Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
attack or damage to the nuclear power plant located at Indian Point. To bring this into perspective, new administrative candidates in schools of education are now required, in their strategic plans, to allocate resources away from instruction, supervision, remedial assistance, collaboration efforts and professional development. Specifically, for example, a superintendent or principal must often choose between an unequivocal commitment to student security or the reduction in class size for elementary school students. A new camera monitoring system will often result in the need to layoff additional instructional and support staff. Bomb scares from the 1970s have returned with new offshoots focusing on unattended packages and suspicious envelopes. Teachers and administrators are trained to do more with less and in a more highly structured and intense environment than ever before. The full plate is overflowing and choices for school leaders continue to move in directions that inhibit and undermine needed instructional programs. Our national expectations for public schools to keep the arguable implications of the 9/11 heritage alive are foundering badly amid the competing forces which require cutbacks in school budgets, reallocation of resources to non-instructional mandates, and a focus on the tested subjects of math and reading only (at the expense of social studies, science, and arts), all in a climate of unprecedented attacks on public schools and their teachers. While the future of public education is an important subject for national debate and evaluation, current circumstances do not provide fertile ground for rich and intelligent curricular efforts to have students across the country explore the important questions raised by the tragedy of 9/11. Most teachers, administrators, and university professors will simply ask where it will fit in a way that offers a viable opportunity to achieve the lofty goals discussed previously. The first decade of the new century undoubtedly has also taken us to a more divisive, insular and hypersensitive condition as the tone of the country appears to be more suspicious, xenophobic, and less tolerant. Fiscal realities seemingly have increased frustrations in communities and exacerbated tensions toward newly arrived immigrants, particularly in Muslim communities. Prejudice, bias attacks, and the recent focus on bullying incidents have become regular parts of the school lexicon with resultant implications for schools of education. New teachers must be trained in today's realities for curriculum, instruction, inclusion, bullying and security procedures. The newest categories of inclusion, bullying and security procedures require the attention of teacher preparation institutions to the exclusion of other topics which are focused on instruction, curriculum and assessment concerns. None of these categories are illogical or unacceptable, yet returning to the Full Plate concept, they stretch already limited resources of time and money on a profession and institutions which are already under unrelenting attack from the media, government and a host of powerful corporate interests. The profound shock produced a decade ago by the 9/11 attacks has receded somewhat from headlines and our attention, and we find ourselves arriving, again, at a crossroads in making sense of September 11 and how we will teach it to a new generation of students who predictably are less concerned and desensitized to the sacrifices made by so many Americans over the past ten years. As Bryan Koon shared during the Summit on Resilience Conference, our collective feelings of vulnerability dissipate with each year we are removed from the disaster, making contingency planning progressively more difficult. (Koon, 2012). 69