Wisconsin's Assault on Public Education
Wisconsin's political leaders, including Governor Scott "Hoping To Be Ready For National Prime Time" Walker, are doing their best to really, truly dismantle public education.
It's a challenging story to write about, because people who aren't following education these days think phrases like "dismantle public education" are hyperbole. They aren't. Wisconsin is on a path to do away with public education as we know it.
Teaching
Wisconsin has been doing its best to break the teaching profession. Walker made himself a national player four years ago by stripping all public sector unions of the power to collectively bargain. That has worked out just about as badly as could have been predicted; people are hired and fired based on, well, anything bosses feel like basing hiring and firing on this week. Wages are less than robust. It has led to teachers saying things like this from Sean Karsten, a thirty-two year old first year reading instructor:
I just look to keep improving my teaching in the best way I can and try to keep my nose out of the other stuff.
Union membership has plummeted-- why spend money on dues for an organization that can't actually do anything when you need that money more for, say, food for your children? But that means there's nobody to effectively stand up to Walker's newest proposal.
It emerged last January as a proposal for alternative certification. "Let's give people with life experience teaching jobs," said Walker. Since then, the legislature has been fleshing out the details, bringing us to the current point-- a proposal people who never graduated from high school could end up teaching high school. (You can see the whole history of the idea in AP releases here.)
Wisconsin would retain some standards-- to teach English, social studies, math or science you would have to have a bachelors degree. In something. Anything. And, weirdly enough, this would only apply grades 6 through 12. In Wisconsin, a first grade teacher would require a real teaching degree, but you could teach twelfth grade chemistry with a bachelors degree in art history.
Walker has been very successful selling the narrative of teachers being overpaid fancy-pants who think they're so special with their uppity college degrees while demanding to soak the taxpayers for upscale benefits far better than anything the cashier at the Pick'n'Save ever gets. This is just more of that-- after all, teaching is a job pretty much anybody would do, anyway. If this all happens, Wisconsin will have the distinction of being the first state in which Teach for American volunteers will be overqualified. In Walker's Wisconsin, anybody will be able to "be a teacher," even without an ivy league degree or five whole weeks of training.
Schools
Just yesterday, the legislature's budget writing committee approved a CURMUDGUCATION: Wisconsin's Assault on Public Education: