We must despise our kids: Our ugly war on teachers must end now
Republicans and Democrats can agree on one thing: Demonizing teachers. It's the "reformers" doing the most harm
Last week’s jobs report showed the labor market decelerating. This appears to be thefifth straight year that promising signs in the winter end up softening in the summer and fall. And indicators like the labor force participation rate (which is at a 38-year low) and wage growth (which has stagnated for decades, including in what should be a surge period since the Great Recession) make it look even worse.
But Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute dug out perhaps the worst numbers in the report. With September’s data in, we can see how many teachers went back to school this year. And Gould finds that the tremendous gap that opened up when local budgets crashed during the recession has not come close to being filled.
At the peak, we had 8.1 million public K-12 education teachers and staff in July 2008. Seven years later, we have far less, 7.8 million, despite a larger population of students that need to be served. According to EPI, the local public education shortfall, accounting for additional student enrollment, is 410,000 jobs.
This means that classrooms built for 25 or 30 students now have 35 or 40 in them. It means that kids don’t get the same level of personalized instruction, or in some cases any attention at all. It means that programs like art and music have to be excised, or extracurricular activities, simply because there are no resources available to staff them.
Obviously the main culprit of this tremendous and damaging shortfall in student learning is austerity budgeting around the country. Most funding for public schools comes from the states, and they have not rebounded to pre-recession funding levels, nor have they made education enough of a priority to keep up. Though teaching children is routinely stated as our nation’s most important priority in political campaigns, we treat it in the exact opposite manner in budget documents.
But there’s a bigger point to be made here, first brought up by blogger Duncan Black, aka Atrios. Speaking of teachers, Atrios wrote, “who could have predicted that demonizing them, cutting salaries and benefits, and reducing job security might make it a slightly less attractive option for people.”
The amazing thing is just how bipartisan this campaign to denigrate the American teacher has been. We know about the war on public employees on the Republican side, from Scott Walker on down. States under Republican control have routinelyeliminated collective bargaining rights, cut retirement benefits, and generally made teaching a less lucrative profession. They’ve also painted a picture of greedy teacher’s unions who deserve “a punch in the face,” according to presidential candidate Chris Christie. Another candidate, John Kasich, signed a law to create a “CEO” position for school districts, armed with the power to override some elements of union contracts.
But putting that expected belligerence aside, teachers have faced assault from their nominal allies for the entirety of the Obama administration. The end of Arne Duncan’s tenure as education secretary puts this into stark relief.
Duncan’s support for charter schools with fewer worker protections, and a “Race to the Top” program that used federal money as a carrot to force states to change their education policies, won rebuke from major teachers unions. He pushed getting rid of “bad teachers” through evaluations that many have criticized as inaccurate. He said that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to ever happen to the education system in New Orleans, basing this notion on certain test scores improving (largely by We must despise our kids: Our ugly war on teachers must end now - Salon.com:
