#TeachStrong Strikes a Macho Pose
By John Thompson.
Educators now have to endure another wave of kinder, gentler soundbites by the corporate-funded the “Third Way.” The new spin, called “TeachStrong,” isn’t much different than the old song and dance. Perhaps, this time, corporate reformers will be a little less devoted to test, sort, reward, and punish, but the new initiative’s agenda comes from the same place as the old public relations campaigns. The Billionaires Boys Club hires top-dollar market experts and then they push a campaign driven by polling numbers, not a diagnosis of education’s problems and solutions.
You can call it the “Third Way” or “TeachStrong” but it is still the same Sister Soljah tactic. Corporate-funded Democrats try to appeal to swing voters by looking macho. Democrats still assume that voters are so angry about the decline in their economic prospects that they have to show that progressives aren’t wimps. Democrats then demonstrate their toughness by beating up loyal allies such as teachers and unions. Of course, this new coalition includes organizations, like the Broad Foundation and the TNTP, that would use disruptive and transformational change to destroy unions, local school governance, university education departments, and the due process rights of teachers. The Third Way will just take a lower profile stance as the overt teacher-bashing of the last decade as TeachStrong is recast as “‘modernizing and elevating’ the teaching profession.”
At the risk of annoying some allies, I would also add that the hands of union leaders are tied. They must participate in the process and seek to steer it away from the catastrophic competition-driven policies of the Duncan administration. Regardless of how the market-driven reformers behave, teachers and unions must play as constructive of a role as possible. In doing so, we must explain to the non-education press and to patrons how corporate reform became the new “status quo,” how it failed, and why it is doomed. They used test and punish to create the education version of the Model T assembly line speed up. Rather than use incentives and disincentives to recreate the world of Henry Ford, we need schools to prepare children for the 21st century.
The Billionaires Boys Club got plenty of mileage out of their charter school narrative, for instance. We must #TeachStrong Strikes a Macho Pose - Living in Dialogue:
