Why Do Americans Love to Blame Teachers?
Healthcare has its critics, but few of them are calling for doctors to be replaced. Education is different—and as a new book reveals, it has been throughout U.S. history.
America hates teachers.
That's not exactly the thesis of Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, but her account of 200 years of education policy provides plenty of evidence for it. "The history of education reform," she notes, "shows … recurring attacks on veteran educators." In the early 1800s, reformer Caroline Beecher argued that young women with a missionary calling should replace male teachers who were "intemperate … coarse, hard, unfeeling men, too lazy or stupid" to teach; she suggested those men should be sent into the mills instead. Two centuries later, Goldstein notes, programs like Teach for America are promoted as a kind of missionary calling, in which young fresh-faced college graduates replace lazy, stubborn, unionized teachers.
In between those two endpoints, Goldstein recounts the United States' dishonorable McCarthy-era assault on left-wing teachers—and its even more dishonorable record following Brown v. Board of Education, in which black teachers were systematically fired or pushed out of their jobs in order to prevent them from teaching white students. As Goldstein shows, the main result ofBrown was not to integrate schools—which desegregated only haltingly before resegregating more recently—but to force out black educators. Education reform, as so often before, seemed to be less about aiding students than about targeting teachers.
Goldstein argues that discussions of education in the U.S. have repeatedly been framed in terms of moral panics. A moral panic, she says, occurs when "policymakers and the media focus on a single class of people … as emblems of a large, complex social problem." That single class of people is then systematically demonized, as politicians and pundits present "worst of the worst" cases as emblematic of the whole.
In fact, I think you could argue (though Goldstein does not quite) that moral panics do more than demonize a group of people. They serve in part tocreate a group of people—to delimit or describe a particular identity and mark it as deviant. In the ’80s and ’90s, moral panics around poverty created the "welfare mother"—an irresponsible, iconically black inner-city woman who supposedly abused drugs and had multiple children simply to receive hand-outs from the government. Similarly, Arun Kundnani, in his recent book The Muslims Are Coming!, argues that before the 9/11 attacks, Muslims were one assimilating ethnic group among many. Afterwards, the state began to view Islam as a dangerous identity and a problem to be studied, controlled, and policed. The control and policing is important. Moral panics create identities in order to regulate them.
That helps to explain the otherwise mystifying path that current school reform has taken. As Goldstein says, there are a couple of school reform strategies that have been successful. For instance, the Children's Literary Initiative, which Why Do Americans Love to Blame Teachers? - The Atlantic:
Yes, Skipping School Correlates With Low Test Scores—Now What?
In a new report, researchers say they found a link between higher rates of student absenteeism and lower scores in reading and mathematics on a nationwide exam. It’s a finding that isn't likely to surprise many people, least of all educators in America’s public schools. Indeed, a flurry of recent studies confirm what to many observers seems like little more than common sense: Students can’t learn
