THE WAR ON TEACHERS?
This article is part of Re:EDUCATION, an ongoing series on educational innovation.
Like religion and politics, public education may soon be one of those subjects banned from the dinner table for the sake of family harmony. Few issues can boast so many deeply committed stakeholders with so many intensely opposing points of view. Two recent Big Think features on school reform in New Jersey, under Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf, elicited an unusually high number of passionate reader responses, many of them critical of what have become the mainstream axes of school reform: teacher accountability, data-driven evaluation of school success, and the expansion of the charter school system.
Joanne Barkan, who writes for Dissent Magazine, sees serious flaws in the "school reform" movement that went national with the 2001 enactment of No Child Left Behind, under President George W. Bush.
In a nation as politically and ideologically riven as ours, it’s remarkable to see so broad an agreement on what ails public schools. It’s the teachers. Democrats from various wings of the party, virtually all Republicans, most think tanks that deal with education, progressive and conservative foundations, a proliferation of nonprofit advocacy organizations, right-wing anti-union groups, hedge fund managers, writers from right leftward, and editorialists in most mainstream media—all concur that teachers, protected by their unions, deserve primary blame for the failure of 15.6 million poor children to excel academically. They also