What’s the Matter With Corporate Education Reform?
Why Students and Teachers Won When the Vergara Decision was Overturned
Last week I reviewed Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? in which he lambastes professional-class Democrats for thinking that there is “no social or political problem that cannot be solved with more education and job training.” This makes perfect sense because, as a class, professionals are “defined by educational attainment, and every time they tell the country that what it needs is more schooling, they are saying: Inequality is not a failure of the system; it is a failure of you.”
But, Frank contends, the only problem with education, for the professional crew, is that it is “not meritocratic enough.” Thus, all that needs to be done is bust the teachers’ unions (whose sin is their outdated belief in solidarity), open charter schools, test our kids to death, and give tax breaks to “innovators.”
Nothing is more illustrative of this aspect of Frank’s critique than the way so many Democrats lined up to support the Vergara decision in 2014 even against the interests of a key Democratic constituency and key Democratic electeds.
What was the Vergara Decision?
Nearly two years ago, a Los Angeles-area judge struck down the due process rights of California’s K-12 teachers in what many educators like myself found to be a distinctly bad ruling. As Kelly Mayhew and I wrote at the time:
Last week’s decision in the Vergara v. the State of California lawsuit that undermined tenure and seniority rights was a profound slap in the face to teachers who have committed their careers to improving the lives of our children. It was yet another significant victory for those who are seeking to impose corporate education reforms by pitting teachers against children in a cynical, destructive, and utterly counterproductive fashion.
As tenured professors in the community college system, union members, and parents of a child in California’s public school system, we have a unique perspective on this matter. Although the “Vergara” decision has no effect on our jobs at San Diego City College, it does affect the professional lives of the educators who teach our son and it will do them, and him, more harm than good . . .
Pitting our child against his teachers, as the “Vergara” lawsuit seeks to do, is a fool’s errand. It destroys any sense of community in our schools and heaps scorn on the very people we all want to trust with our children’s futures. The interests of teachers and students are not diametrically opposed, as so many in the corporate education reform industry would have us think, but rather inextricably linked. When we disrespect teachers, we demean our education system and do nothing to help students.
San Diego is full of [good] schools . . . as is the rest of the state. If you read much of the news media, however, you’ll believe differently given the endless drumbeat of education “reformers,” who often hide their true agenda of privatization and union busting behind a deeply dishonest rhetoric of “saving children” from “bad teachers.”
More specifically, with regard to the “Vergara” decision, David Welch, a conservative Silicon Valley millionaire and corporate education reformer who has been funding a group called “Students Matter,” won the opening salvo in a battle to deprive teachers of their constitutional due process and seniority rights.
The suit, which hid behind a group of poor and minority students, several of whom did not even attend schools where the teachers had tenure or due process rights, alleged that California’s teacher workplace rights infringe on the constitutional rights of students to an equal education–basically saying that hard-won job security, due process (i.e. that teachers cannot just be fired without a process), and seniority adversely impact low-income and minority students by keeping on “bad” teachers and too-often sticking inexperienced teachers in low-performing schools.
The problem with this argument and the “Vergara” decision (which will be appealed) is that it is based on What’s the Matter With Corporate Education Reform?:
