Dana Bultman, an associate professor of Spanish in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, penned an open letter to President Barack Obama asking for a more careful approach to education reform.
The letter, which was published on The Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet, recounted the experiences of her husband, Javier, a Georgia public school teacher, and a second-grade student she calls Tanesha.
“For Tanesha’s college future to become a reality, our state should be pouring precious funding into teaching resources and the hard-working human beings who are doing the delicate, complex and very interpersonal work of building the curiosity, confidence and academic prowess of each child in their classroom,” she wrote. “These children will then ask questions, they will invent, they will have a healthy skepticism and they will be able to defend themselves from unscrupulous power.”