Time Tough in Public Education

SSD riffed (i.e., laid-off) 8 teachers from my school yesterday. After bitching and moaning for a few hours over a beer after school w/ soon to be ex-workmates I walked home, plopped on my couch, deflated, and slept for ten hours. At lunch today people were talking about turning out for the School Board Meeting next week. Amidst these cuts, and teacher’s COLA (cost of living adjustment pay raises) frozen, our new Super, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, has been awarded a 10% pay increase. It feels like the Super is spoiling for a fight w/ our teacher’s Union. It’s a story repeated around the country for years now: “failing” schools are the fault of teachers and moribund Unions; the solution is cost-cutting management measures and performance-based number-crunching testing models from the corporate business world. You might think this crap would be wearing a bit thin as the country bails out Wall Street’s failed mathematical models but the simplistic stupidity of NCLB’s testing clampdown continues. It's not that testing or standards or alignment or accountability are bad ideas (or new ones, for chrissakes!)but imposed as the high-stakes be-all-end-all of school reform just distracts and distorts from learning to processing paperwork as evidence of learning. The dirty little secret, though, is that the Union’s intransigent position on teacher evaluations for years is at least partly culpable for these slanderous anti-teacher policies. The truth is that there remain on staff at my school nearly as many teachers as were cut who have been phoning it in for years and put out not a fraction of the creativity and effort of that shown by the 8 riffed teachers. This doesn’t mean I think teacher’s are at fault for “failing” schools. Even calling the schools “failing” has become mostly an agenda to privatize and so undermine public education. (More corporate performance-based management.) Higher on the list of factors responsible for struggling schools, I’d say, are, yes, lack of adequate funding, poor organization, lack of leadership, and a host of social ills for which public schools are at worst a mirror. But the Union has stretched its attention to job security to the point of undermining expressed commitment to student learning. And this dysfunction has made it easier for retrograde ideas ab merit pay and charter schools and the like to get in the door. It’s discouraging. And now the District is just passing the buck, or lack thereof. It strikes me as wrong that public education and health care services should be at the mercy of boom and bust cycles of the economy. Next to our home utilities what could be more basic community services? What could be more essential to America’s democratic promise than public education? And when could there be a more important time to invest in education and health care than in tough times?

Currently playing:"Time Tough," Toots and the Maytals