The False Cult of Effort, the Gender Gap, and K-12 Teacher-Bashing | the becoming radical:
The False Cult of Effort, the Gender Gap, and K-12 Teacher-Bashing
While the U.S. presidency is rarified air, the presidential election often reflects the best and worst of the American character.
As the country sits in the cusp of the end of the first black president’s administration and the likelihood of the election of the first female president, what does the current election show about the lingering privilege of being white, male, and straight in the U.S.?
Being black, brown, female, gay, or transgender requires perfection while being white, male, and heterosexual allows any transgression to be excused.
Hillary must be perfect (her email controversy is oddly identical to millions of erased emails from private servers under George W. Bush, although that is of no real concern to the public or the media, for example), but Trump’s admitted behavior as a sexual predator is swept aside as just a man being one of the boys.
Yes, the glorious sanctity of the office of president must not be sullied—although the Republican Party has elected Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and W. Bush, a who’s who of unethical personal and political behaviors?
And in this dynamic of privilege we find the cult of effort—the implication that all these powerful white males are in power because of effort, because they deserve the success, earned the success.
Recall that Trump built this off the pittance of an inherited few million. …
On a smaller scale, then, is the K-12 teacher, a profession trapped in the cult of effort and the gender gap.
Having spent my career in part as a K-12 public school teacher and now as a tenured full professor, I have witnessed first-hand a powerful and ugly dynamic.
First, let me work backward.
Rocketship Academy is patting itself on the back over a new "research" report that it commissioned from good, old SRI International, a group that just happens to be heavily invested in technology-based education. SRI used to stand for Stanford Research Institute, but separated from Stanford in 1970 and changed its name in 1977 (which suggests the split was plenty amicable). That was long before Preston Smith tacked his Teach for America credits onto his resume and looked to enter the lucrative world of edubusiness, but since then, SRI has teamed up with Rocketship to show the awesomeness of the Rocketship Academy product.
When I heard the story of a teacher at Massachusetts’ largest charter school who received a $6,087 *bill* from said school after he let them know that he wouldn’t be returning to teach there this fall, I had to know more. Surely there had to be some kind of mistake or miscommunication, and by *we’re claiming liquidated damages,* the school really meant *thanks for your years of service and good luck at your new job.* So I did what anyone playing the part of a journalist on the Internet can do. I contacted the teacher and asked him if he would consent to a tell-all on my blog. To which his lawyer said *please don’t.* But I was still left with another unanswered query—call it Question 2—what kind of a school goes after a teacher like this anyway? It’s field trip time, reader, and we’re off to a mystical land known as the Mystic Valley.
