Special ed teacher quits: ‘I just cannot justify making students cry anymore’

Wendy Bradshaw is a mother and a teacher in Florida’s Polk County who specializes in working with children — infants through fifth grade — living with disabilities to help improve their educational and life experiences. She has undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in education. Bradshaw loves to teach but she has reached a point where she cannot tolerate working within an education system focused on standardized test-based accountability that forces children to perform developmentally inappropriate tasks.

She is, she said, tired of being forced to make kids cry.

Here is her resignation letter, which I am publishing with permission. This appeared on the website of the The Opt Out Florida Network, a nonprofit organization that advocates for public education and against test-based school reforms. She is an administrator for the Opt Out Polk group within that network.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/25/special-ed-teacher-quits-i-just-cannot-justify-making-students-cry-anymore/?postshare=1041445881835800