Chip Mosher: Teachers’ bleak landscape
When I was 16, in October 1963, a week after my best friend in high school murdered his abusive father and then put the shotgun into his own mouth and pulled the trigger, I had a dream. I dreamt President Kennedy had been shot by a rifle, and wounded, in the backyard of the White House. A month later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, by a rifle.
As they did to the cursed Cassandra in Greek mythology, snakes seemingly have licked my ears to give me the awful gift of foresight about some things — especially about public education, the system I believe in, more than anything, to engender hope for the human race.
And now public education is suffering a slow death by suffocation at the hands of the psychopathic corporate-based reform movement, just as, like a canary in a mine (cough, cough), I’ve been predicting for a decade.
Nationwide, the heavily funded reform movement has been behind what former-reformist Diane Ravitch has called the “largest transference of public money into the private sector in history.” In