Pres. Barack Obama's Secy of Education, Arne Duncan, was formerly head of the Chicago public schools, but he persists in the cause du jour of "teacher accountabililty" for student performance. Dangerously, he now has a Hero-President and a big budget to coerce the nation's school districts, short of cash and needing federal moneys, into implementing teacher-bashing policies.
For those sincerely interested in reforming education - specifically: public education - we have replaced one Thug's No Child Left Behind with the Sheeply Clothed Throw Teachers Under the Bus.
The problem with this accountability nonsense is it is seductive to the many who long ago lost touch with our public institutions and believe in the magic of the marketplace. That is a serious problem, because when some World Bank type comes along demanding market models as the route to the Promised Land, the public - to throw in yet another metaphor - drink the Kool-Aid.
Has Pres. Obama become the Jim Jones of Public School Teachers? When he seeks to apply the magic of the marketplace to public institutions, he is a social terrorist.
The teacher accountability fix is rather like mammograms. They monitor, but they do nothing to address the problem. As gender-parity medical activists have pointed out mammograms do not cure cancer. The public may feel like something is being done, but cancer in women still remains on the rise, mysteriously.
My late grandfather, Lowell B Denny I, once defended the United States Postal Service (USPS) to me when I proposed its privatization. This man who had risen in the ranks of the USPS and raised four children schooled me on its social necessity. For one small fee, anyone in the country could send a USPS letter to anyone else, and that everyone had access to mail service.
My grandfather instructed me that were it a private enterprise, made to conform to market voodoo, the population in rural areas may or may not continue to get mail since it would be expensive to do so; and sending a letter to a grandparent in the middle of such remote areas would be equally expensive.
Imagine Grandma in the woods spending FEDEX prices to send you that holiday card!
Public schools - the mission of educating the many, the poor, is as costly but worthy an investment as the investment we put in small babies, 99.9% of whom earn nothing in return. All public institutions are public investments, for the public.
I don't know where the magic of the market is magic, but it's not in the rearing of children.
We must first expect the expense of public schools if we are to guarantee free public, k-12 schooling (insufficient in a post-industrial society) to all children.
Then we must reconcile what place it is to serve in our society. This will define curriculae and inform teachers as to their role. Remember: soldiers who don't know what they're fighting for are a pretty unreliable lot.
The larger question, the elephant in the room that our rulers do not want discussed is this: what are public schools for? What do we as a society want produced from 12 years of publicly funded education?
Our rulers do not want this discussed because their answers would diverge widely from ours. We would want well trained, literate, engaged citizens. This was always the Dream of public schooling which fled headlong into an ideologically narrow society, which wants conformity, obedience, legions of poor boys to be sent into deserts and jungles to fight and die and not question and certainly not display the cynicism toward the nation-state that our rulers do every day when they send jobs "overseas."
Don't think. Just toil. Just die. Bleed.
What is wrong with our public education is the latent class war waged within it. Only, one side doesn't know its fighting and by complicity are backing this teacher accountability attack.
Of course we should have good teachers. Of course Johnny and Susan must know how to read. But why?
Our rulers have maliciously convinced the public that the woes of our society be traced back to Johnny and Susan and their teachers, not to their poor, corrupt leadership of our society. The rulers get bailed out. Public school teachers extraordinarily rendered.
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