Adam Bessie: Retiring the "Bad Teacher" Boogeyman
Guest post by Adam Bessie.
"I support our teachers, but my daughter was traumatized by an unfirable 1st grade teacher," so read a tweet I received after expressing concern that Vergara v. California decision - which declared K-12 teacher tenure unconstitutional for violating the civil rights of students - had nothing to do with civil rights, little to do with students, and everything to do with the continued efforts to privatize public education. If you publically critiqued the Vergara verdict, you no doubt received a similar reply, which I've described by the following equation, dubbed VAM [Vergara Attack Method]:
Compliment of teachers in general ["I love teachers"]
- [BUT] there are "bad teachers"
+ vague and/or extreme personal anecdote about "bad teacher"
= you must be a "bad teacher" and hate children if you support tenure or any other rights for teachers. Also, you are against civil rights, likely a socialist, and most definitely are destroying the economy.
Rhetorically, it's almost impossible to respond to VAM - Who can disagree that there are "bad teachers?" Who wants a child to be subjected to such a horrible person? Who wants a child to be traumatized?
VAM works especially well when coupled with civil rights rhetoric, as I wrote about in my last essay "A Tale of Two Vergaras: Of Stardom and Civil Rights". Who could be against civil rights? And so, in a masterful rhetorical twist, if you're for tenure, you're also against helping impoverished minority children - you're standing in the way of equality. In more advanced versions of VAM, civil rights rhetoric is seamlessly connected with fixing the sagging economy as we see in an op-ed in USA Today claiming "There is no war on teachers." The author assures us that there is "no such war," and that if anything, the focus is on firing just a "very small minority of teachers" who are not just harming children, but according to his calculations, would actually fix our current financial crisis:
The gains according to historical economic patterns would be measured in trillions of dollars and would be sufficient to solve our national fiscal problems as well as the vexing income Adam Bessie: Retiring the "Bad Teacher" Boogeyman - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher: