Nominee's Background:
Named New York City Teacher of the Year three times and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. In 1992 he was named Secretary of Education in the Shadow Cabinet of the Libertarian Party. He is committed to reforming the public education system.
The following was reprinted from his website www.johntaylorgatto.com
John Taylor Gatto was born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a river town thirty-five miles southeast of Pittsburgh where his grandfather, Harry Taylor Zimmer, was the town printer in the days when printers still honored their descent from Peter Zenger. John attended public schools in Swissvale, Monongahela, and Uniontown, and the private Catholic boarding school in Latrobe, all towns in western Pennsylvania.
As a boy he held many jobs: sweeper in his grandad's printing office, snow shoveler, lawn mower, Kool-Ade and comic book salesman, and delivery boy for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph and Uniontown Morning Herald, among others. He did undergraduate work at Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia, then served in the U.S. Army medical corps at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Following army service he did graduate work at the City University of New York, Hunter College, Yeshiva, the University of California, and Cornell.
After college, Mr. Gatto worked as a scriptwriter in the film business, was an advertising writer, a taxi driver, a jewelry designer, an ASCAP songwriter, and a hotdog vendor before becoming a schoolteacher. During his schoolteaching years he also entered the caviar trade, conducted an antique business, operated a rare book search service, and founded Lava Mt. Records, a documentary record producer, which won several awards for cover design and content, and which presented the horror of H.P. Lovecraft, dramatized, and the speeches of Richard M. Nixon and Spiro Agnew, exactly as given.
He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called "An Evening With John Taylor Gatto," which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries. In 1992, he was named Secretary of Education in the Libertarian Party Shadow Cabinet, and he has been included in Who's Who in America from 1996 on. In 1997, he was given the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for his contributions to the cause of liberty, and was named to the Board of Advisors of the National TV-Turnoff Week.
His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001) of which the special author's Pre-Publication Edition (2000) is for sale at this Web site.
Gatto's office is in New York City, his home in Oxford, New York, where he is currently at work on a documentary film about the nature of modern schooling entitled The Fourth Purpose, with his friend and former student, Roland Legiardi-Laura. For more information about this film, visit The Fourth Purpose. Gatto has been married for forty years to the same woman, and has two grown children and a cat. He hopes to build a rural retreat and library for the use of families pondering local and personal issues of school reform.
Nominating Speech:
An excellent article he wrote appeared in Harper's September 2003 issue and can be read here: http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/devi/hs/against_school.html
To research this nominee, please look for them on the
Wikipedia website or at
Google.
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Progressive Criteria:
The Education Department will
Support true academic standards and reject punitive standardized testing that deprives schools of funding solely because of low test scores;
Support not penalize school districts that need extra help because they have many poor, minority or immigrant students;
Work to restore public education as an effective vehicle for social mobility, as it has been for so much of our country's history;
Open up many routes to higher education;
Improve teacher pay, dignity and respect;
Reject voucher systems and other privatization schemes;
Protect our students from commercial influences and marketing in their schools;
Understand that in addition to training for good jobs, the public education system must educate responsible, engaged citizens.
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