Illustration: Randall Enos
By the Editors of Rethinking Schools
It’s hard not to take it personally: A few months ago, the cover of Newsweek consisted of 11 sentences in chalk on a blackboard. They all said the same thing: “We must fire bad teachers.” Big yellow text in the center called it “The Key to Saving American Education.”
Teachers have always been devalued in the United States, but in the past months the pace and intensity of the attacks have escalated sharply. Spurred by the June 2 deadline for the second round of Race to the Top, states have raced to fire more teachers, tie pay and evaluation to student test scores, close or reconstitute more schools, and disempower teachers’ unions and teaching as a profession—trampling teachers, students, and communities in the process.
What lies behind this unprecedented assault on teachers? And, even more important, what can we do about it? We believe that these attacks are part of an effort to dismantle public education and that we need an effective, collaborative strategy to combat it.
But let’s start with what isn’t going on. In virtually the same words used to sell No Child Left Behind in the early years of Bush II, the attacks on teachers are phrased in terms of “closing the achievement gap.” In fact, the first paragraph of Newsweek’s “Why We Can’t Get Rid of Failing Teachers” story concludes: “Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists—and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to sag.” It would be nice if Newsweek were suddenly worried about how race and class affect student success. But these diatribes against teachers are not based in a commitment to equity.
No, if closing the achievement gap were the goal, we would see demands for adequate, equitable resources and funding for every student in every school—demands, for example, for quality early childhood education programs, full-time librarians, robust arts and physical education programs, mandated caps on class size, and enough time for teachers to prepare and collaborate. We would also see a renewed commitment to affirmative action in university admissions; a drive to recruit and nurture teachers of color; a commitment to ensure that students come to school ready to learn because their families have housing, food, medical care, and jobs; and an end to zero
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