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Gee, if you demean teachers, single them out using dubious metrics and promote the idea that the way to improve schools is to fire them, small wonder that teachers start to feel unwanted:
The slump in the economy, coupled with the acrimonious discourse over how much weight test results and seniority should be given in determining a teacher’s worth, have conspired to bring morale among the nation’s teachers to its lowest point in more than 20 years, according to a survey of teachers, parents and students released on Wednesday.
More than half of teachers expressed at least some reservation about their jobs, their highest level of dissatisfaction since 1989, the survey found. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years, citing concerns over job security, as well as the effects of increased class size and deep cuts to services and programs. Just three years ago, the rate was one in four.
Someone can explain to me how public education in America is enhanced by making teachers feel like shit.
By the way, the real goal of this right-wing education policy isn’t solely to humiliate teachers as much as it is to humiliate unions. They want to build a narrative of union bosses protecting “bad” teachers and engaging in corruption at the expense of kids. For the most part, the only organized entity that pushes back against right-wing ideas about education are teacher’s unions. So if you take them down a notch in the eyes of the public, you have more opportunity to get policies through like vouchers and charter schools and all the rest.
The collateral damage here are the besieged teachers themselves. The broken value-added model paints all teachers with that broad brush, the idea that they’re getting away with bad performance reviews. As if this idea of reviewing teacher performance is somehow new. The problem is that this particular metric doesn’t correspond to reality, not in any meaningful way. So the promoters of right-wing education policies blow right by it, saying that they need some hard data, and value-added is better than nothing. In reality it’s much worse, and it demeans an entire profession in addition to weakening the structures upholding public education in America.
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“…the real goal of this right-wing education policy isn’t solely to humiliate teachers as much as it is to humiliate unions.”
Wrong. The real goal of the right-wing is to destroy public education in the USA. The best way to create a passive and easily manipulated class of worker-slaves is to make them as stupid as possible. The Sixties revolutions in thinking amongst young college students (civil rights, anti-war, feminism, anti-corporate) were a direct outgrowth of improved education/funding and it scared the bejesus out of the Owners. They vowed to never again let the masses reach the dangerous level of critical independent thought.
Don’t get bogged down in trivia when the ax is falling.
David, I do not, often, disagree with you. However, when you suggest that this assault upon teachers AND education is a “right-wing policy”, then you are not being wholly honest, based on the evidence available to me. The “business model” and the utterly false “call” to “accountability” is totally bi(or is it “buy-partisan.
Did you happen to see this?
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/1/occupy_education_teachers_students_resist_school
If one reads the transcript, one discovers that Karen Lewis, who is President of the Chicago Teachers Union, makes very clear that the political class, as a whole, is “on board” with the “privitization” approach and her retelling of Rahm Emanuel’s comments about the “future” and worth of 25 percent of the children, in Chicago’s school districts, DOES NOT square, in the slightest, with your assertion.
My own experience, as a mere, lowly “voter” also confirms the fact that Democrats running for School Board positions, in the city in which I live, Penn Hills, PA (the school district that took Santorum to task, by the way, for “using more than $70,000.00 from the district’s cofers to “home school” his children, when he and his family actually resided in Virginia) are quite as vocal and vehement in seeking to cut school-taxes and programs, as well as “teaching-to-the-test” … as the Republicans.
Perhaps, other commenters might have encountered similar “bi-partisan agreement” on this educational “policy”?
None of my youngest daughter’s teachers, she being the only one of my daughters still in elementary (or secondary) school, are at all happy with the “policy” begun by Bush but supported, now, by virtually all members of the political class. One notes that Barack Obama has done little to change this “policy”, not even mentioning it from his “bully pulpit”, and he has, if memory still yet serves, made public “example” of teachers AND their unions.
DW
David Dayen wrote, “by the way, the real goal of this right-wing education policy isn’t solely to humiliate teachers as much as it is to humiliate unions.”
Maybe I’m far too paranoid, but somehow I doubt their goal is that innocuous: I think the real reason that right-wing extremists want to get rid of public education is that they truly do not want an educated workforce. They want a low-cost/low-complaining workforce. I think this is the same reason they don’t truly want to control illegal immigration or are limiting collective bargaining.
Corporate America needs… yeah, I’ll say it… slave labor. In their limited worldview, it’s the only way to preserve their gold.
Well crud, I wrote my similar comment before reading yours. You did a much better job of articulating my point-of-view.
At least now I don’t feel so paranoid.
Semantics.
When a right-wing education policy is pursued by both parties (currently on a national level by Arne Duncan) is it still right-wing?
Labels don’t mean much, IMO. In fact they often obfuscate.
Mar 8, 2012
Flunking Arne Duncan
by Diane Ravitch
including:
Q.Do Duncan’s policies encourage teachers and inspire good teaching?
A.No. Duncan’s policies demean the teaching profession by treating student test scores as a proxy for teacher quality. . . .
What’s with teachers in those well funded public schools in rich and affluent suburbs where all the kids graduate and most of them go to Stanford and Harvard? Are they garbage too?
Here in Wisconsin, public school teachers put their students in the top three nationally for SAT scores and graduation rates. Year after year after year. And still our teachers are under attack by Walker and the republicans.
Why does the right, including Arne Duncan and his boss, focus exclusively on teachers in poor communities? Because successfull public schools don’t fit their narrative of failure allegedly caused by teachers and their stinkin unions. That’s why.
Teachers are important but, going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn.
The US has a severe under-class problem with many in prison and apparently they want more.
I’m not kissing up, I promise; I tend to be confrontational and ascerbic.
But this is the most erudite commentary I can remember. It’s not copyrighted is it? I think I could sell it. Good job, y’all!
Speaking of erudite, here’s Paul Krugman’s ‘Ignorance is Strength’ in today’s NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/opinion/krugman-ignorance-is-strength.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Hey, Ragg, come back early. Come often!