A to B: Chris Buttimer Found That Greed Isn't Good

[caption id="attachment_4573" align="alignleft" width="350" caption="Illustration by Daniel Vasconcellos"][/caption]

I remember watching Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko proclaim, "Greed is good" in the TV trailer for Wall Street when I was in middle school. I don't think I ever saw the movie until much later in life, but I remember being attracted to the lifestyle portrayed on the TV screen — the limos, the women, the flashing computer screens, and just the overall frenetic and exciting lifestyle that everyone who worked on Wall Street seemed to be living.

When I graduated from college at the height of a market boom, I decided I'd try my hand at becoming the next Gordon Gekko. I worked as a Wall Street trader in Boston first, and then in New York. What I found was a workplace environment and overall lifestyle that I loathed. My coworkers routinely withheld information from each other, fudged numbers, stabbed friends in the back for bonuses, and used their connections to get ahead, undeservedly so in many cases. After five years in finance, I decided I had had enough.

Coming back to my hometown of Boston, I fell into an assistant teaching position at a summer school program, which I had only planned on doing to make a few dollars while I applied to graduate school to do something — anything — other than work on Wall Street. After about a week of working with the students and seeing how amazingly smart, funny, kind, and caring they were, I knew that teaching was what I wanted to do.

For two years, I worked part-time as an assistant teacher in the Cambridge Public Schools, while I got my master's degree in teaching at night. When I graduated, I took over for the English teacher at the middle school who was retiring. I spent my all of my time, energy, and money (the district's as well as my own) creating an engaging literary environment in my classroom where we read great books, discussed big ideas, and wrote until our hands hurt. In doing so, I was able to reach about 75 percent of my students effectively; however, I simply didn't have the skill set to instruct students who were three or more grade levels behind their peers and who struggled with decoding and fluency — areas that are typically, yet erroneously, seen as being the purview of K–5 teachers only.

I came to the Ed School to gain the knowledge required to teach every one of my students effectively. I gained these skills in the reading specialist program under Lecturer Pamela Mason, M.A.T.'70, Ed.D.'75, and I now feel like I have the tools to either reenter the classroom as an effective practitioner or to work with teachers to build their capacity in areas that I was lacking when I began my teaching career.

However, given the school's expertise in the policy arena, my coursework exposed me to trends in education reform that I find extremely troubling, which is one reason why I came back to learn more through the Ed.D. Program. Many of the current reformers at the policy and administrator levels are embracing neoliberal market-based, corporate-style reforms, which promote practices that I saw lead to such greed and corruption on Wall Street. With the advent of competitive reforms such as merit pay, test-based accountability, and market-based systems like vouchers and charters, we are already seeing unintended consequences in the forms of cheating, competition for scarce resources, and a system of winners and losers. These reforms are creating new tiers in an already stratified education system, thereby threatening the institution of public education and our nation's democratic ideals.

When my time at the Ed School is up, I have a tough decision to make in determining whether to fight for equity for students and teachers in the classroom or to take that fight to policymakers at the state and federal level. Neither of these roles will give me Gordon Gekko's lifestyle or salary, but I'm fine with that because the work I'll be doing advocating for kids, families, and teachers will be far more rewarding.

— Chris Buttimer, Ed.M.'10, is currently an Ed.D. student in the Culture, Communities, and Education Program. He has not seen the Wall Street sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and doesn't plan to.