Betsy DeVos, Matt Bevin, and the Smarmy Attack on Teachers | GQ:
Betsy DeVos, Matt Bevin, and the Smarmy Attack on Teachers
It’s easy to oppose education strikes if you don’t believe teaching is a job.
In February, West Virginia teachers shut down every public school in the state. For nearly
two weeks, the striking teachers stood their ground, disregarding the advice of union leaders and holding out for a 5 percent raise and a promise from the governor to address the sharply rising cost of health care. Following their success, teachers in Oklahoma organized their own state-wide strikes, while those in Arizona are also threatening strikes for the end of the month if the legislature doesn't finally come through on pay raises. And in Kentucky, educators across the state staged walkouts last Friday.
Kentucky governor Matt Bevin was particularly irked by the walkout in his state, and had a lot to say about it. "I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today, a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them," he told reporters, adding, "I'm offended that people so cavalierly, and so flippantly, disregarded what's truly best for children."
To be 100 percent clear, Bevin had no information about any sexual assault that happened during the walkout. His "guarantee" was a total fabrication. He's since
apologized in a four-minute video, but only after facing outrage from teacher organizations and Kentucky politicians alike—the state's Republican-dominated House of Representatives even passed resolutions condemning the remarks. But he isn't the only political leader trying to make the teachers into the villains of this story. Just days before Bevin basically blamed teachers for child abuse, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin
compared teachers striking in that state to a "teenage kid that wants a better car." In Fallin's metaphor, the perfectly good car the teachers already have includes broken desks, four-day weeks, stagnant wages since 2008, and tattered,
decades-old textbooks.
"I think about the kids,” DeVos said. “I think we need to stay focused on what’s right for kids. And I hope that adults would keep adult disagreements and disputes in a separate place, and serve the students that are there to be served.”
Although DeVos uses the word "adults" here, and not specifically "teachers," she's making the same argument as Bevin in Kentucky: Teachers are doing a disservice to students by letting these "adult disagreements" get in the way of their teaching. We often talk about teaching as a "calling," something that people are innately drawn to out of some altruistic impulse. And there's nothing wrong with having a sense of duty for your job, that feeling that your work is tied to a broader social good. But this romanticized view of teaching actually lionizes and devalues it at the same time. If we don't think of teaching as a job—instead of a calling, a sacrifice, a duty—then we can't talk about job conditions, material things like class size, shortened school weeks, or teacher pay. And it's not just a problem from the right. Teach for America, well-intended as it may be, is founded on the bedrock principle that minimal training and boundless passion can prepare college grads to teach in under-served communities, essentially de-professionalizing education.
Opponents of well-funded public education, people like DeVos and Bevin who want to see schools as privatized as possible, are relying on this same mindset when they attack teachers pushing for better working conditions. Teachers are caretakers, the argument goes, and therefore if some teachers are willing to walk out of school, Continue reading:
Betsy DeVos, Matt Bevin, and the Smarmy Attack on Teachers | GQ:
