Education Fri Feb 12 2010

A Bad Year for Teachers, a Bad Year for Public Education

By Ramsin Canon

This is going to be a bad year for public education.

After the State of the Union address and GOP response, there was a lot of back and forth about different policy points and the challenge the President laid down and the people standing behind Bob McDonnell and the number of times the President used certain words. What nobody commented on was that the two men agreed enthusiastically on exactly one thing: the need to privatize public education.

The take away from that night is that the American political duopoly supports the privatization of public education. They honestly believe that injecting the profit motive into education is the way to make sure that all American children get a decent education. That is a major policy shift that is so harmonious with the corporate policy tune that no news operations expressed any surprise or outrage.

But, of course, it is an outrage. The privatization of schools is sold as "ingenuity" and as a way of "leveling the field" by offering that cornerstone of free market fundamentalist mythology, "choice". Give parents choice and all problems go away. Because education is like used cars.

Forget that there is exactly zero evidence that charter schools work. Forget that vouchers take as an assumption that children from more difficult backgrounds should be allowed to fail. Forget that the history of American education demonstrates that expansion of public schools and professionalization of the teaching profession--and civil service, collective bargaining protection for teachers--tracks perfectly to the improvement of American education.

Why are we making teachers the sole enemy? And why are we suddenly comfortable with the idea that less democracy is a good thing?

Chicagoans enjoy a precious democractic power we unfortunately flunk more often than we ace: local school councils and their power over school improvement and principals. Charter schools are exempt from rules that establish local school councils, and now the very concept of LSCs is under attack, because it places some democratic control over the bosses in the schools.

Yes, we need a system to get rid of bad teachers. Does that mean giving bosses absolute power over them? It is mind boggling to me that "liberals" and progressives would approve of a "reform" that would give bosses absolute authority over the schools and inject the profit motive into the system. It is seen as an easy way to be centrist--blame the teachers unions--but in reality it is an immensely dangerous way to think about school reform.

The schools, particularly public schools, were once dumping grounds of patronage. Teachers were little more than babysitters. It was impossible to attract well educated and dedicated people to the profession for exactly that reason. Unionization--and only unionization--changed that for the better.

Charter schools offer their employees no job security. The pay is terrible, no retirement security, and teachers are often forced to teach outside of their discipline. Ask yourself why you think other people should do a job you're not willing to do just for the good feeling it supposedly gives them? Bosses are always eager to make teachers--or nurses, or child care workers--seem cold and uncaring whenever they advocate for themselves in the workplace. Where are their pay cuts and sacrifices?

Why would anyone want to become a teacher, when masters degrees with a quick minute in the classroom are so quick to blame them for everything. Students ignore them, parents blame them, the editorial boards salivate at each annual budget, gleefully singling out the small percentage of teachers with high end salaries.

Charter schools do not hire better teachers. Their staffs tend to be bifurcated between well-paid long-time teachers who have moved over from the public sector and eager young kids who will burn out in a few years. What success charters have comes from their ability to skirt special ed and other "burdens" public schools need to deal with by law, and just skim the best students with the most engaged parents.

It's not just the federal war on public education. It's going to get nasty locally, thanks in no small part to the short-sighted and irresponsible bloviating from the Reverend James Meeks, who has led a thus-far admirable effort to draw real attention to the immoral inequalities in our school systems. He compared teachers unions to the Gangster Disciples. The GDs for the record are an on-going criminal enterprise built on an enormous drug, theft, and prostitution market enforced by violence and terror.

Mayor Daley faces an election campaign next year that he will probably win but that can become an opportunity for some brave soul to really degrade his power and establish an opposition power base from which to mount genuine opposition to the Mayor. I think he fears that more than he fears an outright loss.

Want to split progressives from one another and set various factions in the black community against each other? One municipal level issue will do that better than any other: schools.

Meeks' recent rightward turn on the issue of school privatization is sinister not only because it is bad policy, but also because it is indicative of a nasty form of power identity politics to come. Mayor Daley will be using the schools, and the teachers union in particular, as the centerpiece of his reelection bid because that's where he can find solace. His management of the budget, the police, the fleeing of jobs--he will only get beat up there. Education is where he can still be toasted by the 21st Century Lakefront Liberals with their childish obsession with "entrepreneurial social justice" and simultaneously hold the support of distributive justice activists like Reverend Meeks.

What will the result be? More hate whipped up against teachers, men and women who have dedicated their lives--their one spin, as an old mentor of mine used to say--to educating the next generation, of preparing them not just for servile employeeship but to be critical minded participants in our civic society. I hate the bad teachers, but I know they are only noticeable because of all the great teachers that are out there, working hard every day.

Americans have a unique obsession with self-esteem, yet no group has lower self-esteem than the American worker. We're taught from a young age that we should be grateful to ever even have a job, that we're lucky to be paid what we're paid. The same libertarians who unquestioningly site the labor market as a justification for outrageous CEO and banker bonuses and salaries (how else do you attract the best?) mewl and puke about an educator who makes 150% the median salary after five years in the workforce--with a pension to boot!

Because we're just the mud people at the bottom. We don't control the capital, and therefore whatever the bosses--the Johnny Jobseeds who "create jobs" out of pity for us--deem to let us lap up off their wingtips is our just desserts.

Yes, we need some personal responsibility--parents need to be involved, don't fail their opportunity to participate in democratic public education--but the problem is not "the culture". The problem is economic disparity, communities rent by the exact same scarcity that the free market fundamentalists treasure as the only way to keep "labor costs down" (i.e., rip you off).

And the teacher is not your enemy. Try to remember that when the Mayor hails the assembly line educator sweat shops propped up as "models" because they're run by non-educators. Remember that we want people who know the profession well to run the system. How would the Lakefront Liberal professionals take to having a city electrician or cop brought in to run their boutique firm? So why should investment bankers or real estate developers run our schools?

Public education. An equal education for every kid--standardizing the critical thinking skills that make democracy possible--is critical for having a real participatory democracy. That is freedom. The ability for some, already more likely to succeed, to get ahead on the backs of everybody else is not freedom, or liberty, or equality. It is might makes right--a principle that fits nicely with the world view of our friends at the top of Machine Lite.