world know of our successes is a task that we must undertake if our story is to be truly told. The stories of our teacher bloggers along with your comments and personal accounts will help to tell the general public of our challenges and rewards as urban educators. Most importantly, by creating a forum to collectively tell our own stories we say that we will not continue to be passive victims of ill-conceived school reform strategies that often paint us in the poorest of light. We instead must insist on being recognized and treated as the knowledgeable professional educators that we are.