Alonso and the Windmills

Once upon a time, there was an idealist, who was also a theorist, an educator, a believer, and perhaps even a “charmer,” who would one day grow up to be the CEO of the Baltimore City Public School System. Swept up on a stream of intellect, through the current of the American dream and guided by the immigrant experience, Dr. Andres Alonso’s came from Cuba to be a crusader. At lease that’s what I inferred from his character after having read the July 2006 New York Times article, “An Unfailing Belief in the Power of Teaching,” by David M. Herszenhorn. This nearly forgotten profile of Alonso describes him while overseeing curriculum instruction for New York City’s 1.1 million publicly enrolled students with a near Naderesque (or Joan of Arc) panache.

Unmarried and with an adopted foster child whom he once taught in his own classroom, Alonso holds an unwavering belief in the individual power of a teacher. There are no “at risk” children and poverty is no excuse for a failing school. Students are brought to school “as is,” the parental responsibility practically relinquished, because if they had better kids, they’d send them to school too. Ultimately one gets the sense from Alonso that teachers really are powerful entities and one should expect them to be nearly incandescent in their ability to transform students. How can you not be a teacher and not have a high expectations? Regardless of mitigating circumstances, we’re all believers, right man? Every student can go to Harvard, Alonso did.

I read this article with a deep fascination and almost with a twinge of repulsion. I don’t I think I’ll ever have the idealized view that Alonso has, that all students can be remedied by a saint-like teacher, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t occur daily in Baltimore City classrooms, nor does mean that I teach from the basement of a Machiavellian sentiment. I feel many teachers in BCPSS have a keener understanding over time of exactly how powerful we can be as individuals, and at the same time how helpless; that there are many varying shades of grey, from the teacher, to the public, parents, neighborhood blight, to the corner drug market that funds a child’s food supply, seasoned public servants can see how these factors enable or disable a child to learn and mature.

I sometimes worry that although I admire Alonso’s tireless spirit and his belief in the power of a school, I fear that he is blind to those that can’t see his beautiful, nearly pristine vision. And it’s not because they don’t want to, nor are the educators and concerned citizens unwilling, but rather because they simply can’t see a vision that has not manifested in the world that they live in. Sometimes I look at the smiling Alonso, astride a horse and ready for battle with petulant glee, as a crusader, and like many crusaders he may have lost the vision of reality in pursuit of the quest.