Most Insight Into Modern Education

Clayton Stromberger

We hear a lot of talk these days about the sorry state of education and the best ways to improve the lot of the 21st-century student. Unfortunately, most of it is blather from people who haven't spent an hour in a classroomsince LBJ was a president and not a high school. How refreshing then to read words about the challenges of schooling kids today from one who knows intimately what it's about. Clayton Stromberger's dispatches from Blackshear Elementary - first in his moving essay "20 Kids," published in XLent, and in a later editorial in the Austin American-Statesman's Sunday Insight section - were the impassioned testimony of a teacher who believes in his students and their ability to learn and knows that TAAS scores and TEA judgments can't tell you everything about a kid's potential to succeed. Stromberger'swriting was clear and powerful, his stories about his students were moving, and his observations about AISD troubling. Anyone looking for insight into the lot of teachers in our city right now would be hard pressed to find any reportage more humane or illuminating.