Teachers Without Borders

• Remarkable images:  Haiti:  Two Years after the Quake
• TWB iTunes podcast:  Earthquake Research and Education in Haiti
• TWB iTunes podcast:  Post-Earthquake Education Efforts in Haiti

Two years after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed over 70,000 people in China, a shallow earthquake leveled Port au Prince, Haiti. Up to 300,000 lost lives and over a million homeless. January 12th, 2012 marked the two-year anniversary of this natural and “national” disaster, the effects of which could have been mitigated.

While it is unfair to compare one country’s reconstruction efforts with another, I cannot help but illustrate what is possible when teacher leaders are in charge.

That is where a member of Teachers Without Borders’ Advisory Board comes in: Sharon Ravitch, Ph.D of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.  Dr. Ravitch currently serves as Senior International Advisor to the Haitian Ministry of Education. Along with her colleagues in Haiti and beyond, she is addressing policy issues and educational reconstruction, as well as the coordination of services.

But Sharon Ravitch is doing something even more fundamental. She is relying upon local educational leadership and teachers – the educational pillars necessary to maintain a society’s structural integrity. She knows that teachers have their ears to the ground, always listening to the rumbling just below the surface.  She illustrates how teachers are the ones who recognize the fault lines, serve as a community’s first responders, and represent the only true, durable multiplier of change.

The epicenter of the Chinese earthquake of May 12, 2008 was close enough to TWB’s center of operation in Dujiangyan China (where educators were studying science inquiry methods) to decimate everything.  We lost teachers and students.  These were shoddy buildings in a densely populated area.

At least they had some kind of disaster plan.  It was, however, wrong.

I arrived in China shortly afterward during the relief and recovery stage.  Within months, Chinese teachers, geologists, and school administrators explored earthquakes from a geological and structural perspective, informed by accurate science.  Groups of teachers gathered around shake tables, stretched springs and coils, created and tested Popsicle structures.  They learned how to create lessons around structural and non-structural hazards; when to gather under one’s desk or escape the building based upon whether it was likely to sway or sink.  Officials crossed out inaccurate data about their escape plans and substituted more accurate versions. Building-phobic parents sent their children back to school.  Science became central to physical and emotional safety.

In Haiti, the same thing:  dense population, lousy buildings, shallow earthquake.  At the sign of any danger, Haitians often instinctively and immediately run indoors for protection.  Here, too, the buildings killed them.  Yet many Haitian Geology teachers knew exactly what to do on January 12, 2010, thus saving hundreds of lives (listen to our podcast with )

But this was the exception rather than the rule.  Despite the thousands of NGOs and rock-stars Haiti has been forced to accommodate with equanimity and grace, there remains enough rubble (measured in metric tons of concrete) in Port au Prince alone to construct a four-lane highway from Port au Prince to Los Angeles and back again.

When Chinese teachers in Sichuan first heard about the earthquake in Haiti, they wrote letters of support.  Sensitive to the emotionality connected with anniversaries, they writing again, sharing their love and shared sorrow with their colleagues in Haiti.

How many earthquakes will it take until the global community supports teachers from below the ground and up?  Anything less undermines the very foundation of society itself.

But this is something Dr. Sharon Ravitch has known all along.

LEARN MORE:

• Emergency Education: at Teachers Without Borders
• TWB Teacher’s Guide to Earthquake Science & Safety (free)
• Sharon Ravitch, Ph.D:  Teachers Without Borders Advisory Board
• Sharon Ravitch at the University of Pennsylvania
• Aga Khan Development Network:  Deep support for vulnerable communities
• PARSQUAKE:  Earthquake education in the global Persian community
• Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies:  A global leader
• IRIN News: Humanitarian news and analysis