It is a shame indeed that teachers should be hesitant to speak their minds to the administrators at their schools, for fear of being dismissed.

In March of last year, Mr. Todd Friedman, an English teacher at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, filed an unfair-labor charge against the administration there for “a new ‘dumbed-down’ curriculum and unfair evaluations”. Just this month, he was fired for no good reason at all, on a technicality.

He committed the apparently egregious error of personally buying copies of Shelley’s Frankenstein for his students, and charging them $2 a copy - a fraction of their price - to make up some of the difference. In the end, he still lost money. He wanted to ensure that all of his students had their own personal copies they could write in, so as to enrich their experience reading the book, by charging them less than the school bookstore would and encouraging them not to rely on free copies in school’s vaults, which as school property cannot be written in. In addition, his actions provided an opportunity for low-income students to have the same resources as their peers.  

We the undersigned demand that the administration of Midwood High School and the NYC Board of Education reinstate Mr. Todd Friedman as a teacher with the full rights and tenure which he had before he was so unceremoniously and discourteously removed simply for pursuing perfection and intellectual freedom. Further, we demand that he receive an apology.