There’s a meme out there suggesting that I become the next Secretary of Education for this country. I use the word “meme” in the original sense where something gets repeated often. Some of it might have started from my pictures with then-presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro, but the more recent uptick ostensibly comes from Peter Greene’s Forbes article. In it, he takes on Liat Olenick’s original proposal – which then turned into a core tenet of Warren’s educational plan – and builds on it.
Greene has a few criteria that such a person should meet:
- A traditional public school teacher
- A venerated veteran teacher, at that
- A teacher who hasn’t been dubbed an edu-celebrity (an educational figure who amassed tens of thousands of social media influence in seemingly inauthentic ways)
- A person who has more years as a school-based educator than one who hasn’t been school-based
- A person who can delve into the big picture issues, the minutiae, and everything in between
And the first name he cites is mine.
On a personal level, I think my face fluctuated from mouth agape to eyes squinted. I laughed because Greene’s writing can toe the line between satire and factual without losing his audience, so I didn’t know whether to appreciate the sentiment or just laugh at the prospect.
But let me take him seriously for a few minutes.
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