Education Quote by Laura San Giacomo

San Giacomo’s line lands because it refuses the easy binary our school debates usually crave: heroes versus villains, “good teachers” versus “bad teachers.” She starts with praise, but it isn’t a softener so much as a calibration. Yes, excellence exists. The problem is structural, not moral. By shifting quickly to “not prepared” and “haven’t been trained,” she recasts failure as a systems issue: we keep asking educators to perform inclusion like it’s a personality trait rather than a practiced skill set supported by time, money, and leadership.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how institutions launder responsibility. When inclusive education falters, the blame typically falls on individual classrooms - the overwhelmed teacher, the “difficult” student, the “demanding” parent. San Giacomo flips that: if people aren’t trained, the adults above them chose that outcome. It’s a critique that resonates in a culture where “inclusion” is celebrated as a value while being treated as an unfunded mandate.

Her last move is the sharpest: “lovely and easy.” That phrase punctures the mystique around accommodations and differentiated instruction, which are often framed as burdensome extras. She’s implying that once you understand the mechanics - tools, strategies, collaboration, the right expectations - inclusion stops being a crisis narrative and becomes normal practice. Coming from an actress, the delivery reads less like policy memo, more like plainspoken advocacy: stop romanticizing struggle; teach people how to do the job.