Anna Quindlen is one of the best essayists in the U.S. today. Her latest commentary in the July 21 isue of NEWSWEEK will appeal to thoughtful conservatives and liberals alike....

Write and Wrong

A teacher who is psyched about engaging struggling students learns that bureaucracy is more important than pedagogy.

Anna Quindlen
NEWSWEEK

Each year in the state of Indiana, librarians, teachers and students compile a list of 20 nominated books for the Eliot Rosewater Award, named after a character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, a native of the state. This year one finalist was "The Freedom Writers Diary," which makes even more bizarre what happened to Connie Heermann, tossed from her classroom for trying to use that same book as a teaching tool.

In the months since Heermann was placed on an 18-month suspension without pay by the school board in Perry Township, her case has been ballyhooed as errant censorship. But it's really a cautionary tale about what's too often the ruling principle in American public education: the timidity and inefficiency of powerful bureaucracies far removed from the daily lives of either teachers or kids.

A bit about "The Freedom Writers Diary": the book grew out of the work of Erin Gruwell, who was once a newbie teacher in a class of at-risk students in California. "At risk" is edu-code: it most often means the students in question are poor, minority, have chaotic home lives, are likely to drop out. Gruwell decided that the road to success for her students was to get them to write their lives. They kept diaries about everything from self-doubt to incest to gang membership. Some of the students used profanity and racial slurs, but a reader notices that as their writing improves, that disappears. As Gruwell says, "As they wrote more, they made better choices." They also had better lives. The students in Gruwell's classes started out believing they might not survive high school—literally. By the end of the book, they're heading to college.

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