Diane Ravitch Uncensored
Education, Media, PoliticsMar 4, 2011Since the economic crash of 2008, one driven by rampant, unregulated greed and speculation frighteningly illustrated by the Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job, Wall Street has deftly side-stepped vilification, the superrich walking away with fortunes – and reputations – in tact. And even more deftly, these same billionaires have successfully framed public servants – and teachers in particular – for the crime, making them appear greedy, lazy fat cats responsible for destroying the economy.
For the last year, the “bad teacher” has become an icon of lazy avarice, an antagonist in a corporate media narrative that shows public education in state of crisis, a crisis on par with global warming as the promotional poster for the Academy Award not-nominatedWaiting for Superman suggests, with a cute, attentive kid sitting ready to learn in a school desk amidst a bombed-out wasteland. This wasteland, though, is not the poverty caused by mass foreclosures, by outsourced