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Committing to the Classroom

Dear Fellow Alumni,

I still remember the day I told my students that I wouldn’t be coming back to teach the next year. I planned to continue working toward educational equity at Teach For America, but in that moment it seemed a poor answer to Suzel’s disapproving frown.

“Actually, Suzel, I won’t be here next year,” I said when she joked about coming back from high school to check up on me.

She tilted her head to the side, and her smooth forehead crinkled. “What do you mean, Ms. Yu?” she said. “You’re a teacher.”

I felt a mixture of pride, sadness, and, yes, guilt. I was far from a perfect teacher, but I was genuinely proud of what we had accomplished together. I had made career changes before, but this one felt much more raw and personal. Nevertheless, though my decision to leave the classroom was hard, I knew it was the right one for me.

Teaching is not a road taken by default. The choice to stay in the classroom requires the same drive and intentionality as the decision to go to medical school and become a physician. For the alumni teachers I know and those who were interviewed for our cover story, their choice to remain in the classroom is a powerful statement about where they feel their influence will be most strongly felt.

“The thing that’s keeping me in teaching,” 8-year veteran Sylvia Corona (L.A. ’00) says, “is the idea that I’m having an impact on people who will grow up to make decisions in this world.”

Close to a third of Teach For America alumni are teachers, several hundred of them from our earliest corps years. For our cover story, journalist Seth Kugel (N.Y.C. ’92) and I talked to more than a dozen alumni who have chosen to remain in the classroom. Each of them has taken a different path to teaching as a career—not as foot soldiers on the front lines, but as leaders of change within their schools.

Given the challenges we all know exist in the profession, One Day invited alumni to submit essays answering the question, How would you reinvent the profession of teaching? Thanks to all of you for your great submissions. We heard from teachers, nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, and many others who posed innovative ideas about how to address challenges in training, support, and the lack of professionalism in teaching. Even more inspiring is that many of the contributors are actively working to make their visions a reality.

Finally, in this issue, we are excited to be able to share with you the presidential candidate’s answers to your education questions. Of the deluge of thought-provoking questions alumni sent in, we selected five—addressing issues from charter school support to teacher tenure policy—to ask Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama. Read their responses in one of the clearest comparisons to date of the nominees’ education stances. The decision is yours.

Warm regards,

Ting Yu

N.Y.C. '03

Editor in Chief