Public Education Is Under Assault

We need a union that will fight for us, whether Democrats or Republicans are in the White House.

Wrestling may be scripted, but it’s not really fake. Those guys go in there, and whether or not results are pre-planned, they take real, obvious physical punishment. That said, I don’t believe for a minute Linda McMahon can body slam whoever that guy is. Furthermore, she’s no more qualified as Education Secretary than she is pro-wrestler. I do believe, though, like Betsy DeVos, she bought her position fair and square.

Whoever you voted for, we’re in for a tough four years. The GOP wants to end teacher tenure, enact merit pay, and implement “school choice” nationwide. I don’t know about you, but I’m not at all comfortable with that. Do you trust your principal? Do you trust every principal in the city? We are union, and while my principal may not be insane, yours may be a slobbering lunatic.

I recall, years ago, calling a NY Times reporter to comment on an article. I mentioned to him that I had two students who spoke English fluently, placed in my ESL classes because they were illiterate. As far as I could tell, there was no program suited to help them. The reporter asked if he could write about it. I wasn’t sure.

“Do you have tenure?” he asked. I said I did and he said not to worry. He sent my quote in a fax to the DOE. My principal called me into his office. We had a big meeting with counselors and supervisors. It appeared everyone’s ass was sufficiently covered, which was all that mattered. Still, the principal let me know all of this, whatever it was, was solely my fault.

He started making me check out with him every day, especially on those Regents days where high school teachers tend to disappear. When he refused to buy books for my students, I found something in the contract that said he was required to to provide supplies. I threatened to grieve, for the first time in my career. The principal bought the books and stopped harassing me.

That principal, if he could have, would have fired me for publicly expressing concern for my misplaced students. I needed tenure then, and you need it now. City charter teachers don’t have tenure. They may move around every few years from school to school. Institutional memory doesn’t exist in gig culture.

Years later, as chapter leader, I was quoted as saying my then-principal was “not insane.” The old principal who harassed me visited and started ranting about how I was implying that he was insane. What can you say but thank God for tenure. They can pry it from our cold, dead hands. (By then we won’t need it anymore.)

Merit pay? It’s been around since 1920 and has never worked anywhere. And who gets it? The person who washes the principal’s car on Tuesday? The one who visits the Comfort Inn with him Wednesday? The one who jumps up and down to make the bestest bulletin boards?

Or do we battle one another to raise standardized test scores, which may as well reflect zip codes rather than teacher quality? Campbell’s Law says the more we push this stuff, the higher the possibility for undesirable consequence. It leads to outright fraud, like, GW’s Texas Miracle, or Michelle Rhee’s questionable achievements, even after she blamed and fired everyone she could.

“School choice” means we send tax dollars to private schools. Often as not, this benefits those who already send their kids there—those who really don’t need extra support. Also, once they know the government pays, schools can raise prices to weed out those they don’t want, or simply to pull in more cash. When people get to vote on voucher programs, they tend to reject them. That’s why Trump’s people might try to force it on states with conditional block grants.

This isn’t the first hostile administration we’ve faced. Other than Trump, the most recent one, actually, was Obama’s. I always wondered whether his education secretary, Arne Duncan, would be able to speak while Bill Gates was drinking a glass of water. Common Core rose from the primordial ooze under Obama.

Who could forget Michael Mulgrew getting up in front of an AFT Convention, threatening to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt? He’d do anything to protect his precious Common Core. While the name is gone, on NY State Regents exams and others, the Common Core principles live on. And, to be charitable, they are utter crapola. Still, the tests remain as a monument to their architect, David Coleman, who famously advised young writers, “People don’t really give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

And who can forget those good old days, when Obama’s education secretary applauded the firing of an entire school staff in Rhode Island? I believe the teachers eventually got their jobs back, after agreeing to work longer days for no compensation.

I also read that RI school was full of newcomers who, you know, don’t speak English. Oddly, students who don’t speak English tend to get lower test scores. Who knows why? But if my students don’t know English, and therefore don’t pass standardized tests, it must be because I’m a terrible teacher.

Do you hate Danielson observations as much as I do? Well, they came from an Obama-era program too. Race to the Top kind of blackmailed states into accepting these rating systems.

Nice little Federal Aid program you got here. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. How’s about you use one of these nice little rating systems we’re selling?

Personally, I find these checklists useless. I sometimes feel like the Danielson checklist was created to accommodate supervisors who don’t know how to write. If I have a supervisor who is not insane, I’m perfectly happy to get a written report, unique to my lesson, with suggestions. An oral one would be fine too.

The very best observation I ever got came from a principal who sat the whole period in my class. When he walked out, he told me, “Those kids love you.” He never wrote it up, but I’ll remember it long after I forget the others (which I already have).

AFT may indeed work to fight things that hurt public schools these next four years. I’ll support them if they do. Here’s the thing—we don’t know what will happen in the next four years. What if Democrats come into power, and pull the same crap? It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. With the exception of school vouchers, Obama’s administration favored all this stuff. We need leadership that will fight to protect our jobs and preserve public education no matter who is in office.

Both AFT and UFT supported Obama term two, making no educational demands whatsoever. It seems to me our support ought not to be unconditional. I recall other groups getting concessions from him on his second term. Why couldn’t we?

One thing Unity has not been very good at has been aligning with groups like the Network for Public Education (NPE). Part of our ABC platform is to build better alliances with parents and community. We won’t sit on our hands if Democrats once again start taking marching orders from Bill Gates. Instead of punching you in the face if you try to take down Common Core, we’ll give you a frigging medal. We will work to protect public education whether Democrats or Republicans are in control.

Take a look at this, from NPE:

If McMahon is able to enact this agenda, it will hurt not only us, but also our students. Just like they do with health care, they want to privatize education. Kids might not have neighborhood schools anymore.

Imagine having to post your lesson plans online so parents could complain about the history you teach, or the stories you share with students. Imagine living in terror of teaching a truth some parent deemed inconvenient. Are we supposed to teach fairy tales so as to protect the sensibilities of politicians who want to pretend we live in some 1950s black and white sitcom?

Is your school sufficiently underfunded? I’ve worked in classrooms where I felt lucky to have a piece of chalk. If funding leaves public schools so as to supplement privatization, they’ll start facing closure again, as they did under Bloomberg, and Obama. If tenure disappears, we’ll be losing jobs at the whim of insane administrators. We can do better.

We will do better. To do that, we will need new activism, new ideas. We need new blood. We need a new vision, and we need new leadership. The time to settle for same old, same old has passed.

Our time is now, and we need to grab it.