The Teacher Wars

September 16, 2014 8:14 PM

A new book by journalist Dana Goldstein profiles the deeply controversial history of the teaching profession in the US. A write up in the New York Times and the New Inquiry.
posted by latkes (23 comments total)

From the New Inquiry piece:

Against all evidence, experience, and common sense, we cling to and generalize our idea of the perfect teacher. Among nonpornographic depictions of teachers—I admit that most movies about teachers are probably porn—fantastic teachers are vastly overrepresented. It’s part of the national bargain with schoolteachers: We won’t pay you as well as a dental hygienist, but as an individual, people will assume you’re doing a good, important, and generous job. Whether it’s Matilda’s Miss Honey or Ryan Gosling teaching ghetto dialectics in Half Nelson, we have to imagine that all teachers share a common passionate commitment because the alternative is unbearable: We force all children to spend most of their waking time being evaluated and instructed by some underpaid randos because otherwise we’d have no idea what to do with them. Ask any babysitter how much they charge per hour to watch 30 nine-year-olds. It’s an absurd thing to require of a person, and America was able to pull it off because the women they were asking didn’t have a lot of other options...
posted by latkes at 8:15 PM on September 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

A response to the New Inquiry piece in Jacobin.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:47 PM on September 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

"EVERBODY knows teachers are nice, perfect, golden, brilliant paragons of virtue who never do anything wrong ever riiiiiiiiight? Meet Sir. Billibous Dingsworthy, education reformer. He says teachers actually are humans who make a smells, and once he saw them kiss. Isn't it time we let kids educate themselves by giving them ipads and locking them in closets? I'm John Stossel, for EduCloset™,and"
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:55 PM on September 16, 2014 [20 favorites]

And another thing, the last motherfuther thing these privatizing motherfuthers want is a full out war on teachers. No no no no. No. That is what you do not want. Teachers are used to being crapped on, but if you outright go to war on em? You will lose. Ain't nothing more terrifying that 300, 3000, 300000 teachers marching up on your ass because their signs are spelled RIGHT. They know EXACTLY what to say to the camera. And everybody is paying attention and hopping around cleaning the erasers before you know what happened. You want the teachers to be complacent, anxiety-ridden, pedanting each-other and politicking for Department head, not mad. Uhuh. This is going to end very badly for the reformers. Like Battle of Moscow badly.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:04 PM on September 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

More important than teachers is parental involvement or the lack thereof. That, and not better teachers (important as they are), is at the root of the problem.
posted by shivohum at 9:49 PM on September 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

I am sure if the IBEW was the most powerful union in the nation we would have all kinds of think pieces on the moral failings of our nation's electricians.
posted by munchingzombie at 10:06 PM on September 16, 2014 [8 favorites]

I keep asking this question out loud, but am I the only person to notice that David Horowitz is listed as one of the two senior advisers on the TNI advisory board?
posted by 99_ at 11:36 PM on September 16, 2014

More important than teachers is parental involvement or the lack thereof. That, and not better teachers (important as they are), is at the root of the problem.

With sufficient parental involvement we wouldn't need schools at all. If all parents had the personal and financial resources to home-school their kids we could just close all the schools and rely on parents to organise ad-hoc solutions to things like social involvement and group activities. The idea of having universal education is to substitute for home schooling, because very few parents are up for that sort of commitment.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:02 AM on September 17, 2014 [3 favorites]

With sufficient parental involvement we wouldn't need hospitals at all. If all parents had the personal and financial resources to home-medicine their kids we could just close all the clinics and rely on parents to organise ad-hoc solutions to things like innoculations and surgery. The idea of having universal healthcare is to substitute for home doctorin', because very few parents are up for that sort of commitment.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:26 AM on September 17, 2014 [9 favorites]

With sufficient parental involvement we wouldn't need armies at all. If all parents had the personal and financial resources to kill-train their kids we could just close all the boot camps and rely on parents to organize ad-hoc solutions to things like invasions and patrols. The idea of having professional forces is to substitute for home militia, because very few parents are up for that sort of commitment.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 1:40 AM on September 17, 2014 [3 favorites]

Well yes, that's my point. Saying that parental involvement is more important than teacher quality really assumes that parents have the ability and desire to teach. They don't, generally, which is why we have schools.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:23 AM on September 17, 2014

And another thing, the last motherfuther thing these privatizing motherfuthers want is a full out war on teachers.

they've been fighting and winning a war against teachers for years now. you could replace 'steelworkers' or 'autoworkers' and come up with similar rhetoric: look what happened to them. the new inquiry review is almost good, but the writer takes a right turn to the zombie-idea that MOOCs can somehow replace any part of the current educational system (plus his take on racial conflict in schools in brooklyn is dangerously glib). sure, plop down a kid in front of Degrasse-Tyson instead of a random 25 year old college graduate... but the main thing he misses is the place of the teacher in the bourgeois state as someone who's job is directly to discipline the working class (and create the working class.) not that he was really trying. the right is winning it's war against teachers unions because of class politics, the same way they defeated the steelworkers and autoworkers. the teacher's union is a skilled trade union, not semi-skilled, with significant barriers to entry i.e. 4 years of college and teaching represents one of the few stable, well-paying jobs in many communities. thus, teacher's unions have opponents below them, kept out of jobs by barriers i.e. education and certification, and opponents above them: higher-paid professionals whose taxes pay for salaries.

A response to the New Inquiry piece in Jacobin.

which illustrates all of the blindness of the academic radical left. what they understand least is class politics in US society, which is particularly damning for a publication with a marxist pose.

I keep asking this question out loud, but am I the only person to notice that David Horowitz is listed as one of the two senior advisers on the TNI advisory board?

is it really that David Horowitz? i couldn't find any info.
posted by ennui.bz at 3:44 AM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Saying that parental involvement is more important than teacher quality really assumes that parents have the ability and desire to teach.

It doesn't assume that at all. What it says is that education is most successful when parents do a good job of being parents and teachers do a good job of being teachers. But those are two different jobs.
posted by escabeche at 5:45 AM on September 17, 2014 [6 favorites]

Saying that parental involvement is more important than teacher quality really assumes that parents have the ability and desire to teach.

Not at all. It's not about parents assuming part of the teaching load, it's about parents co-operating with the teachers in the kid's education, meaning making them do their homework, talking about school, going to parent-teacher nights, and on being contacted by the teacher who tells them "Jimmy skipped class today and is failing because he's not turning in projects", says "He'll be in class tomorrow with those projects done" rather than "Who gives a shit? that's your job!"
posted by fatbird at 7:03 AM on September 17, 2014 [3 favorites]

the new inquiry review is almost good, but the writer takes a right turn to the zombie-idea that MOOCs can somehow replace any part of the current educational system

I didn't take it that way. He is right. There are many topics that are most easily internalize through rote repetition which computers are very good for. There are really many topics where the inside out classroom or whatever they call it, independent work at home followed by briefer support in class (instead of the other way around) just works better, at least for a kid with a reasonable home life. (And one thing this book talks about well, as far as I can tell from the reviews, is that schools are being asked to make up for massive social inequalities, and yet are totally unresourced and poorly equipped to do that job.) To me the weakness of the piece is that Malcolm Harris makes zero effort toward imagining better solutions. So he says things like, "teaching has to change" with absolutely no suggestion of what that might mean. That's where he is allowing his words to be easily used to support the MOOC/neoliberal agenda as critiqued by Jacobin.
posted by latkes at 7:10 AM on September 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

That's insane about David Horowitz. It MUST be a different David Horowitz?! I don't see his name here.
posted by latkes at 7:12 AM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Driving down the highway the other day, I saw one of those Ad Council billboards which told me about how valuable I could be as a teacher. How I could change children's lives for the better. It's important for the community, after all.

And I thought about how the only ads we see for jobs on a regular basis are for the military and teaching. In the former, we talk about duty, honor, courage and patriotism, obscuring some aspects of the job. In the latter case, we talk about kids, community, the satisfaction of a job well done. We don't say shit about the pay, the hours, the administration, or, in short, all of the people and institutions that seem to regard it as their job to stand in your way as a teacher.

Being a teacher is the only private sector job we beg people to join. And then once you do, we call you lazy, ineffective, mooching assholes who should be replaced at the soonest opportunity. No wonder we have to beg.
posted by aureliobuendia at 9:31 AM on September 17, 2014 [6 favorites]

That's insane about David Horowitz. It MUST be a different David Horowitz?! I don't see his name here.

This is very weird. His name isn't there, but if you google/bing for "The New Inquiry" "David Horowitz", that page comes up (screenshot). Perhaps it was recently removed?
posted by peterb at 9:43 AM on September 17, 2014

I am sure if the IBEW was the most powerful union in the nation we would have all kinds of think pieces on the moral failings of our nation's electricians.

I doubt this, because I so rarely see that kind of think piece about prison guards, especially in relation to how often I see it about teachers. And I could rewrite that sentence using a few other heavily unionized but male dominated fields. It's hard for me to believe that gender doesn't play a role.
posted by heisenberg at 9:46 AM on September 17, 2014

Update: It is a different David Horowitz, as indicated by the publisher on Twitter. Phew.
posted by peterb at 9:59 AM on September 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yes! Magazine published a great infographic explaining why and how corporations want to control public schools. A web of corporations and foundations controls the curriculum, the tests, and the textbooks that are used to "demonstrate" the failure of schools and teachers. They then control (and sometimes profit from) charter management organizations which run the replacement schools, in spite of mediocre results from these new de-regulated schools.
posted by cushie at 10:42 AM on September 17, 2014 [3 favorites]

Interesting TAL about a community crapping on its public schools this week.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:59 PM on September 17, 2014

I just finished reading The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley.

She discusses parental involvement, and notes that the kind matters more than the amount. Parental involvement in sports and extracurriculars and fundraising doesn't help and may hurt; parental involvement in the form of reading to your kids or even just asking them about what they learned in school each day helps.

The biggest takeaway I got from the book was that, if you want good education in your country, you have to make it important, throughout society - specifically:

* parents who demonstrate that education is important, by talking with their kids, reading to them, showing respect for teachers, and emphasizing that educational achievement matters in life
* national policies that raise standards for teachers - strict admissions requirements to get into teacher training colleges, and limits on the number of teachers trained, so a glut of teachers doesn't contribute to low teacher pay
* national exit exams that actually measure learning and are widely considered important (she talks about an exchange student from Korea being amazed that kids are seriously preparing for the Presidential Physical Fitness test but blowing off their high school exams)
* avoiding tracking, which tends to result in lower-track kids having lower achievement (whereas when you don't separate kids and have high standards for all of them, those same kids, absent tracking, tend to achieve a lot)

It was a pretty interesting look at how teachers, teaching, and learning are viewed in various countries.
posted by kristi at 10:15 PM on September 17, 2014