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