A Cry for Education Reform

In his controversial book Kill Your Teacher, Rabbi Nachum Shifren offers a provocative account of his nightmarish days as a teacher in the politically-correct and corrupt Los Angeles Unified School District.

He first recounts the two years he spent as a teacher at Dorsey High School, from 2003-05. An orthodox Jewish Rabbi, he employed traditional methods of teaching his students, mostly minorities, Spanish, holding them accountable to basic individual standards of excellence, such as completion of homework assignments and proper class preparation and attendance.

Both his persona and his teaching methods spurred a vitriolic burst of outrage by students, parents, and a school board who lent a deaf ear to his cause. Rabbi Shifren was a constant victim of verbal and even physical assaults and death threats, and his classroom was burnt down by student activists.

He tried to reach his students, but a handful of rebels made sure to torpedo his cause, disrupting his lessons with consistently disrespectful behavior. At parent-teacher conferences, he was blamed by parent and principal alike for his own “insensitivity” to the failing student.

Troublemakers were constantly unpunished for their behavior by the higher authorities of the school. Though Shifren wrote numerous complaints against the harsh racism and disrespect of the students, the Teachers’ Union ignored him as he was accused by the Principal for his “harsh” standards and racism.

He was eventually fired from the school district as a victim of reverse-racism and as a scapegoat blamed for the poor results from lazy students, despite support from the local member of U.S. Congress for his being a “superb teacher.” In Kill Your Teacher, the cry of Rabbi Shifren is one direly needed to expose the world of political-correctness and mediocrity of American inner-city public schools.

“Our schools used to be the envy of the world,” he remarked on American education. “Now we live in a culture of permissiveness.” The “permissive” culture at Dorsey High was highlighted by the students, parents, and board members playing the “race card” quite often.

Racial differences became an excuse for poor effort and infighting among minority students at Dorsey High. “The unspoken code,” Rabbi Shifren, a white Jew, writes in his book, “in both Union and District is that Blacks and Hispanics are ALWAYS victims, never aggressors. There’s just a white racist, somewhere, somehow, lurking around the corner, manipulating academic failure and social irresponsibility.”

The principal, a black Muslim woman, never lifted a finger to help his cause. Never once was the group of obscenely irresponsible students who consistently harassed Rabbi Shifren to blame for their abuses. The situation was handled with superficial face-saving solutions, of which Rabbi Shifren remarked, “If this is the level of decay in our body politic on top, how is the classroom teacher expected to deal with the malaise caused by the destroyers from within?”

Though opposed by many, Rabbi Shifren focused his heroic efforts into a role not just of teacher, but that of coach as well. He encouraged and promoted hard work and extra effort among his students, hoping they would remember him “for the attitude necessary to be a winner.”

He said the thoughts of the Founding Fathers of America should be studied and critiqued, because those thoughts formed the America that was different from the rest of the world, the America that was a great nation. If those early-American values are to be ignored and replaced by modern multi-culturalist and progressivist agendas, Americans will fade into the rat-race amidst the rest of the world.

“We spoonfeed the kids a daily pablum of diversity, ethnicity, and victimization to justify the lousy scores and make the kids feel good about themselves after all,” he reflected. In order to restore proper balance to the public education system, the new “cultural diversity” must be rooted out and replaced with truth and values, the federal government must not intervene so much in the public school curricula, and teachers must be allowed to set standards of excellence for students in order to promote a drive to succeed amongst them.

In his book, Rabbi Shifren uses his chilling account of teaching in some of the worst schools in the country to uncover the filth and corruption that is preventing the youth of the country from maturing as persons.

Matt Hadro is an intern at the American Journalism Center.