On September 10, 2012, standing in crisp morning air of a Chicago fall, thousands of public school teachers took to the picket line for the first time in 25 years. Spirits in the streets are high and the ceaseless honking from passing supporters suggests that the public is on the side of the teachers, for now. In the days, and perhaps weeks to come, Mayor Emanuel is likely to begin a bruising rope-a-dope strategy designed to turn the tide of public opinion against Chicago's teachers. However, beyond the narrow circumstances of this fight lie broader questions about how Americans perceive school reform in the 21st century.
Mayor Emanuel's administration and so-called education reform groups (e.g. Democrats for Education Reform and Education Reform Now Advocacy) have worked hard to frame the contract dispute with the Chicago Teachers Union as an epic battle between greedy teachers determined to sacrifice children's futures for personal financial gain and the selfless politicians -- led by the oh-so-earnest Rahm Emanuel -- fighting desperately to reform the schools solely for the benefit of "the children."
This framing is clever propaganda. First, it plays upon parents' desire for their children to have better opportunities than they themselves have had. It invokes the engrained notion, and reality, that education is the most assured means of social mobility in American society. Then, it stokes the resentment of parents -- many of whom who work at or below the poverty level -- against teachers who are comparatively well-paid and enjoy adequate benefits including health care, retirement plans, and summers off. It is understandable why Emanuel's administration would exploit such sentiment. Its policy aims are clear: eroding union power and reducing the education budget by replacing highly-paid, veteran teachers with low-paid, inexperienced replacements. But such propaganda is also symptomatic of a larger tendency in American political discourse to characterize increasingly dire, systemic failures as the moral failure of a select group of individuals.
Most recently, in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, President Obama placed the blame for America's lagging performance in education largely on teachers, parents, and students: "A government has a role in this [education]. But teachers must inspire. Principals must lead. Parents must instill a thirst for learning. And students you've got to do the work."
This rhetoric appears benign -- it even drew applause from the crowd. But lurking beneath these words are venomous implications: Obama implies that America's underperforming schools are the result of uninspiring teachers, ineffectual principals, thoughtless parents, and lazy students. Obama is not alone. From the left and the right, the vilification of teachers and parents is pervasive in American political discourse and has become the backbone of every attack on America's "failing schools." Such a characterization of education obscures the complexity of the problems facing teachers, parents, and students. It also precludes any examination of the material conditions of the communities in which struggling teachers teach, struggling students learn, and struggling families survive.
The vilification of teachers, students, and parents is a necessary component of an emerging ideology that seeks to impose the illusion of a free market onto the classroom. This ideology posits the classroom as an idealized space in which the student and teacher engage in an educational transaction. Like floor-traders at the Chicago Board of Exchange haggling over the price of a bushel of wheat, students and teachers make a trade. The student has a choice to buy or not buy the education offered by his or her teacher. The students choose to learn or not learn as determined by the teacher's ability to inspire, the principal's ability to lead, the parents' capacity to instill intellectual curiosity, and their own motivation to learn.
This emerging ideology obscures social reality behind harsh sanctions designed to reform schools by disciplining teachers, students, and parents. As Bernard Harcourt has rightly pointed out in The Illusion of Free Markets, a substantial apparatus of ideological padding and all manners of discipline are required to fabricate the perception of a "free market." Likewise, similar forces must be marshaled to produce the illusion that lazy teachers, parents, and students are the fundamental cause of underperforming schools. New and elaborate systems of discipline have been mobilized to maintain this fiction: teacher performance pay, No Child Left Behind legislation, and financial penalties for parents. These heavily promoted initiatives serve to exclude competing forms of thought, and they help extricate the classroom from the social reality in which it exists. The quality of any school is primarily determined by the social relationships arising from the material conditions of the communities in which it exists. However, politicians and school reform advocates rarely point to the existence of staggering economic and social inequality as determinative factors underlying substandard educational performance.
If this ideology does indeed mask social reality, who benefits from its promulgation?
Politicians benefit from such an ideology because placing blame for failing schools on the teachers, parents, and students means that they do not have to engage in the dirty, difficult, grinding work of actually governing. Governing is difficult: It costs a fortune, upsets constituencies and donors -- and when it works -- holds politicians accountable. It makes sense then that an increasing number of career politicians are eagerly abdicating their responsibility to govern by embracing the expedience of privatization.
In Chicago, Mayor Daley hastily sold the city's parking meters for some quick cash that has left the city and its citizens on the hook for millions. Mayor Emanuel shuttered public mental health facilities and sent the city's most vulnerable citizens into the world of for-profit mental health care with little more than a free bus pass. On a national level, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has proposed unraveling the social safety net by voucherizing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid.
Education is the latest of many services to be slowly farmed out to private corporations. Politicians portray privatization as a solution in itself. In actuality, privatization does little more than produce a new system of social relations, and consequently, a new set of problems. Privatization is nothing more than a 21st century bait-and-switch. Charter schools are not the panacea citizens have been promised.
Nonetheless, charter school corporations market themselves as the last best hope for educating America's children. Of course they do. Public education is becoming big business and the past two decades have seen an explosion in the number of charter schools. Out-of-state groups representing powerful charter school corporations have poured into Illinois. They have doubled down on a "blame-the-teachers" campaign in hopes of increasing market share amidst disputes between teachers and the Emanuel administration. They cloak this corporate self-interest in the rhetoric of "choice" and "children first." Since the first hints of a teachers' strike earlier this year, education reform groups have made robo-calls and flooded the airwaves with commercials that depict Chicago's teachers as unreasonable. Mayor Emanuel has championed their cause and echoed their rhetoric stating that his "goal is to give parents the ability to make a choice of where they want to send their kids." However, closing neighborhood public schools and forcing kids into dystopian lotteries to gain admittance to charter schools does not seem like much of a "choice" to many families.
Sadly, if Chicagoans fail to recognize the deeper systemic issues underlying their failing schools, the teachers' strike may play right into the hands of Rahm Emanuel who stands to profit politically and the charter school corporations which stand to profit financially from a carefully crafted ideology designed to discredit Chicago's experienced and hardworking teachers.
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Teaching impoverished and violence wracked communities necessitates much more than what would be asked of a teacher in a normal community. Dealing with despondent children from broken and/or abusive families amongst a corrosive anti-education culture is hugely difficult. That takes extraordinary teachers that need to be recognized and rewarded for success in such a difficult environment. It is an environment in which most teachers will fail to deliver, not because they are lousy teachers but because it is such an extraordinarily difficult mission.
How many readers would gladly accept working an extra 2 hours with the sole compensation literally an extra paid 10 minute break? If a business did that to salaried staff on a permanent basis they surely would wish for a union to fight back against the greed.
Rahm could fund schools to increase hours in other ways besides sticking it to the teachers.
A Gold Coast tax of 1% of property values or income just to CPS schools works for me, but millionaire Emanuel is not likely to do so.
I find it just appalling that the Democratic mayor of Chicago is on the same side as shadowy very well funded 'education reform' groups out to bust public unions and divert taxpayer money to for profit enterprises.
How many readers would gladly accept working an extra 2 hours with the sole compensation literally an extra paid 10 minute break? If a business did that to salaried staff on a permanent basis they surely would wish for a union to fight back against the greed.
Rahm could fund schools to increase hours in other ways besides sticking it to the teachers.
A Gold Coast tax of 1% of property values or income just to CPS schools works for me, but millionaire Emanuel is not likely to do so.
I find it just appalling that the Democratic mayor of Chicago is on the same side as shadowy very well funded 'education reform' groups out to bust public unions and divert taxpayer money to for profit enterprises.
A certain flagship media group that owns a flagship AM station, TV station and major newspaper is virulently anti-union, with a certain sports team broadcast to be followed by an expose of the "shadowy union bosses trying to take over Chicago".
Pull back the curtain, and the underlying game being played in educational deform is one of privatizing education and profiting from it, and most kids will wind up with poorer choices than before.
It's dizzying to watch Democrats vigorously oppose the voucherization and privatization of Medicare in one sentence and then vigorously support the the voucherization and privatization of public education in the next breath.
The progressives lack any progressive vision of public education, and instead, got fooled by the neo-con version George Bush offered up. Many politicians, even today, don't understand than NONE of the major policies of the past decade have worked, and they have caused widespread collateral damage. What is called "reform" is usually the systematic dismantling of the American system of public education. As Garrison Keillor quipped, that's not reform, it's vandalism.
It's important to remember that adjusting for America's much higher rate of child poverty, American students are doing very well on these international tests that everyone wrongly hyperventilates about. On the last PISA test (the last major international test), USA was #1 in the world in the number of top scorers in reading and #1 in the world in number of top scorers in math. Also, adjusting for much higher child poverty rate (double the average of other PISA nations), our average scores in reading were #1 in the world.
Unions are as American as apple pie, and striking is part of how unions exert influence and kept checks and balances in the workplace, just as we have checks and balances in our democracy.
We have to understand education policy in a very broad way--we want to educate the masses in a way that doesn't simultaneously weaken middle class and working class families even more.
Charters, with generally lower teacher salaries and poorer benefits and job security, weaken the middle class even more, while providing an education that appears to be, on average, slightly worse than that provided by roughly comparable public schools. Meanwhile, increasing charterization de-stabilizes the public school systems tens of millions of American children rely on--once the apple cart is tipped over, who will pick up the pieces? Most children will probably be left with worse choices than they have now.
As a researcher, there's one critical misconception to point out here ... you say "There are charter schools that are performing very well ..." and this is something many charter school advocates and politicians often say. Actually, while STUDENTS in some well-known charters post above average test scores, those SCHOOLS themselves may be providing average or below average education.
It's crucial to separate the variables here, and what high-profile charters succeed at doing is selecting, for example, a slice of the low-income urban student population that is more motivated and able to begin with than average low-income urban students. Then they offer a fast-paced curriculum which some kids can't keep up with, so the less able or motivated from their already more elite group of kids drops out or is counseled out. Attrition rates in some charters are astronomical, and they also serve fewer kids with serious disabilities. Then the charter school declares victory when their test scores are higher than a nearby public school, although the playing field was heavily tilted in their favor from the beginning. Don't be fooled.
Go teachers, go!