Teachers Saved My Life. Why Do We Treat Them So Poorly?

I have attended commencements of all kinds throughout my career, and I can tell you that some of the best are in prisons.

Over and over, I have spoken at these commencements with incarcerated men and women who acknowledge the awful choices or stupid mistakes they made, the strangers or loved ones they hurt, yet emerge from prison renewed through higher education. While 95 percent of the people incarcerated will come home one day, they often return to the same cycles that led them to prison in the first place. Through college coursework, they are able to reflect on their past, develop a clearer vision for their future and gain the skills to contribute to their families and communities.

One student told me that pursuing college while incarcerated was the first time he had moral and academic credibility with his family. The potential for higher education in prison to change lives is the reason that I worked to expand these programs when I was the U.S. secretary of education and president of a national education civil rights organization, and do so now as chancellor of the State University of New York.

I believe so deeply in the transformative power of education because teachers saved my life.

When I was 8 years old, in October of 1983, my mother died suddenly from a heart attack. It was indescribably devastating. I then lived alone with my father, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s until he died when I was 12. During those years with my father, no one outside our home knew he was sick, and I didn’t know why he acted the way he did.

Some nights he would talk to me; some nights he wouldn’t say a word. Other nights he would be sad or angry, or even violent. Home was scary and unstable, but I was blessed to have New York City public schoolteachers who made school a place that was safe, nurturing, academically rigorous and engaging.

If not for Allan Osterweil, my teacher in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at P.S. 276 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, I would be in prison or dead. Amid the darkness of my home life, Mr. Osterweil gave me a sense of hope and purpose. In his classroom, we read The New York Times every day. We learned the capital and leader of every country in the world. We did productions of Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll.